Helga Adler

Helga Adler (born Helga Obuchoff: 21 December 1943) spent the earlier part of her career as an East German historian and, latterly, politician. She was politically engaged during the build up to German reunification, but in November 1991 resigned, sidelined and disillusioned, from what had by then become the Party of Democratic Socialism, Since then she been formally unaffiliated politically, but very far from uninterested.

She has been a committed feminist through most of her career, and was the director of the Paula Panke Women's Centre ("Frauenzentrum Paula Panke e.V.") in Berlin-Pankow between 1998 and 2009.

Life Helga Obuchoff was born in Praschnitz a mid-sized town in the Zichenau region of what had become East Prussia following the frontier changes agreed and implemented by the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union four years earlier, in 1939. Her father had volunteered for army service in 1939, and was promoted by the end of the war to the rank of a junior officer. After the ethnic cleansing of 1944/45 the Obuchoffs and their three children ended up living with relatives in the Harz region, before moving on and settling in Genthin, a small industrial town near Magdeburg, where Helga Obuchoff grew up. However, in 1979 it was from the IPW in Berlin that she received her doctorate for work on socialist and democratic movements and the peace movement in Western Europe and the USA ("...soziale und demokratische Bewegungen sowie über die Friedensbewegung in Westeuropa und den USA "), till 2008 or 2009. She also, in 1999, became spokeswoman for the "Berlin Women's Network" ("Berliner FrauenNetzwerk").

Since 2011 Adler has represented The Left (party) in the Berlin-Pankow local council, although formally she remains unaffiliated politically.