Frida Rubiner

Frida Rubiner (born Frida Ichak / Фрида Абрамовна Ицхоки: 28 April 1879 – 22 January 1952) was a political activist (KPD), writer, journalist and translator of important communist Russian texts into German. Pseudonyms under which she wrote included Georg Rehberg, Arnold Brand and Frida Lang.

Life

Family provenance and early years Frida Abramovna Ichak was born into a working class Jewish family in Marijampolė, a midsized multicultural town halfway between Königsberg and Vilnius, today in Lithuania but at that time in Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire. Abraham Ichak, her father, had an office job.

Student years abroad In the first part of 1899 she enrolled as a student at the Philosophy Faculty of Zürich University where she studied Philosophy, ). She was a student at Zürich between 1899 and 1903. Some sources, citing articles that she subsequently published, indicate a largely scientific focus for her university studies. The title of her doctoral dissertation implies a mathematical-scientific focus: "Über die Ausnahmestellung der Wärme unter den Energieformen" (loosely: "The exceptional properties of heat as a form of energy"). Through her husband she came into contact with a circle of anarchist-artists. Very soon she was collaborating with her husband to produce translations of Russian novels, for instance those of Gogol. There is a lack of agreement between the sources as to where they were based for the next few years, but the Rubiners appear to have been living in Paris during 1913 and the first part of 1914, then relocating to Berlin. The Rubiners remained politically engaged during their wartime years in Switzerland. A surveillance report filed in 1918 by Swiss authorities and the German embassy refers to a belief on the part of the German General Staff that the Rubiners were the focus in Zürich of a group "central to the international revolution". The same report described Frida Rubiner as a "rabid Bolshevik [who likes to disguise herself as] a poet's pussycat" ("rabiate Bolschewistin [die sich gern als] Dichtergattin [tarne]"). while another states simply that he died during an influenza epidemic. During this time she was also a member of a Soviet Communist Party cell and sat on the influential Executive Committee of the Communist International. Meanwhile, beyond the world of political activism, by the early 1920s she had already translated into German works by the revolutionary communicators Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek.

In 1924 the party ordered her back to Germany where she took over as political editor of the Berlin based Rote Fahne (Red Flag) newspaper. She returned to Moscow for medical treatment after being badly injured by a fall on the stairs, but by the time she died on 22 January 1952 she was back in Kleinmachnow, the prestigious Berlin suburb where the East German party leadership had their homes.