Katharina Kern

Katharina "Käthe" Kern (22 July 1900 – 16 April 1985) became a German anti-government activist during the Hitler years. After 1945 she quickly emerged as a senior politician and party loyalist in the Soviet occupation zone (after October 1949 the German Democratic Republic / East Germany). She served between 1946 and 1985 as a member of what became the powerful Party Central Committee. A long-standing leading figure in the Ministry for the Health Service), she also served, between 1949 and 1970, as head of the national "Mother and Child department" ("Hauptabteilung Mutter und Kind").

Life Provenance and early years Katharina "Käthe" Kern was born into a working-class family in Darmstadt as the twentieth century dawned. Darmstadt, which was also the city where she grew up and lived as a young adult, had become a prosperous industrial, commercial and cultural centre during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was here that she completed her apprenticeship for a career as a clerical-commercial worker. In 1919 Käthe Kern joined the Young Socialists. Just one year later, still not 21, she joined the SPD which, following electoral reform, had recently found itself in the novel position of being the largest party in a new German parliament and leading participant in the coalition government of a post-imperial German republic. Kern was an activist party member and trades unionist from the outset. Between 1921 and 1933 she was a member of the "Zentralverband der Angestellten" (ZdA), a trades union of private sector clerical workers. Meanwhile, she supported herself between October 1921 and October 1924 by working as a secretary for the president of Landesversicherungsanstalt Hessen, the Darmstadt-based statutory pension insurance provider branch for Hessen.

Democratic Women's League In 1947 Käthe Kern was a co-founder of the "Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" ("Democratic Women's League of [East] Germany" / DFD), becoming one of the movement's five honorary (unpaid) vice-presidents. Within the Leninist constitutional structure implemented during the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union and now being extended to Soviet EmpireSoviet allies in middle Europe including East Germany, the ruling party was to be flanked by a number of "mass organisations": this arrangement was intended to broaden the government's legitimacy and support within the overarching one-party framework. The DFD was one of five mass organizations that received a fixed quota of seats in the East German national parliament ("Volkskammer") alongside the seats occupied by representatives of the ruling party and those allocated to the four other "bloc parties". Kern's position in the leadership cabal of the DFD conferred on her a political weight beyond that which would be associated with a "women's organisation" in a western-style democracy. She remained a member of the DFD national leadership team from 1947 till her death in 1985. In 1958 she was appointed to the parliamentary Constitutional Committee ("Verfassungsausschuss"), on which she continued to serve till 1963. She was a member of the parliamentary Healthcare Committee between 1963 and 1967, and of the Work and Social Policy Committee between 1967 and 1971.

Connections Kern was involved at different stages in a number of organisations devoted to the German Democratic Republic's international relationships. Between 1958 and 1962 she served as a presidium member with the "Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft" (DSF / " German–Soviet Friendship Society"). It was als in 1958 that she joined the National Executive Committee of "Volkssolidarität" ("People's Solidarity") a mass movement dedicated to providing support for old people.

Death and celebration Käthe Kern died at Berlin on 16 April 1985. She was cremated and honoured with burial at the Memorial to the Socialists in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin. Her funeral was attended by relatives, "comrades in arms" and friends. Fellow members of the Party Central Committee who joined in the celebration at the cemetery included Horst Dohlus, Herbert Häber and Werner Krolikowski.

Recognition