Käte Sima

Käte Niederkirchner (born Käte Appel or Käte Dienstbach: 30 January 1944 - 19 November 2019) was a German politician (SED / PDS) and pediatrician. In 1967 she became the youngest member of the East German parliament ("Volkskammer"). Her life was impacted by having been born with a famous aunt, the Communist resistance activist Käthe Niederkirchner who was killed by Nazi paramilitaries at Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944, and who was posthumously much celebrated by East Germany's political leadership.

Early life Käte Appel was born at Chelyabinsk, an industrial city east of the Urals. "Appel", the family name by which she was known to comrades, was her father's party pseudonym. Her father's name had been Karl Dienstbach when he had emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 in order to avoid the prison term to which he had been sentenced at a district court in Frankenthal following his conviction on a charge of industrial espionage. During the 1920s Karl Dienstbach (1900–1977) had come to the attention of the authorities in Germany as a vociferous trades unionist and Communist activist. Käte Dienstbach's mother, Mia Niederkirchner (1911–1982), was also a political activist, living in Soviet exile at the time of Käte's birth. Her parents had originally met in the Hotel Lux in Moscow, which during the Hitler years had become a vast hostel for exiled German communists. During the final years of the war both her parents were working with prisoners of war in the Gulag network around Chelyabinsk, as political educators for the National Committee for a Free Germany. According to another source her parents were both working as officials at a prisoner of war camp, her mother as a secretary and her father as a cook.

Political career By the time she graduated Käte Dienstbach had already embarked on an unusually precocious career as a politician. She joined the party in 1965. In 1967 she married a fellow medical student, Jürgen Sima , who later became Head Physician at the hospital in Berlin-Weissensee. By 1981 she was sitting in the Volkskammer not as a representative of the FDJ, but as a part of the larger SED parliamentary group. Later, at some point between 1986 and 1990, she reverted to using the name Käte Niederkirchner which, thanks to her aunt's fame, still resonated powerfully in the German Democratic Republic.

In United Germany 1989 was a year of changes. On 13 November 1989, as the ruling party prepared to rebrand and relaunch itself in anticipation of a more democratic future, and less than three weeks before the resignation of the entire Central Committee, including the Politburo, Käte Niederkirchner became a member of the newly elected 11 member praesidium of the "Volkskammer". For the first time in the history of the German Democratic Republic, the praesidium election took place during a meeting held in front of television cameras, and the election modalities involved a secret ballot of Volkskammer members. On 11 January 1990, following the resignation from the "Volkskammer" of Werner Jarowinsky (who was a politburo old-timer), Käte Niederkirchner took over his positions as leader of the SED parliamentary group and vice-president of the Volkskammer.

In 1990 Käte Niederkirchner undertook a training in Psychotherapy, which for the rest of her career provided a second main pillar to her career as a physician. (She had already been a qualified Paediatrician for twenty years.) At around the same time she self-diagnosed as an ADHD sufferer:

"Children with an attention deficit - with ADHD and Autism diagnoses - are specially gifted. All the ones who are 'different'. Just like me. That's why we get along together so well. If I hadn’t had ADHD .... I would never have been able to survive those difficult times. ADHD people always come up with something. It's not an illness but a potentiality. You can learn to live with it. She received more votes from her fellow parliamentarians than any of the other five parliamentary vice-presidents.

By this time it was not just Chancellor Kohl who saw German reunification on the horizon, and acquiring an intensifying momentum of perceived inevitability. Reunification took place, formally, on 3 October 1990, which involved the merging of the parliaments of East and West Germany according to a population based formula. 144 members of the old East German Volkskammer, including 24 from the PDS joined a newly enlarged Bundestag (parliament) based (at this stage) in Bonn. Käte Niederkirchner was not among them.

Instead she pursued and built on her career as a paediatric physician. Directly after reunification she undertook a training in Psychotherapy. In or before 1992 she opened her own specialist clinic for children with ADHD. She had already diagnosed herself with lifelong ADHD.

Towards the end Käte Niederkirchner fell ill with cancer, from which she died in a hospital at Berlin-Lichtenberg on 19 November 2019.