Marie Schmidt
Marie Schmidt was a German political activist and politician.. During the politically dead-locked period directly before the Hitler government took power in Berlin she became a Communist member of the parliament of the People's State of Hesse.
Biography
Provenance and early years
Marie Kuhn was born in Egelsbach, at that time a small town a short distance to the north of Darmstadt. Her mother was Elizabeth. Her father Heinrich Kühn was a farmer who became the father of seven daughters: Marie was the sixth. On 23 April 1914 Marie Kuhn married the plasterer Adolf Theodor Schmidt.Politics
During the war, which broke out a little more than three months later, Marie and Adolf Schmidt were both deeply involved with the "proletarian" peace movement. She was an early member of the Communist Party of Germany which in 1918/19 emerged from it. In her home community, she was elected to become a member of the Egelsbach local council. She also made her mark across Hesse more widely, gaining a reputation as an effective and aggressive public speaker representing the Hesse Communist Party, and acquiring the soubriquet "Rote Marie".During 1931/32, Schmidt served as one of just three women members of the 70-seat Hesse state parliament. Having secured her seat in the election of 15 November 1931 she made just one brief speech in the chamber. That was in February 1932 when she contributed to a debate over a government bill.
In March 1933, following the National Socialist take-over in January 1933, Schmidt and her husband were arrested in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. They were detained for several weeks and then released. Under the dictatorship the Communist Party and political activism were banned. After 1945, Schmidt, by now a widow, rejoined the Communist Party, but with Communism now seen increasingly as a proxy for Soviet expansionist ambitions the party no longer enjoyed significant support in what became, in 1949, the German Federal Republic. Marie Schmidt withdrew from public political engagement. Nevertheless, after the Communist Party had been banned by the West German Constitutional Court in 1956, and then, as Cold War concerns began to recede, quietly relaunched with a new name in 1968, Marie Schmidt joined the "new" party.