Helga Einsele

Helga Einsele (born Helga Hackmann: 9 June 1910 - 13 February 2005) was a German criminologist, prison director and high-profile prisons reformer.

Life and works Provenance and early years Helga Marianne Freda Hackmann was born into a liberally minded family in Dölau on the edge of Halle in Saxony. Helga's mother was an early advocate of women's emancipation. Completing her schooling in 1929, she moved on to study Jurisprudence at the universities of Königsberg, Breslau (since 1945 "Wrocław") and Heidelberg. Her university career was interrupted by an eighteen month stay, during 1931/32, in New York: the visit was undertaken in the company of a Heidelberg graduate student, whose trip was being funded by a bursary from Columbia University. Helga Hackmann had originally gotten to know the biology student Wilhelm Einsele (1904-1966) through their shared political involvement. Her studies in New York were complemented by a period of practical social work with women of the New York Police Department. Later, during the 1930s, she would draw on the notes and experiences from her time in New York for her doctorate. Helga Hackmann had married Wilhelm Einsele in 1931, during their time together in New York. Forbidden from working in the German legal system, she was able to complete and submit her doctoral dissertation while living with her husband on the shores of Lake Constance, eventually receiving her doctorate (apparently remotely) from Heidelberg University in 1939.

War years By that time, they had moved again. During 1938, Wilhelm and Helga left Konstanz and settled in a remote Mountain village in Austria, which remained a separate country till March 1938. Here, they remained, sitting out fascism and war, till 1945.

1945 After the war ended in 1945, Helga Einsele returned with her daughter to Germany, making her home in the American occupation zone at Frankfurt am Main.

Wilhelm Einsele remained in Austria, where he had established a small research institute of his own at Kreuzstein (Mondsee), and was building a reputation for his scholarly insights into inland fisheries management. Through her old tutor, Gustav Radbruch, Helga Einsele met Radbruch's friend, Fritz Bauer, who would soon become both a friend and a professional colleague. Over the next couple of decades she would frequently assist Bauer, sharing in his denazification work.

Einsele's reform agenda at Preungesheim did not go unresisted. In 1947, she took over a prison in which most of the prison officers had been on duty under National Socialism. The idea that there might be - and was - such a thing as a "born criminal type" was a deeply ingrained underlying assumption. When first she suggested that prison officers and prisoners should attend her lecture together, and that the prisoners should be seated for the event rather than being left to stand while the officers sat, the institution became "a witches cauldron". Prisoner officers found it unreasonable. They found the new prison director and her ideas "weird". But such resistance only fuelled Einsele's convictions that there had to be a better way. Radbruch had taught her that Germany did not need a better criminal justice system, but something better than a criminal justice system". ("Nicht ein besseres Strafrecht, sondern etwas, das besser ist als Strafrecht." Another important reform involved instructing prison staff to treat prisoners with respect.) Traditionally prisoners had been addressed with the familiar pronoun "du" (thee/thou/tu), implying inferior status; while prison staff had expected to be addressed by those in their charge as "Sie" (ye/you/vous) implying superior status. Einsele caused consternation in some quarters by instructing prisoner staff to address prisoners with the more respectful "Sie" pronoun. Where possible, she included the prisoners themselves in any decision process affecting daily prison life, and she also institutionalised this consultative approach by supporting the creation of representative bodies or "prisoner councils".

Recognition Fritz Bauer died unexpectedly in July 1968. The Humanist Union, of which Bauer had been a co-founder, established the annually awarded Fritz Bauer Prize to celebrate his memory. In 1969, Helga Einsele became the first recipient. That was only one of a number of awards and other marks of esteem that Einsele received because of her efforts, over many years, to create a humane prisons system in West Germany. In 1976, she received the irregularly awarded Humanitarian Prize of the German Freemasons. In 1979, she was a recipient of the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal, awarded by the State of Hessen.

Retirement Helga Einsele retired from her position with the prisons service in 1975, having reached the age of 65 and was appointed that same year to an honorary professorship in Criminology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.

Death Helga Einsele died at Frankfurt on 13 February 2010. Her daughter and grandson were with her.

Following a decade during which the "socialist paradise" of East Germany came to be seen as no more than a front for anti-democratic Soviet imperialism, while West Germany experienced a sustained "economic miracle", and the conservative chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer - or something very like it - seemed likely to endure for ever, the left-of-centre Social Democratic Party (SPD) finally came up with a plan designed to make itself electable in the democratic part of Germany. The Godesberger Programme repudiated Marxism and set aside many other left-wing tenets associated with the party's history. After nearly eight years in the making, a new programme was presented to a special meeting of party activist members, held in the town hall at Bad Godesberg during three days in November 1959. There was no more talk of socialisation or even of the working class. When a vote was taken, just sixteen comrades voted against the Godesberger Programme. One of them was cast by a delegate sent from Wolfgang Abendroth's Frankfurt party branch, Helga Einsele.