Maria Emhart
Maria Emhart was an Austrian resistance activist who survived the Hitler years and, in 1953, became a national politician.
Life
Provenance and early years
Maria Emhart was born in Pyhra, a small town on the edge of Sankt Pölten and a short distance to the west of Vienna. She was the first-born of her parents' five children. Johann Raps, her father was a railwayman. He drank. Maria Kreutzer her mother, aged just 17 at the time of Maria's birth, was a farm worker. When she was three months old her parents married one another. During her childhood the family lived in a two-room apartment in a social housing development in Sankt Pölten. There was never enough to eat. The children went without shoes between April and October each year, and at nights slept two to a bed.Factory work
Money was short, and when she was 14 she had to leave school and take a factory job at the Sankt Pölten :de:Glanzstoff Austria |Glanzstoff factory. When she attended the interview for her first job, part of the interview process involved weighing her. She was slightly built and undernourished, and the personnel officer had to send her away with an apology, explaining that she did not even match the minimum weight for a trainee. However, a family friend familiar with the factory knew that the personnel officer was due to retire shortly. She therefore returned for another interview with his successor a few weeks later, having first taken the precaution of discretely sewing some stones into the hem of her dress. This time she passed the weight test and was offered the job she badly needed. By this time war had broken out. Business was good and the factory was working three 8 hour shifts each day. Every third week the fourteen year old Maria Raps worked the night shifts. With male factory workers having been conscripted for military service she was often required to undertake heavy work which in more normal times would have been reserved for the men. By 1917 poor working conditions in the local factories were combining with wild rumours about a workers' state in Russia and of strikes in Berlin and Vienna to feeding into political radicalisation. Neither of Maria's parents had ever found much time for politics: she nevertheless became one of many who turned to trades union activism in the aftermath of the First World War. At 17 she joined the Social Democratic Party: the move would shape the rest of her life. The next year she found that she was pregnant. The father of her baby would have been Karl Emhart, a rail worker like her father. In 1918, however, by selling a revolver and her watch she was able to afford a train ticket to Vienna where she underwent an illegal abortion. She would later attribute her failure to become pregnant following her marriage to that procedure.Marriage
In 1921 Maria Raps married Karl Emhart. The marriage, though childless, was happy. The couple remained together till Karl Emhart's death in 1965, irrespective of the legal divorce that they were forced to go through in 1936 in order that Emhart might avoid losing his job after Maria's political activism had earned her an eighteen-month prison sentence.Politics
She embarked on a role of political leadership as an elected member of the Works council at the factory where she worked. She took every opportunity to press for an improvement in the working conditions of the co-workers who had elected her to the position. Between 1920 and 1932 the registered population of Sankt Pölten grew from 23,000 to 37,000 in 1932, supported by a rapid expansion of manufacturing. Conditions in the factories improved through the 1920s, partly as a result of pressure from organised labour, but the economic backdrop remained uncertain. Acutely conscious that she was handicapped by having had to leave school at such a young age, Maria Emhart travelled by train to nearby Vienna twice a week in order to attend classes at the Workers' Academy in the city. The college was run jointly by the SPÖ and the Austrian Trades Union Congress. Although general education featured on the curriculum, there was also a focus on political ideas, enabling Emhart to absorb the ideas of party luminaries such as Otto Bauer, Emmy Freundlich, Adelheid Popp and Karl Renner. The Bauers and Renner actually taught at the college, as did Julius Deutsch and Friedrich Adler. Emhart's student contemporaries at the college included Franz Jonas, Bruno Kreisky, Anton Proksch and Otto Probst. Along with the chance to gather new political insights and ideas, attendance at the Academy provided ample networking opportunities of which, as became clear during the ensuing decades, Maria Emhart took full advantage. A particular friend whom she first met at this time was Rosa Jochmann, described by one admiring commentator as "one of the party's most energetic and idealistic young women".At the local elections held on 9 May 1932 Maria Emhart was elected to membership of the local council. The industrial nature of the town was reflected in the fact that the SPÖ achieved, as at the previous election, an overall majority of votes and seats, despite a reduction in vote share from 64% to 54%. There were 42 seats on the council: Emhart was one of just three women members. The focus of her work as a municipal councillor was on social matters. She sat as a member of at least three council sub-committees, on health, education and welfare. She also used her networking abilities to strengthen links between municipal councillors and workers' organisations, especially those organised by working women. Surviving letters to friends from her years of retirement clearly show that Emhart knew very well that she was filling the archetypal female niches in her political work. As the eldest of her parents' five children, she had at an early stage learned to look after her younger siblings as a mother and later, as her mother grew sick and worn down with the pressures created by poverty and the father's drinking, she found she was also acting as a surrogate mother to her own parents. Transferring those nurturing habits to her political career came completely naturally.
1932 was, as event subsequently turned out, the last year in which local elections were held in Austria for eighteen years 1950.
Democracy cancelled
In January 1933 the Hitler government took power and transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Austria remained a separate country till 1938, but the same populist forces were at work. In Vienna Chancellor Dollfuss was emboldened to shut down parliament and assume dictatorial powers. The move away from democracy was not so brutally quick, and perhaps less minutely planned, than in Germany. Nevertheless, the February uprising in 1934 was energetically crushed by the army, and the police, operating in concert with paramilitary pro-fascist street fighters. It lasted only a week, but the extent of the violence on the city streets and the extent of the changes that followed, which included the "self-elimination" Parliament and the "disciplinary measures" imposed on non-fascist political parties including, notably, the SPÖ, have led some commentators to characterise that violent week in February as the "Austrian Civil War". Maria Emhart participated with practicality and passion, though reported details of her involvement are not entirely clear. It is clear that she was not averse to inflicting some violence for herself, having been coached in judo and martial arts by her husband. Many years later, in 1976, she would gleefully recall in a letter to a friend how she had bent back the thumb of a policemen who was trying to remove from her a large party banner during one of the demonstrations. The next day she had the added satisfaction of being arrested for questioning over the incident: the policeman said she had hurt him, and winked. Emhart denied everything. The February uprising quickly triggered a vast palette of myths as to who did what, how many were killed, and who was responsible. The government promoted the narrative that "the Jews" were responsible. Despite scholarly attempts to derive a single narrative from the many recollections included by Emhart and her friends in correspondence, it has not been possible to distil a single chronology describing her own involvement, even if there is nothing half-baked about the heroic stature Emhart very rapidly acquired among antifascists. Phrases such as "possession of arms", "ringleadership" and "female Schutzbund commander" feature in court submissions of her doings during that week, but her eventual acquittal makes it impossible simply to interpret these at face value. Twenty years later, long after the Hitler nightmare had started to recede into the past, and democracy had returned to Austria, Emhart was still being questioned - generally by admirers and interviewers - about the role she had played in February 1934: her detailed replies, while no doubt well-intentioned - did nothing to pin down a clear timeline. She even gave apparently conflicting replies to questions of whether or not she was ever herself a member of the Socialist paramilitary "Schutzbund" organisation. An unambiguous statement that a woman was a member of paramilitary organisation would certainly have distressed many male comrades: but at least one commentator indicates that by unfailingly reacting to questions about her own paramilitary involvement with digressions about male sensibilities, both at her trial in 1934 and when called upon to remember those events twenty years later, she conspicuously declined to answer the questions as put. There can in any event be little doubt that she undertook "courier work" - including the smuggling of grenades and other weapons to combat locations - for the paramilitaries.Along with engagement in the fighting, there are references to her prominent role in recruiting women to transport desperately needed munitions to male comrades fighting desperately from ad hoc strongholds on the streets. Well covered baby carriages were the conveyance of choice. On the streets in her home town Maria Emhart acquired the soubriquet "Flintenweib" in celebration of her fearless contribution to the ill-fated uprising.
Many of the most prominent SPÖ leaders had been arrested the night before fighting broke out. Other fighters fled in the immediate aftermath of those events to neighbouring Czechoslovakia. Emhart was involved in obtaining and supplying emergency medications and bandages to comrades who needed them. She knew that the police were looking for her, but ignored pleas from comrades that she should herself escape across the border. She felt that for her to fleeing abroad would mean letting down Schutzbund comrades in a time of great need.
On 20 February 1934 Maria Emhart was arrested "on suspicion of riot" by pro-government paramilitaries. She would later recall the ensuing interrogation by "Heimwehr" paramilitaries as "violent and humiliating". She overheard a group of pro-government paramilitaries gossiping, and speculating that as a "dangerous red" she was most likely to become the first woman to be hanged in Austria for many years. A more realistic outcome of any trial was a ten or fifteen-year prison term, but since the emergence of an Austrofascist government was a recent development, it was genuinely hard to know how the authorities would deal with political activists who had found themselves on the losing side in the February uprising. The morning following her arrest the paramilitaries who had been taunting her handed her over to the police. She remained in pre-trial police detention for the next four months, seriously fearful that once she faced a court she would be convicted and executed. Because of her known leadership role among Sankt Pölten socialists she was at times placed in solitary confinement. However, the cells at the court complex were overflowing in the aftermath of the February events, and there were also times during her pretrial detention when, at night, detainees were forced to sleep two to a bed. She obtained and no doubt contributed great strength through the camaraderie manifested by exchanging ideas with others incarcerated, using communication methods that included shouting through walls, knocking on the pipes in the cells, or simply singing songs together that echoed between the cells as the guards took their evening meal break together in another part of the complex. Nor were the inmates forgotten by comrades outside. On May Day they were cheered by a brass band marching loudly past the prison in solidarity. At nights the darkness of the cells was briefly illuminated as train drivers on the nearby track flashed their greetings: Karl Emhart, her railway-worker husband, was temporarily suspended for his suspected involvement with this development.
Maria Emhart faced her treason trial before a local court in June 1934. Sources are vague and contradictory about what happened, but at least one of them spells out that a jury failed to convict her, citing lack of evidence. Witnesses who testified that they had seen her wearing a dark coloured ski suit and carrying a leather bag with a revolver in it were evidently not believed. The St. Pöltner Nachrichten which by this time had become slavishly supportive of the government, reported that the witness statements on which the prosecution case depended were mutually contradictory. Records of those witness statements have not survived. Much of Emhart's testimony does survive, however, confirming reports that her performance in court was lucid and, as matters turned out, persuasive. Her denials were robust and her unapologetic commitment to socialism was on full display through the hearing. Emhart was accordingly acquitted by the jury and released. According to one source she was re-arrested on the way home from the court by police acting on orders from Vienna, but her husband was able to persuade the arresting policemen, on grounds of her "incapacity", to let her go. There were some among the responsible officials who were nevertheless determined that she should not go unpunished, and she was ordered to pay a 70 schilling fine for leading an illegal street protest.
A few days later she was attacked in the street by a gang of armed paramilitaries led by a man identified as Major Marinkowitsch. After this, believing that she would be in danger of attack or another arrest if she stayed in Sankt Pölten, during a ski break in the mountains she was transported by friends across the border into Switzerland, where she spent six weeks in Davos. Elsewhere it is recorded that the principal reason for her visit to Davos was to obtain treatment for her Tuberculosis which had flared up during the exceptionally stressful preceding months. According to this version, her treatment was funded by Elisabeth Windisch-Graetz, popularly known as "the red archduchess", a committed lifelong socialist and a granddaughter of the late emperor. She remained in contact with comrades in Austria, however, as well as with her husband Karl who was subjected to police searches and close surveillance while she was away. After six weeks in her Davos sanitorium she received the message from Austria, "Rosl schwer erkrankt". This was a coded message through which she was informed that in August 1934 her friend and political comrade, Rosa Jochmann, had been arrested, also in connection with the February events.