Marie Torhorst

Marie Torhorst (28 December 1888 – 7 May 1989) was a German school teacher and political activist who became an East German politician. She served as Minister for People's Education in the state of Thuringia between 1947 and 1950. Some sources identify her as "the first-ever female minister (on state or national level) in the history of Germany". Others are content to record that, within Germany, she was the first-ever female minister in the state of Thuringia.

Marie Torhorst stated and proved what is today known as the Carathéodory-Torhorst theorem in her 1918 doctoral dissertation. The dissertation was subsequently lost and Torhorst's contribution was for many decades overlooked; but in the twenty-first century mathematics scholars are happy to acknowledge and celebrate her work.

Life Provenance Marie Torhorst was born at the end of the so-called "Year of the Three Emperors" in Ledde, then as now a sleepy village in the flat countryside west of Osnabrück. She was the seventh and youngest child of Arnold Torhorst (1841–1909), the local parson and his wife, born Luise Smend (1847–1923). The family seems to have been intellectually gifted. Marie's elder sister, Adelheid, would also achieve a measure of eminence in teaching and, after 1945, in politics. The sisters would later, jointly, have a secondary school named after them. Luise Torhorst had inherited a useful sum of money as a result of which she was able to see to it that not just her four sons, but also her three daughters, received a full education.

Student Sources are not completely consistent as to when she embarked on her university education, much of which coincided with the First World War. She attended the University of Bonn, studying Geography, Mathematics and Physics. There are at least two reference to her having also studied at the University of Göttingen. It might have been thought that her doctorate should have provided a launch pad for a life-long career in the universities sector. There were still vanishingly few women working in high-level academic research at this time, however, and at least one commentator has identified "a lack of confidence in her own mathematical ability" in her autobiography.

She joined the socialist "Studenten-Arbeitsgemeinschaft" (apparently an umbrella group of socialist student associations) in 1917. During the early twentieth century her political record made it hard for her to find a permanent teaching post. She was able to find a part-time teaching position at a Catholic girls' school in Bonn, however, and also found work with the university as a university librarian. It was probably in 1922/23 that she completed several terms of study at the "Handelshochschule" (loosely, "business college", at the time being subsumed into the university) in Cologne, studying business administration and economics, following which she received a qualification in teaching business studies. She continued to lead the business school till 1929.

Her political and feminist beliefs had been deeply rooted in Torhorst's personal values and life choices since at least as far back as the First World War, but it was only in 1928 that she became a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Between 1929 and 1933, Marie Torhorst taught and worked as a "Studienrätin" (loosely, "student counsellor") at the Karl Marx School which had been set up in 1921 in Berlin-Neukölln by the education pioneer Fritz Karsen, and then progressively expanded under Karsen's direction during the years that followed. There was much about the school which was considered innovative at the time. In 1929 Karsen took the bold step of turning it into a "Gesamtschule" (loosely, "comprehensive school"), intended to educate children displaying the widest possible range of abilities. Another appealing feature for Torhorst was an underpinning philosophy which insisted that academically talented working class children should have the same opportunities as the children of more prosperous and/or well educated parents to pass the "Abitur" (secondary school final exam). The significance of the "Abitur" in Germany was (and is) that passing it opens the way to university-level education. Torhorst's four years at the school included, in 1932, a six month study trip to the Soviet Union. Her half year in the Soviet Union left a lasting impression.

The early 1930s were marked by an intensification of Germany's political polarisation. In the Reichstag (parliament) this was reflected in political deadlock. In January 1933 the Hitler government took power and rapidly transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. A progressive school in a traditionally left-wing district of Berlin named in honour of Karl Marx was, unsurprisingly, high on the National Socialist hate list. Bernhard Rust was installed as acting Prussian Minister for the Arts and Education on 4 February 1933 (following the dismissal of his predecessor in the office), and on 21 February 1933 Rust dismissed Karsen from the headship of his own school. The teaching staff were dismissed, and when the school reopened later that year it was with a new name, a new set of teachers, and a large swastika flag hanging in the main hall. Karsen emigrated. Marie Torhorst's teaching career was evidently over. During the final months of the war she was also involved in looking after German prisoners of War under the auspices of the "Reichsgruppe Handwerk" (a government backed craftworkers' organisation).

Torhorst herself also used the press to share with comrades some of her ambitions for her new role. These included the necessity "to bring an end to the still major differences between urban and rural schooling provision". She also shared her opinion that there was "still much more to be done to lay down a genuinely democratic basis for the development of a highly qualified and progressive German intelligentsia". Indispensable to that ambition was "a substantial increase in the proportion of university students with working class backgrounds". She would therefore make it her top priority to ensure that "the treasures of culture and learning do not simply benefit a small number of comrades at the top of society". In 1950 Marie Torhorst lost her position as Thuringian Minister for People's Education. Significantly Isolde Oschmann, her successor, appointed only in 1951, was another woman. Isolde Oschmann was a former Kindergarten teacher who turned out to be very much less of a hands-on education minister that Torhorst had been: her footprint on East German history remained slight despite her having held ministerial office for more than a year. It remains unclear why Marie Torhorst was replaced in the role. There is no very obvious indication from her subsequent public career that she was among those who fell out of favour with the party leadership at this time.

Ex-minister Torhorst then served, briefly during 1951/52, as political secretary with the East Berlin office of the "Internationale Demokratische Frauenföderation" (IDFF / "Women's International Democratic Federation"). She also accepted an invitation from Paul Wandel, East Germany's Minister for Education, to take over the running of the important "Arts Exhibition of the People's Republic of China" which was held in East Berlin during 1950/51. In 1952 she joined the East German Education Ministry as head of the department for cultural relations with foreign countries, a position she retained till 1957. Between 1958 and 1962 she taught at the (East) German National Pedagogical Institute, where in 1962 she also accepted a professorship. Through the 1950s and early 1960s Torhorst held a number of other, mostly short-term and part-time complementary appointments relating to her educational experience and expertise. Beyond the world of education, she also served between 1957 and 1960 as an honorary deputy president of the "Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" (DFD / "(East) German Democratic Women's League". After 1964, the year of her seventy-sixth birthday, she continued to engage actively in education related projects and discussions, but now on a free-lance basis.

Stasi links After reunification it emerged that Marie Torhorst had been a longstanding and active Secret Informant for the Ministry for State security. When the Stasi files were investigated, her earliest surviving report was found to date from 1953. Most Stasi informants produced reports on the daily movements and conversations of their work colleagues and / or family members, but Torhorst had been targeted and recruited after it was noticed, from routine monitoring of her personal letters, that she had excellent contacts with a number of persons of interest on the far side of the "inner German border". No doubt it was considered useful that she was always herself a compulsive writer of long detailed letters to friends and contacts. On account of her links to the East German government she also enjoyed exceptional travel privileges at a time when East Germany was becoming became ever more physically isolated from the west. Those on whom she submitted reports included her cousin, the respected professor of church law Rudolf Smend, the popular historian Wolfgang Leonhardt and the journalist Stephan Grzeskowiak. (Stephan Grzeskowiak was, in addition, one of Torhorst's former pupils from her time as a teacher at the Karl Marx School in Neukölln during the early 1930s and, more recently, had been a party insider with the team surrounding Kurt Schumacher, the recently deceased leader if the SPD in the west. His ongoing links, as a journalist, with SPD politicians in Bonn during the 1950s, 60s and 70s were of particular interest to Torhorst's Stasi handlers.) In 1958 her Stasi handlers marked the seventieth birthday of "GI Sophie" (the codename by which she was identified in the files) with a hamper worth 75 (western) marks, accompanied by a note commending the way in which she had "fulfilled all her assignments in an exemplary manner ... [and showed] a keen of interest in [the Stasi's] work". It does appear that her reports were not just long, but also both detailed and, at times, remarkably "readable" and even "chatty". She was indeed unusual among Stasi informants in her willingness to submit unsolicited advice, for instance concerning books from the west which should probably not be permitted to circulate in East Germany, or ways in which East German radio programmes might more effectively counter the "western propaganda" broadcast by the U.S. backed RIAS (radio station) from West Berlin. After her seventieth birthday a regular "secret collaborative relationship" was deemed no longer appropriate on account of her age, but she continued to receive "official visits" and her advice continued to be solicited, according to the reports of her Stasi handler at the time, Officer Hüther.