Heidi Knake-Werner

Heidi Knake-Werner is a German politician (Die Linke). She served as a member of the German parliament ("Bundestag") between 1994 and 2002. Between 2002 and 2009 she was one of Berlin's more high-profile senators.

Life Provenance and early years Heidi Knake was born in Tomaschow (as it was known at that time), a midsized industrial town to the south-west of Warsaw which had been in Congress Poland before the First World War, in Poland subsequently, and since 1939 part of Nazi Germany. However, by the time she was 2 extensive ethnic cleansing in what had again become Poland in 1945 had already removed most of the German-speaking population, and she grew up in Wilhelmshaven on Germany's north-western coast. There followed a period of post-graduate research and study at Oldenburg. It was from the university at Oldenburg that in 1978 she received her doctorate in Social Sciences, and where till 1987 she stayed on as a researcher into topics such as family, education and industrial sociology. That year she switched to the University of Bremen. She joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) in 1970, and became increasingly engaged politically, both within the party and in local politics more generally, serving for four years as a municipal councillor in Oldenburg. For some of this time she was the deputy leader of the SPD group on the council. However, at the height of the ructions over professional blocks for members of extremist political parties, in 1981 she resigned from the SPD and joined the German Communist Party. This came directly after the increasingly "moderate" SPD party executive had launched its own "party operation" ("Parteiordnungsverfahren") against the "renitente Linke" (loosely "reluctant left"). She remained a Communist Party member till 1989. Sources are almost entirely silent about Heidi Knake-Werner's nine years as a member of the German Communist Party. In 1990 she changed her political allegiance again, joining the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), recently relaunched as a successor to the old East German Socialist Unity Party, as younger members of what had till recently been East Germany's ruling political establishment struggled to prepare for a democratic future, following the changes of 1989/90. Reunification took place suddenly, formally, in October 1990, and during the rest of that year it was still unusual for a western politician to join the PDS: most of the relatively small number who did so came not from the West German Communist Party but from the SPD. Her own transition gave Knake-Werner a reputation as a political maverick which she has subsequently seemed to relish. Then, as part of a general shake-up at the top of the parliamentary party that accompanied the unexpected resignation from the leadership of Gregor Gysi, in October 2000 she was, some felt, demoted when she became the parliamentary group's "First Parliamentary Business Leader" ("Erste Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin"),

Berlin senate Between 17 January 2002 and November 2006 Heid Knake-Werner served as the Berlin senator for Health, Social affairs and Consumer protection.

Later years In October 2010 she was elected to chair the Berlin region Volkssolidarität ("People's Solidarity"), a welfare organisation for the over 65s which traces its origins back to East Berlin and the old German Democratic Republic, but which survived the traumas of reunification better than most of the state mandated East German institutions. In 2014 a further election confirmed her in office. By that time it was reported that the Berlin Volkssolidarität was operating around 70 day centers, retirement homes and other facilities in Berlin.