Margarete Wittkowski

Margarete "Grete" Wittkowski (18 August 1910 – 20 October 1974) was a German economist and politician (KPD / SED). Between 1961 and 1967 she served as deputy chair of the East German Council of Ministers, the only woman ever to hold this post. Between 1967 and 1974, she served as President of the East German National Bank.

Life

Provenance and early years

Margarete Wittkowski was born in Posen. Her father was a businessman: her mother was a pianist. She attended school in Posen till 1926, when the family moved to Berlin. Here, between 1929 and 1932, she studied Social economics ("Volkswirtschaftslehre"). Till 1931 she was active in the Zionist Movement, after which, following "discussions with leftist friends" her political energies were increasingly focused on the Communist Party, which she joined in September 1932.

Nazi Germany, Swiss exile (1933-1939)

In January 1933 the political backdrop was transformed when the Nazi Party took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Political activity - except in support of the Nazi Party - became illegal. At the end of February the Reichstag fire was instantly blamed on the Communists, and in March 1933 those identified as Communists began to be arrested. During 1933 Margarete Wittkowski emigrated to Switzerland, where she enrolled at Basel University and worked on her doctorate dissertation. She passed the oral element of her doctoral exam, for which she was supervised by Edgar Salin and Herman Schmalenbach, in February 1934, for work concerning the relationships between the big banks in Berlin and German industry.

Remarkably, between 1934 and 1938, Wittkowski continued to travel to Germany, while taking care to hasten back to Switzerland when the situation appeared to be becoming too dangerous. She appears to have been considered a leader among the exiled German communists in England.

Soviet occupation zone (1946-1949)

Margarete Wittkowski returned to Berlin in June 1946. In 1949/50 she attended a course at the Party Academy. There was a study period in Moscow.

However, whereas Wittkowski saw in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in West Germany a potential ally in support of workers and in opposition to the Adenauer régime, Ulbricht saw the western SPD, even before publication in 1959 of the Godesberg Program, as irredeemably counter-revolutionary. led to a charge of "Managerism". In February 1958 the Central Committee plenum endorsed the orthodox line advocated by General Secretary Ulbricht: Wittkowski underwent a "temporary demotion". and Wollweber.

She was quickly restored to the State Planning Commission vice-presidency, although now there was more than one vice-president so that her relative stature within the body was diminished. A few years later, after 1961, the economic reforms branded as the "New Economic System", reflecting a modest loosening of centralised control across the entire "Eastern Bloc" seemed to acknowledge concerns that had been expressed by Wittkowski three years before. She herself remained at this point outside the Party Central Committee Politburo, but her principal interlocutor within it was Werner Jarowinsky who had been a pupil of her old friend and literary collaborator, Jürgen Kuczynski. In February 1961 she resigned from the State Planning Commission for the last time and took up a post as a deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, where her departmental responsibilities covered Trade, Supply, and Agriculture. Over the years there were many deputy chairmen of the Council of Ministers, but Wittkowski was the only woman ever to be numbered among them. She held this post till July 1967. Meanwhile, in 1963 she was readmitted to the Party Central Committee.

Margarete Wittkowski's final big job, to which she was appointed in 1967, was the presidency of what was renamed, on 1 January 1968, the East German Central Bank (Staatsbank). She held this position until her death, which took place while she was travelling, at Singen on the southwestern edge of West Germany.