Rosi Wolfstein

Alma Rosalie (Rosi) Wolfstein (after 1948, Rosi Frölich: 27 May 1888 – 11 December 1987) was a German socialist politician. After the murder of her friend and mentor, the communist pioneer Rosa Luxemburg, she inherited Luxemburg's copious collection of papers, and devoted much time to organising the archive. During the 1930s, with her partner Paul Frölich, Rosi Wolfstein worked on an important biography of Luxemburg.

Life Family provenance and early years Rosalie Wolfstein was born at Witten, then a industrial city west of Dortmund in the Ruhr region. Her father, Samuel Wolfstein (1843–1901), was a Jewish businessman. and Wolfstein lost no time in joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). In Moscow she met, and according to one source quarreled, with Lenin.

Party insider: party splits Between 1921 and 1924 she sat as a Communist Party" member of the Prussian regional legislature ("Landtag"), where within the parliament she was deputy leader of the party group. Between 1921 and 1923 she was also a member of the party head office and organisation team, where she had responsibility for party publishers. However, use of the word "united" in the party name reflected a continuing propensity to party infighting through the 1920s, and in 1924, after the Ninth Party Congress, held in Frankfurt am Main, Wolfstein resigned her party and parliamentary posts in protest against the "ultra left-wing" party leadership around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. She signed, however, not with her real name, but using the pseudonym "Marta Koch". in February 1941 Wolfstein and Frölich were provided with emergency visas. They escaped together to New York City, travelling to North America by way of Lisbon and Martinique.

Woflstein and Frölich lived together in New York from 1941 till 1950. In 1948 they married each other. She was actively involved in various New York based welfare organisations while Frölich focused on academic work.

Final years They returned to Germany in 1951, settling in Frankfurt am Main, which till 1949 had been in the American occupation zone and was now beginning to emerge as a major administrative and commercial hub in a new German state, the Federal Republic ("West Germany"). Disillusioned with Soviet mandated communism, she now rejoined the Social Democratic Party, forty three years after first having joined it. She was also active in the recently created printers' trades union, IG Druck und Papier and was involved in the establishment of the which originated in 1951 as a sub-section of the printers' union.

After Paul Frölich died, his widow managed his literary estate and attended to the publication of some of his writings. She died at Frankfurt, half a year short of what would have been her one hundredth birthday. At her burial, which took place in the city's main cemetery, Holger Börner, the regional Minister-president, gave a speech of tribute, asserting that she "always fought with heart and mind for social causes" ("stets mit Herz und Verstand für die soziale Sache eingetreten") and celebrating her as "a second Rosa Luxemburg".