Selma Steinmetz

Selma Steinmetz (1 September 1907 – 16 June 1979) was an Austrian educator and author who emigrated to France after the cancellation of democracy in Austria. In France she became a resistance activist following the German invasion in 1940. At the end of 1945 she was able to return to Vienna (where she had spent her student years) and was one of the first researchers to study the histories of victims of National Socialism. After 1963 she was an important contributor to the work of the Austrian Resistance Archive ("Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes").

Biography Selma Steinmetz was born in Vienna, the eldest of her parents' three recorded daughters. Heinrich Chaim Steinmetz (1882-1941/42), her father, worked as a retailer. He had come to the city originally from a village called Tyczyn near Łódź in what was known before 1915 as "Congress (Russian) Poland". Her mother, born Helene "Leni" Landesman Blass (1879-1933), was a product of Vienna's Jewish community. Both Steinsmetz's parents were active in the Social Democratic Party She grew up in the family home at Gaußplatz 3 in north-central Vienna ("20. Stadtbezirk").

She studied History, Germanistics and Education at the University of Vienna and qualified to work as teacher. As part of her university-level education she produced a 246-page dissertation in 1931 on the nineteenth century writer-polymath Bettina von Arnim. It was also in Paris that she met and soon afterwards teamed up with Oskar Grossmann. They remained together till 1944, though they never formally married. This made it possible for her to help numerous Austrian and German comrades being held in the concentration camps in the Toulouse/Montauban area. In material terms the conditions under which the emigrants existed were bad, especially through the winter of 1941/42 which was a harsh one. Money and food were in short supply. They lived in unheated rooms and were subject to frequent harassment from the authorities. Since they were living as unregistered foreigners, their presence was technically illegal which meant a constant risk of arrest by the "Pétain police" and possible detention in the camps, although before 1942 there was no significant risk of deportation. In order to supplement her income Selma Steinmetz took to working "at home", making leather purses. Other topics on which she published research included the continuing difficulties and discrimination encountered by women at Austrian universities, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and the Slavic peoples, and about Jura Soyfer. She wrote about the persecution of Jews and about the revolutionary socialist Franz Sachs and various other allied topics. The street was named after Arnezhofer more than a century earlier, under Mayor Karl Lueger (1844-1910), a high-profile mayor of Vienna and a man whose antisemitic views were more mainstream in the city during the final decades of the nineteenth century than they would have been after the Holocaust. Despite promises by the protestors that they would stick labels with the "new" street name over the official street name signs, the matter remains unresolved at the official level.