For months, no, for years the young woman had feared that Richard would disappear forever – in the Gestapo cellars or in emigration. In 1939 there was growing concern that he might commit suicide. She hadn’t been able to get him to drive the eight-week-old child out together. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the increasing hopelessness of the common will to survive, they had witnessed it. But now the child could not tear him out of the depression either. The fact that it was called Ricarda – the feminine form of Richard – already reflected the premonition that it would have to replace Richard one day.
Because children are supposed to get fresh air every day, Änne walked alone with the pram for a little anxiously across the Ku’damm. When she returned, she found the front door open and saw Richard’s feet dangling over the bathtub.
She cannot recover from the shock for a long time and is sent to a psychiatric ward. And no sooner does she return to her sisterhood than she overtakes what the Nazis forced on those who threatened “public health”. Änne was sterilized not only because of her psychological fragility, but also because of her connection to communist city councilor Dr. Richard Schmincke.
After the war, many children lacked their fathers. Ricarda was no exception. But her father was neither killed nor killed by the Nazis. Why he had given himself to death, Änne and abandoned her, the newborn, remained one of the probing questions. Some of Richard’s estate did not quite fit into the modest abode of his grandparents in Rudolstadt, Thuringia, where Änne stayed with the child: some elegant furniture, silver cutlery, two suitcases with foreign labels. One full of souvenirs from China that charmed the girl.
The social medicine specialist Schmincke only received public recognition posthumously. When a new stage in child and maternal protection was reached in the GDR, or when the “birth control pill” was made generally available in 1968 and when the woman was responsible for abortion in 1972, Änne told her daughter: “Richard always fought for that.” Streets and a medical college bore his name. The Brecht student Ernst Schumacher composed a recitation about him, which was performed in 1977 in the Apollo Hall of the State Opera with Brecht’s son-in-law Ekkehard Schall. That meant little to mother and daughter. Trapped in personal trauma, they did not want to speak to anyone about Richard Schmincke.
This shyness became a shock “when in the happy days of German reunification the term ‘communist’ became more and more common and again came close to the ‘criminal’,” as Ricarda Bethke writes about her father in her search for clues. In 2008 the daughter hit a newspaper article with the headline “The machinations of Dr. Schmincke ”, which meant his activity as the elected head of the health department in Berlin-Neukölln from 1927 to 1933.
There he had set up a number of social institutions and sexual counseling. Despite their stoutness and bourgeois habitus, Neukölln’s proletarians trusted their city council. As a doctor, he took care of those who had been beaten by the Nazis. Often he also had to issue death certificates for them. His “machinations” now also included his 1925 – 1927 often unsuccessful attempts as a member of the state parliament of the KPD in Saxony to enforce social welfare such as increasing unemployment benefits or rejecting the reintroduction of the ten-hour day. Suddenly it turned out to be unforgivable that Schmincke had been to the Soviet Union several times, where he inspected the first successes in social protection for mothers and children. And it was completely unacceptable that he traveled to China and Japan on behalf of the Comintern from 1924 to 1925, where he did not appear as a secret agent and under real names. He was part of the medical team of the terminally ill Sun Yat-sen.
Already with the book published by S. Fischer in 2001 The different red flag Ricarda Bethke had shown that she did not belong to the undoubtedly believing left in the GDR. And now she did not accept that all of the left anti-fascism was sent to the Orcus. Researching what really drove Richard Schmincke became a necessity for her.
In addition to two bags full of letters and documents that she found in her mother’s closet, she consulted numerous sources from archives and libraries. The book now published Red heritage masters the difficult interweaving of personal concern with the world historical horizon. In doing so, none of the fashionable auto-fictions arise. Unexplained and contradicting issues are not smoothed out. The author could not really understand why the bathing and fashion doctor Schmincke, who ran profitable practices not only in Germany but also in Rapallo after the First World War, became a communist. And she found hardly any evidence as to why his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was so clouded that he strictly rejected the idea brought to him to emigrate there. Again and again Bethke dares to write: “I don’t know.”
Chased from office in 1933
The reader is compensated with a lot of knowledge that was catapulted out of the general historical consciousness. It is hardly known that important socio-medical achievements of the Weimar Republic were demanded and in some cases implemented, especially by leftists from the KPD and SPD, before the Nazis abolished them again. Nor is it known that the Nazis immediately decreed occupational restrictions not only for Jews, but also for communists in high positions. Schmincke was chased out of office and arrested in 1933. Once released, he lost his license as a statutory health insurance doctor. And he was so politically branded that he was no longer able to set up a profitable private practice. He was increasingly threatened physically. And in 1939, when his license to practice medicine was withdrawn, he was finally banned from working on “public health”.
This busy and troubled man was also the single father of a difficult boy who could neither handle his mother’s departure nor the fact that Richard had been living with Änne, 33 years his junior, since 1929. The daughter questions this very patriarchal connection again and again. Änne was too poor and too illiterate for Richard’s family. But he had recognized her cleverness and taken a liking to her cheerful demeanor. He energetically supported her education and training. She didn’t need to be interested in housekeeping. Richard could cook a roast goose. According to her sister Lotte, although he always played the teacher, he was not an ossified patriarch.
The book confirms that the patriarchal character of cross-class love relationships diminished during the Weimar period because a radical democratic perspective seemed to open up. The woman striving for emancipation did not only come from the bourgeoisie. The Weimar Republic offered proletarian girls with a hunger for education, aesthetics and personal independence opportunities to develop. The fascination that Änne exerted on the citizen Schmincke is comparable to that of Bertolt Brecht for Margarete Steffin. Or with the fascination that the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatts, Theodor Wolff, met his secretary Ilse Stöbe. Wolff continued her in his exile novel, which Weidle had just published The swimmer a great monument. He too was committed to the education and qualification of the esteemed young woman. And although he was not a communist, he avoided driving out of Use class consciousness. These gentlemen understood that it was important in turning the world upside down.
Red Heritage: Looking for Richard Schmincke, my father Ricarda Bethke Past Publishing 2021, 300 pages, € 20
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