Hedwig Voegt

Hedwig Therese Dorothea Henriette Voegt (28 July 1903, Hamburg, German Empire - 14 March 1988, Leipzig, Eastern Germany) was a German literary scholar who obtained a doctorate in German-Jacobin literature when she was 49 and became a university professor at Leipzig University.

While she was a younger woman, modest family circumstances ruled out an academic career. During the 1920s she worked for the post office in Hamburg as a telegrapher and became a political activist (KPD), serving at least three prison terms during the twelve Nazi years because of her resistance to the régime.

Life Hedwig Therese Dorothea Henriette Voegt was born in the central Hamburg quarter of St. Pauli. Her father was a plumber. Despite her obvious intelligence, she received only basic schooling before moving on to train for clerical work in the dispatches department of the Hamburg Telegraph Union. She moved on again, in 1920, to work for the post office.

She was arrested again in December 1934 and sentenced a few months later, to a two-year jail term for "preparing high treason" (Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat). She served her sentence initially at the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, and then at the women's prison on the east side of Lübeck. Many years later Lucie Suhling's daughter published a biography of Voegt. Voegt was released in 1937 and, despite being kept under close surveillance, was able to resume her resistance work.

In 1953 she received a contract at Leipzig University to teach on German Literature. Literature and history fell within the Philosophy faculty, but in 1955 she was switched to the university's political important Journalism Faculty, which was the country's principal university level university faculty for journalists and, because of this, the focus of constant attention from the powerful Party Central Committee. Between 1959 and 1963 Hedwig Voegt was the Teaching Professor for Literary Journalism and Stylistics at the Leipzig University Journalism Faculty. Carl von Ossietzky Medal of the East German Peace Council Johannes R. Becher Medal Medal for Fighters Against Fascism