Käthe Popall

Käthe Popall (born Käthe Fürst: 15 February 1907 – 23 May 1984) was a Bremen politician (KPD). She was the first female member of the Bremen senate.

Like many left wing politicians of her generation she spent most of the Nazi years in prison. During that time she was divorced by Hans Lübeck (who also spent many of those years in state detention). She had met Hans Lübeck in 1928 and married him shortly after that, with the result that sources covering the first part of her political career tend to identify her as Käthe Lübeck. She married Reinhold Popall in January 1946: sources covering the second half of her life therefore identify her as Käthe Popall.

Life Provenance and early years Käthe Fürst was born in Bremen, one of the six recorded children of a manual labourer. On leaving school she initially took unskilled work, but following a commercial apprenticeship she worked as a book keeper, employed by "Vorwärts", a consumer co-operative.

In 1927 or 1928 she met a fellow member of the Young Communists, Hans Lübeck, whom she married shortly thereafter. In 1931 the two of them relocated to Düsseldorf, where she worked with the Lower Rhineland regional party leadership team ("Bezirksleitung Niederrhein") of the RGO. However, by the summer of 1931 she was in Halle, employed at the consumer-operative there. At the start of 1932 she was appointed a party leader organiser for the women's section of the Young Communists in Halle. In the autumn of 1932, she travelled with her husband to Moscow, but according to one source her wish to study at the "Lenin" Party Academy there came to nothing because she failed the entrance exam. She never saw him again.

By 1956 Käthe Popall's political career was effectively over. In 1967 or earlier she relocated away from Bremen with her family to Ottweiler in the Saarland, where their daughter grew up. The couple were active in the Workers' Welfare (AWO) and Friends of Nature movements. Reinhold Popall died in 1981. Back in Bremen the President of the Bremen Senate was by now Hans Koschnick whose father had played an important part in the political awakening of Käthe Lübeck (as she was at the time) more than fifty years earlier when she had worked at the jute mill. In 1982 Koschnick organised a reception in her honour at the Bremen City Hall.

Early in 1984, already suffering from cancer, she moved back to Bremen where, a few months later, she died.