Ella Kay

Ella Kay (16 December 1895 – 3 February 1988) was a Berlin city politician (SPD) with a particular interest in workers' welfare and youth matters. During the Hitler years she became a resistance activist: she focused on looking after victims of government persecution. Despite being subject to surveillance and frequent visits from the security services, she avoided arrest.

Life Provenance and early years Ella Johanna Hedwig Luise Kay was born in Berlin-Wedding. Her father was politically engaged, both as a trades unionist and as a member of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands / SPD). During the first decades of the twentieth century a large unbuilt area on the edge of the municipality used hitherto for military training was redeveloped as Tempelhof Airport. Many years later, looking back on her childhood, she would reminisce ruefully: "The so-called good old days never were". For many commentators the early 1920s in Germany were dominated by political unrest driven by economic austerity and hunger, topped off by currency collapse, but there were also some positive developments. A long-standing demand from labour activists for an Eight-hour working day to be signed into law was enacted for heavy industries and munitions factories in November 1918 and was quickly implemented across industry. The benefit for Ella Kay, as a factory worker, was immediate: she now had her evenings free to pursue her own further education.

In December 1927 she enrolled at the Socio-political seminar of the German Politics Academy ("Deutsche Hochschule für Politik"). Classes took place in the evenings, which made it possible for her to combine her studies with her paid day job. Thanks to a recent dispensation by the Prussian minister for public welfare the training courses at the academy, originally intended only for male social work students, could now also be made available to women. Applicants were selected on the basis of interviews, subject to satisfactory previous qualifications and experience. Ella Kay was the first female student to be accepted onto the course. A contemporary fellow-student and political soul-mate with whom Kay formed a what would prove a lasting friendship was Franz Neumann.

Crisis years As the economic position deteriorated, politics in Germany were becoming increasingly polarised nationally, with the division particularly stark in Berlin. In 1931 unemployment reached more than four million, while wages were reduced. Social security benefits had been progressively reduced. For working class young people the future looked grim. Interviewed decades later, Ella Kay shared her assessment that the high levels of unemployment had been "manufactured" in order to intimidate the workers. It is known that some of the resistance activists among her friends and contacts were involved in hiding Jews in order to preserve them from the extermination camps, which supportse inference that Kay was similarly engaged. During April 1946 a meeting, which came to be known as the "Unification Congress", was held at the Admiralspalast (normally an entertainment venue), attended by delegates from both the SPD and the Communist Party. However SPD delegates from the western sector, who had already held their own congress on the same issue two weeks earlier, stayed away, believing that the party merger idea had already been rejected. The "Unification Congress" on 21/22 April 1946 unanimously endorsed the party merger, although in reality their decision had no effect in Germany other than in the Soviet occupation zone. Since Ella Kay lived and had her political base in Prenzlauer Berg, she was a "citizen" of the Soviet occupation zone. Following the contentious "Unification Congress" hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members, along with a large number of SPD members in the Soviet zone, lost no time in signing their party membership across to the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), which over the next three or four years became the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. Ella Kay did not. She remained a member of the now much diminished "East German" Social Democratic Party, resisting on-going government pressure to move over to the new party. Later in 1946, as a result of a messy agreement between the occupying powers, free municipal elections were held, as one result of which Ella Kay was elected district mayor in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. (Hitherto she had occupied the position through nomination by the military authorities.) But she still remained loyal to the SPD, and in December 1947 she was removed from office by the military administrators. remaining in office till her retirement on 6 December 1962.