Sonja Rabinowitz “Zur Entwicklung Arbeiterbewegung in Russland bis zur grossen Revolution von 1905”, 1914, German

Sonja Rabinowitz “Zur Entwicklung Arbeiterbewegung in Russland bis zur grossen Revolution von 1905”, 1914, in German
Berlin. Springer. 1914., vi, 97pp. 24.3 x 16.5 cm., soft cover
Covers detached, worn, discolored with small stains, chipped to edges,
damping to lower left corner of front cover and first pages,
damping to upper edge of rear cover and last page.
3 first leaves detached.
Light small foxing stains to edges and some pages, small tear to edge of some pages
Sonja Lerch , born as Sarah Sonja Rabinowitz , [1] (May 3 . Jul / 15 May 1882 greg. In Warsaw , † 29 March [2] in 1918 in Munich ) was a German socialist and peace activist .
Sonja Lerch's life is not easy to reconstruct. She presented her early life in a curriculum vitae that was attached to her 1912 dissertation. Much more information can be found in the interrogation files of the Munich police after their arrest in 1918. However, they only cover the part of life in which the political police were interested. There are contradictions and gaps in the documents. [3]
Lerch was born as the daughter of the writer Saul Pinchas Rabbinowicz and attended the Second Girls' High School in Warsaw. She went to the teacher training college and passed the teacher exam in 1899. In the same year she translated Nahida Remy's “The Jewish Woman” from German into Russian. 1901–1903 Sonja Rabinowitz enrolled at the University of Vienna and heard from the Austromarxist Carl Grünberg . [4] From the winter semester of 1903 to 31 May 1905 was enrolled in Bern. According to her own statements, she taught at a school in Warsaw from 1905 to 1906, where she was accepted into the school administration, and in 1907 she taught in Odessa. Rabinowitz was a member of the Jewish Workers' Union even before 1900 and probably traveled to Odessa on its behalf to prepare for the first Russian revolution in 1905 . As a member of the Workers and Deputies Council in Odessa, she was arrested and imprisoned in March 1907. In May 1907 Sarah Sonja Rabinowitz managed to escape from Odessa by ship to Constantinople via Vienna to her parents, who had fled from Warsaw to Frankfurt am Main in 1907 . [5] During the interrogation in 1918, however, Lerch stated that in 1907 she first went to Vienna to become a writer and to have earned her living with private lessons, before she followed her parents to Frankfurt in 1908. She got involved with the “ Bund“And the SPD and published in German , Russian and Yiddish . In 1910 she would have been temporarily in Munich, where she wrote for the SPD newspaper Münchener Post , among other things . [3]
From 1908 she studied economics in Giessen and Zurich , and received her doctorate in Giessen in 1912 on the subject of the development of the labor movement in Russia up to the great revolution of 1905 . In 1912 she married the Romanist Eugen Lerch , whom she first met in Munich, and moved with him to Berlin, where she gave private lessons in Slavic languages. For the academic year 1913/14 she went to Munich with her husband on October 1, 1913, when he completed his habilitation at the LMU and became a private lecturer.
Sonja Lerch was a pacifist and in 1914 was one of the first declared war opponents with the outbreak of the First World War . As co-founder of the Munich USPD she organized together with Kurt Eisner , Hans Unterleitner, Richard fighters including in January 1918 as part of the January strike -actions a strike of about 3000 Munich ammunition factory workers to enforce the general peace and was arrested on February 1, 1918 for treason . [6]
In addition to Eisner and Ernst Toller, Lerch is one of the main speakers at the meetings, although the police minutes only mention her by name, but do not include her speeches in shorthand. [7] A report received from the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office to the Bavarian Ministry of Justice describes an appearance by Sonja Lerch:
“She immediately called on Eisner for a mass uprising, spoke of the connection between the German and the Russian proletariat and, in particular at the meeting on January 31, 1918 in the Wagner-Bräu, gave reasons for the idea of freedom to finally come true in Munich, and called for it not to resume work until the idea of freedom has prevailed. Their speeches also had a decisive effect on those present in terms of the decision to stoppage and the continuation of the strike. […] During the judicial interrogation, she denied having committed treason; She sees no treason in the call for a mass strike. [3] "
Eugen Lerch publicly distanced himself from his wife's political activity and filed for divorce so as not to endanger his career at LMU. [3] A note appeared in the "Münchner Post" on February 2, 1918. She agreed to the divorce, but continued to love him. She was arrested with him when she wanted to see him again after going into hiding. Lerch did not visit his wife in almost eight weeks of their pre-trial detention. On March 15, 1918, Sonja Lerch was transferred from the Neudeck remand prison to the Munich-Stadelheim prison, as the only one of those arrested during the January strike. There she was found hanged on March 29, 1918. [8th]
In his autobiography curriculum vitae is Victor Klemperer , a colleague of Eugen Lerch and friend of the family, the situation is different: So Lerch had reported after the funeral Sonya Klemperer and his wife that it was Sonja Lerch, who wanted the divorce to free to be. Both would have worked together for pacifism, but Sonja Lerch's “anti-German hostility” would have stood between them and alienated them. He shouldn't have visited her in prison. An admission would have been his half-sentence after "you can say that I sacrificed Sonja for my career." [9]
Eisner in his diary of April 2nd and a public report in the Leipziger Volkszeitung on April 12th attribute Lerch's suicide to the deep mortification caused by the loss of her husband and his lack of support. Another press report in the Gothaer Generalanzeiger contradicts: “We can certainly assure you that the divorce matter did not cause any emotional disturbances in our comrade because the application for divorce corresponded to her own wishes. The causes of the collapse are only political. " [10]
Sonja Lerch is buried in the New Israelite Cemetery in Munich, all speeches were forbidden at the funeral, the USPD silently laid a wreath. Her tombstone was restored in 2018 on the 100th anniversary of the death of Cornelia Naumann and Günther Gerstenberg. [3]
The writer Ernst Toller , who also came into custody after the January strike, made her fate in a slightly alienated form under the name Sonja Irene L. on the subject of his drama Masse Mensch , which premiered in 1920 at the Nuremberg Theater, on September 29, 1921 by Jürgen Fehling was staged at the Volksbühne Berlin.
In his autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland Toller took up the life of Lerch again and here separated the real person from the stage figure in mass people. [3]
More recent research on the life of Sonja Lerch was carried out in 2018 by the writer Cornelia Naumann in her novel The evening comes so quickly. Sonja Lerch - Munich's forgotten revolutionary and the artist and author Günther Gerstenberg published on the basis of archive research.
Honors and exhibitions
On the 100th anniversary of her death, Sarah Sonja Lerch was honored with an elegy in the new Israeli cemetery in Munich.
The exhibition Preamble of the Peaceful Revolution in Bavaria - The Long Forgotten Revolutionary Sarah Sonja Lerch by Günther Gerstenberg and Cornelia Naumann was opened from July 24th. - 25.10.2018 shown in the Munich trade union building. [12]
In 2019, the Sarah-Sonja-Lerch-Weg in Munich-Neuperlach was named after her.