Wilma Landwehr

Wilma Landwehr (born Wilma Mahlstedt: 5 January 1913 – 8 August 1981) was a Bremen politician (KPD, SPD) and, between 1950 and 1971, member of the Bremen parliament ("Bürgerschaft").

Life Wilma Mahlstedt was born into a working-class family in the Walle quarter of Bremen, located between the right bank of the river and the city centre. She attended the Reform ("progressive") School in Schleswig Street and then spent a year at a Home Economics College, an institution designed to prepare students for careers as senior domestic servants. Wilma Mahlstedt preferred factory work, however (which increasingly was better paid than "domestic service" at this time), taking a job in a tobacco factory when she was 15. She continued in factory work till 1932, playing an active part in the trades union movement. She was also politically active more generally, having been a member of the Young Communists since her school days.

Meanwhile, she supported herself, from 1949, with a public service job. It was in May 1949 that three of the four military occupation zones into which Germany had been divided four years earlier, including the British and US zones, were fused together and relaunched as the German Federal Republic (West Germany). By that time Landwehr had already stood, in 1946/47, as an SPD candidate for election to the member of the Bremen parliament ("Bürgerschaft"). She was not successful. On 15 September 1950 she took the seat vacated through the resignation of Karl Köster. She was re-elected on her own account in the election of 7 October 1951, and then again in 1955, 1959, 1963 and 1967, becoming one of the assembly's most high-profile members. Another parliamentary committee in which she served was that which drafted Bremen's Higher Education Law, which in turn led to the founding in 1971 of the University of Bremen.

Wilma Landwehr did not stand for re-election in 1971. Heinrich Landwehr had retired the previous year from his longstanding job as secretary of the party regional organisation. He was terminally ill and she cared for him, with a level of self-sacrifice that drew comment from at least one commentator, till his death in 1974.

Four and a half years younger than her husband, Wilma Landwehr outlived him by seven years, dying of heart disease five months short of her own sixty-ninth birthday.