Käte Duncker (born Paula Kathinka Döll; 23 May 1871 – 2 May 1953) was a German political and feminist activist who became a politician in the Social Democratic Party of Germany and then the Communist Party of Germany.
Life Provenance and early childhood Paula Kathinka Döll was born in Lörrach (Baden), directly across the border to the north of Basel. Her father was a businessman and the family lived reasonably well, but when she was seven her father died and her mother took them to live at Friedrichroda on the edge of the Thuringian Forest, and where her mother ran a small guest house for summer holidaymakers.
Politics trumps teaching She attended an all-girls' school in Friedrichroda and the commercial school in Gotha before moving on to the Teacher Training College in Eisenach between 1888 and 1890. Her ambition to become a teacher had encountered initial opposition from her guardian and her mother, but she nevertheless persisted, passing her qualifying exams in 1890 and teaching, initially, in Friedrichroda. By 1893 she had moved to Leipzig where she taught in a girls' school. In November 1893 she attended a political meeting which was addressed by Clara Zetkin by whom she was greatly impressed. The next year she herself started teaching at evening classes organised by the Leipzig Workers' Education League. It was here that she first met Hermann Duncker, studying to become a music teacher, and later her husband. However, in 1895 or 1896 she lost her job at the Leipzig school because of her Socialism ("wegen sozialistischer Gesinnung").
She moved to Hamburg where she taught at another all-girls' school. In Hamburg she became involved in the dockworkers' strike which occurred between November 1896 and February 1897. As a result of her support for the strike she was, as before, dismissed from her teaching post. The realisation that the career teaching children which she loved and for which she had struggled, was going to be incompatible with her political involvement, was a heavy blow. She returned to Leipzig where, despite not being enrolled at the university, she was able to attend certain lectures on a "guest basis", notably those delivered by Karl Bücher. It was, she later asserted, as a result of her studies at this time that she produced her first publication, "On the participation of the female sex in employment" ("Ueber die Beteiligung des weiblichen Geschlechts an der Erwerbsthätigkeit"). Her study concluded that industrialisation would expand employment openings for women, and that it would become impossible to restrict women's professional careers.
She married Hermann Duncker, by now an economics student, towards the end of 1898. Their daughter, Hedwig, was born in 1899. In the meantime, Käte immersed herself in the leftwing politics of the city, becoming first a member of the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) and then a party worker, although legally it only became permissible for women to participate in politics in 1908. She employed her teaching skills, giving lectures to the Workers' Education League covering literature, pedagogy, history, socio-politics and economics. She became the chair of the "Association for women and girls of the working class" ("Verein für Frauen und Mädchen der Arbeiterklasse") in Leipzig.
In February 1903 the couple's second child, Karl was born: Käte Duncker's health collapsed. They moved away from Leipzig to Dresden. As she recovered she returned to lecturing on child protection, education and women's rights. Another publication on child labour ("Die Kinderarbeit und ihre Bekämpfung") appeared in 1906. Over the next few years she developed a close friendship with Clara Zetkin which was both personal and political. In 1906 she became deputy controlling editor for "Die Gleichheit" ("Equality"), the women's magazine managed by Zetkin, under whose direction it had surged from obscurity to a distribution estimated in 1907 at 70,000 copies. Duncker's particular area of responsibility on the paper was the section entitled "For our children", which became a great favourite with working-class families.
In 1906 she gave a presentation to the fourth SPD Women's Congress in Mannheim on care of women during and following pregnancy. In 1907 the family relocated to Stuttgart. That year she gave a presentation on education to the Women's Congress in Nuremberg. In 1910 she was a delegate at the International Socialist Women's Conference in Copenhagen (held in tandem with that year's International Socialist Congress), at which she delivered a presentation on motherhood and childcare. She was also involved in the resolution to introduce an international Women's Day, proposed at the conference by her friend, Clara Zetkin. The first International Women's Day celebrated in Germany (and Denmark, Austria and Switzerland) duly took place on 19 March 1911 (although the idea had come from a national Women's Day first celebrated in New York on 28 February 1909).
In 1911 Duncker gave a presentation to the SPD Party Conference, held that year in Jena, where, according to one source, she had her first encounter with Rosa Luxemburg. By now, a couple of months before the birth of her third child early in 1909, she had withdrawn from her editorial position with "Die Gleichheit". She had been a member of the party's national Education Committee since 1908. In 1912 the family relocated again, this time to Berlin.
War and the Spartacus League
War broke out at the end of July 1914. In the Reichstag (national parliament) the SPD leadership implemented an effective party truce for its duration. In a vote held on 4 August 1914, instead of voting against war credits, the SPD abstained. From the outset, however, this version of patriotism from the party leadership encountered opposition from internationalist and left-wing party members.Susanne Miller: Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg. Verlag Droste, Düsseldorf 1974 (Contributions to "Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien", Vol. 53). Hermann and Käte Duncker passionately opposed funding for the war, and as economic destitution on the home front mounted, the call for an end to the slaughter on the front line would only grow louder. In 1915 Käte Duncker, was a co-founder of the news-sheet, "The International", to which she became a frequent contributor. The news-sheet took its name from International Group which had been launched within the SPD on the initiative of Rosa Luxemburg at outbreak of the war and to which the Dunckers had been early recruits.
In 1916 the International Group was renamed, becoming the Spartacus League. Duncker continued to campaign against the war, using her background on the party's education to locate and address youth groups, while also producing illegal "Spartacus Letters" ("Spartakusbriefe"), carrying the same pro-peace messages. This earned her a "speech ban" on 30 May 1916. She worked in Berlin with Leo Jogiches to coordinate anti-war efforts across the country. In September 1916 she represented the Spartacus League at the national party conference of the SPD. Shortly after this she suffered a health crisis and spent three months in a sanatorium. From 1918 she was responsible for "Women work" ("Frauenarbeit") in the Spartacus League headquarters.
Post war chaos Regarding the closing phases of the war, sources are relatively silent on her pacifist activism. In the context of the revolutionary months that followed national military defeat, following the murders in January 1919 of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Käte Duncker was arrested on 16 January 1919: she was briefly detained and interrogated. She then moved back to Leipzig where the risk of sudden attack or further arrest seemed less pressing than in Berlin. During the war her sons had been sent to Denmark where they were staying with friends, and in Match 1919, around the time when Leo Jogiches was murdered, she joined them. However, her Danish residence permit was of short duration, and at the end of May 1919 she had to move on to Sweden, where , a philosophy professor at Lund University to whom her friend Gertrud Liljequist was married, was able to provide the necessary guarantees on her behalf. From Lund she followed post war developments with keen interest. Writing to her husband on 25 June 1919, she identified the peace terms imposed by US president, Woodrow Wilson as the "dictates of an imperialistic power, victorious following the downfall of its German rival" ("Diktat imperialistischer Siegermächte über den niedergeworfenen Konkurrenten Deutschland"). However, much of her attention was devoted to planning for future developments of socialism and the labour movement in Germany. (She also helped with the translation of at least one Swedish habilitation dissertation into German, in order to try and support herself financially.) According to one source, by 1919 Duncker felt that she had been greatly aged by her activities and experiences during the First World War. The next few years indicated that her reserves of energy were not yet spent, however.
Weimar years The SPD had finally broken apart over the issue of support for the war in 1917. The two principal breakaway movements were the Spartacus League and the Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD). A century later, it is not always easy to differentiate the two movements from each other, and in March 1917 the Spartacus League merged into the USPD while retaining a semi-autonomous status within it. Some of the contradictions inherent in these arrangements were addressed at a conference held in Berlin between 30 December 1918 and 1 January 1919 which gave structure to agreements entered into earlier in the month, in the process establishing the Communist Party of Germany. Hermann and Käte Duncker were among its first members, elected early on to the party central committee.
Käte Duncker returned from Sweden towards the end of 1919 and embarked on a brief series of lectures at the Workers' Education College ("Arbeiterbildungsschule") in Berlin, also supporting herself with translation work. In December 1919, with her husband, she moved back to Thuringia where the family were allocated an apartment in Gotha-Siebleben. 1920 was a difficult year as the region became a focus for the Lüttwitz-Kapp Putsch. In the aftermath of the violence the local left-wing district government resigned and Hermann Duncker, employed by it in a senior secretarial/administrative capacity, lost his job and was obliged to resort to his "fallback occupation" as a peripatetic teacher working for the Communist party, which had a depressive impact on the family.
Regional parliament In the late summer of 1921 Duncker invited by the party to stand as a candidate for the regional parliament (Landtag). The candidacy was not without controversy among her political comrades, and at one stage she withdrew it. Nevertheless, in the end her name was on the Communist Party candidate list and in December 1921, now aged fifty, she was elected to the chamber. She addressed her parliamentary responsibilities with characteristic energy, her contributions focusing on issues involving childhood, and building on ideas that had originated during her time as a teacher in Eisenach and Friedrichroda. She campaigned for the introduction of nutritious school meals and of crèche facilities. She urged improvements in the education available to ordinary people. As a result of her truncated teaching career Käte Duncker had become a proponent of the precepts developed by the education pioneer Maria Montessori, which led her to concern herself with enhancements to the professionalism of teacher training.