Lilli Jannasch

Lilli Jannasch (1872 – 1968) was a German feminist, pacifist, journalist, graphologist, and co-founder of the pacifist organisation Bund Neues Vaterland.

Early life Lilli Jannasch was born in 1872, the daughter of a German bank director and a French mother. Little is known about her early life, but Jannasch became a distinguished member of the German peace movement. It was through the Society for Ethical Culture, of which she had been a member since the beginning of the 20th century, that Jannasch became involved with organised pacifism.

Jannasch did not believe that any form of militarism or imperialism, regardless of its national origin, could ever be regarded as 'ethical'. In 1914, Jannasch, along with Albert Einstein, Otto Lehmann-Russbuldt, Kurt von Tepper-Laski, and others, founded the Bund Neues Vaterland (New Fatherland League). and described as:a heterogeneous group of people whose opposition [to] the war politics of the German Imperial establishment glued them together. It comprised conservatives, liberals, democrats, socialists, pacifists, internationalists, and philanthropists from all sectors of the middle class and from nobility. and in March, Jannasch was arrested and imprisoned, without trial, for four months on charges of treason. The Black Horror referred to 'repeated charges voiced in the German press and elsewhere of wholesale abuses of women and children committed by the French colored troops garrisoned in the occupied territory along the Rhine'. E. Kuhlman describes Jannasch's as 'the most trenchant critique of the Rhineland Horror campaign'. Kuhlman writes that in an article for a German magazine in November 1920:Jannasch compared the crusade's antics to the German folktale the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," in which the piper (in this case, the Rhineland Horror campaigners) played irresistible music (of revenge, chivalric honor, and female protection) while making irresponsible claims (about the African soldiers). The German people, observed Jannasch, were being lured into a never-ending cycle of revenge by the campaign's inflated claims of dishonour at the hands of the colonial troops. Jannasch explained that in using colonials, the French were perpetuating the spirit of retribution instigated by the spirit of retribution instigated by the aggressive, baiting methods begun by the Germans during the war, particularly in their own occupation of Belgium and part of France.

Throughout the postwar years, Jannasch worked for Franco-German rapprochement, continuing to decry militarism and nationalist propaganda.

Later years In the latter years of the 1920s, Jannasch became disillusioned in the face of growing nationalistic feeling in Germany. She withdrew from political activity and worked as a graphologist in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Jannasch's house was raided and she underwent interrogation by Frankfurt police. She fled to France, settling in Strasbourg, and continuing to work as a graphologist. Details of her later years are unknown.