1. Life

2. Personal

3. References

Life

Hanna Weber was born into a working class family in Horn, a small town in the countryside to the north of Paderborn. As a young woman she worked in domestic service and as an unskilled worker in Solingen and Düsseldorf. In 1911 she married her first husband, Walter Staubes.^[1]

Hanna Staubes joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) in 1915. The decision of the party leadership to instigate what amounted to a parliamentary truce over voting to fund the war had been contentious within the party from the outset, and the intensity of internal dissent grew as the slaughter on the battle front and destitution on the home front intensified. In 1917 the party split, and Hanna Staubes was part of the dissident faction that now defected to the Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD). She was also a member of the pacifist Spartacus League, and as the USPD itself broke apart after the war she was part of the leftwing majority that joined the newly formed Communist Party: she was a co-founder of the local Solingen branch.

She became the leader of the women's group for the party's Solingen sub-district team ("Unterbezirksleitung"), and in 1929 was elected to the city council. In 1930 she was elected a member of the Rheinland provincial parliament ("Provinziallandtag"). She was then elected, in April 1932, to the Prussian Parliament ("Landtag"), in which represented the Düsseldorf East electoral district, remaining a member till the abolition of democracy in 1933.^[1] Staubes was also, in 1931, a co-organiser of the "Red Rhine-Ruhr Congress of Working Women".^[1]

The end of the Second World War in May 1945 brought about the downfall of the Nazi dictatorship and Hanna Rautenbach was able to rejoin the Communist Party, working as a party official in Solingen and, from November 1945, in the city administration. It being not immediately possible to organise municipal elections the British forces administering this part of Germany initially sought to recreate the pre-Nazi parliamentary institutions allocating seats based on the last democratic elections, being those held in 1932. When regional elections were held on 10 April 1947 the Communist party received enough votes to give it 28 seats in the 216 seat regional parliament ("Landtag") in the newly configured state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and one of these went to Hanna Rautenbach. She remained a member till 1950.^[1]

Following the blockade of West Berlin in 1949 and the uncompromising suppression of the East German uprising in 1953, cold war tensions between the two German states intensified, and in August 1956 the Communist Party of Germany was outlawed by the West Germany constitutional court.^[3] Over the next decade, however, the relations between East and West Germany became less antagonistic, in 1968 a new version of the former party was launched as the German Communist Party ( "Deutsche Kommunistische Partei" / DKP), notionally as "an entirely new party".^[4] Hanna Rautenbach was by now aged 79 and no longer politically or professionally active. Nevertheless, she lost no time in joining the "new" DKP.^[1]

Hanna Staubes-Rautenbach died at Solingen on 27 August 1981.^[1]

Personal

Hanna Rautenbach's elder brother, Hermann Weber 1888 - 1937, also achieved notability as a Communist activist and, ultimately, as a victim of Stalin's purges.^[5]

References

• There's A Long Long Trail A-Winding
• There's a Long Long Trail A-Winding
• Theresa Longworth
• Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald/redirects
• There's a Lot of It About
• Theresa Luke
• There's Always a Thursday
• There's Always a Way to Find a Way
• There's Always a Woman
• There's Always a Woman (Desperate Housewives)
• There's Always Me
• There's Always Someone Cooler Than You
• There's Always Something There to Remind Me
• There's Always Tomorrow (1956 film)
• Theresa Makone
• Theresa Makoni
• There's a Man Going Around Taking Names
• There's a map for that
• Theresa Maria Coriolano
• Theresa Mathilde Clark
• Theresa McDermott
• Theresa McGlynn
• Theresa McQueen
• There's a Million Ways to Sing the Blues
• There's A Million Ways To Sing The Blues (Features song)