Schmitt-Maaß, Hedwig

Publicist, local politician

Born: 31.01.1918 in Dorndorf (Westerwald)

died: 01.08.1983 in Wiesbaden

The daughter of the SPD politician and director of the Wiesbaden adult education center, Johannes Maaß, left grammar school in the spring of 1933 after her father was banned from working and gave up her plans to study in view of the political situation. After marrying the chemist Dr. Bernhard Schmitt in 1938, she went to Heidelberg, where she enrolled as a guest student at the university.

Hedwig Schmitt-Maaß returned to Wiesbaden in 1945 and supported her father in rebuilding the SPD until she herself became a member of the city council for the first time in 1948 and remained a member until she moved to Bonn in 1959. She was one of the few women to become a member of the city parliament after the Second World War. As a young local politician, she was very interested in women's politics and was involved in the board of the non-party women's committee, which later became the non-party women's association, and was a member of the board of the SPD women's group and the Young Socialists.

At the same time, her extensive journalistic activities unfolded. Her publications focused on political education, the social situation of women and coming to terms with the National Socialist era. After a three-month study trip to the USA in 1949, she worked as an assistant to the American women's advisor, Betsy Knapp, with whom she founded the "Büro für Frauenfragen" (later Büro für Staatsbürgerliche Frauenarbeit e.V.) in Wiesbaden, a unique institution in Germany. Between 1954-58, she was a consultant for political youth and adult education at the later Hessian State Center for Political Education and in 1958 moved to the Bonn party executive of the SPD under Erich Ollenhauer and Herbert Wehner as a women's consultant. In 1963, the Hessian Minister for Education and Public Education, Ernst Schütte, brought her back to Wiesbaden as a press officer, where she later worked under his successors until her retirement in 1978. From 1968 to 1972, she was once again a member of the Wiesbaden City Council.

Influenced by her father's persecution and her own experiences during the Nazi era, she became particularly interested in literature on National Socialism in the mid-1960s and corresponded with writers and survivors of the Holocaust, Jean Améry, Hermann Langbein and Primo Levi, who dedicated a section to her in his book "Die Untergegangenen und Geretteten". Her grave is located in Wiesbaden's Südfriedhof cemetery.