Some 52 years after her death, Charlotte Landau-Mühsam was finally honored last week by her birthplace, Lübeck, in northern Germany, as one of the leading figures of the fight for women’s rights in pre-World War II Germany.
Born in 1881 to a well-off Jewish family, married to a Zionist lawyer, Leo Landau, and a mother to three, Charlotte dedicated her life to promoting women’s rights through her work in the League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund) and later as a member and elected local parliamentarian of the left-liberal German Democratic Party.
Elected to Lübeck’s parliament in 1919, Charlotte was one of the first women parliamentarians in Germany and the first woman and Jew elected to Lübeck’s parliament.
Charlotte and her family fled Germany shortly after Adolf Hitler was nominated as chancellor on January 30, 1933. The family settled down in Haifa, where Charlotte died in 1972 at the age of 91.
At the initiative of the conservative Christian-Democratic Party at the Council of Lübeck, the square of Lübeck’s City Hall was named in an official ceremony after Charlotte Landau-Mühsam. The next day, six Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Stones”) with the names of the members of the Landau family, who fled to Haifa, were placed outside the villa in which the family had lived before leaving Germany.
The decision to name the city hall square was passed despite surprising opposition coming from the representatives of the Social-Democratic Party (SPD). The Social-Democrats suggested naming the square after a non-Jewish woman politician, Ingeborg Sommer, who represented their party in city hall and presided over it during the ’70s and ’80s. While the conservatives also saw in their initiative a way of expressing solidarity with Israel in its current existential fight, the social-democrats wanted to avoid such a political gesture.
Danny Joel, one of Charlotte’s eight grandchildren, manages the family’s archives since the death of his parents.
“I started reading the documents and dived into the family’s history. That’s how I got to know the story of my grandmother, who was a very impressive woman,” Joel told The Jerusalem Post.
“She kept on speaking German after moving to Haifa, while I grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home. My father, who established the public libraries in Israel in order to spread the usage of Hebrew in Israel, insisted that we should talk in Hebrew. He came from Lübeck, too, and chose to abandon the German culture willingly for the Hebrew one. So, my communication with my grandmother was very limited. She was a warm but authoritative and distant woman. She spent much time in painting and was a close friend of the famous German Jewish painter Hermann Struck, who immigrated to Haifa already in 1922.
“Two years ago I visited Lübeck with two of my daughters and met with the lady who is responsible for the Stumbling Stones project there,” recalled 78-year-old Joel, a former agricultural researcher of Israel’s Volcani Center. “Lübeck had a very active and important Jewish community. She brought up the idea of placing such memory stones in front of the family’s last house in Lübeck. A year later I was informed that the stones would be placed on Charlotte’s 143th birthday on September 20.
“The initiative to call the square after her was put forward by the Christian-Democrats later on, in October 2023, in light of the mounting antisemitism in Germany. The party’s leading female candidates even used her name as an election slogan, which said ‘We are Charlotte,’ as part of the campaign to rename the city hall´s square.
“However, it was mentioned in the official documents that Charlotte emigrated from Germany, despite the fact that it was not emigration but an escape. Her husband’s law office was closed down by the Nazis on April 1, 1933. A few days later they left Germany.
“They visited Israel in the ’20s and bought a plot, but as a rich family they left most of their possessions behind and had a very modest life until they started getting compensation from Germany.”
Joel decided not to participate at the memorial events in Lübeck, as he is very critical of Germany’s positions regarding past and present. He wasn’t sure the organizers would appreciate what he had to say. The family was represented by one of Charlotte’s Israeli great-grandchildren, 37-year-old Mor Day Hannani, owner of Progressive Classics publishing house.
“Charlotte died 15 years before I was born,” he told the Post. “Discovering her huge work for women makes me feel that, as a feminist, I am following in her steps a few generations behind her. She fought, among other things, for equal salaries for men and women. We are still fighting for it. I arrived in Lübeck for the first time in my life not only as a relative but as a feminist. With the books I publish, I transform children’s stories into a feminist version: the princess does not kiss the frog; Robin Hood is actually a woman, who is disguised as a man.
“But it was a very emotional moment as an Israeli. Lübeck is not far away from Malmö, where a few months ago the Israeli representative to the Eurovision [Song Contest] had to hide herself because of the hate against her being Israeli. And here I am surrounded with warmth and love as an Israeli in Germany. It filled me with a lot of optimism.”
Hundreds of kilometers away
SOME 320 KM. away from Lübeck, Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor laid four Stumbling Stones in front of the last house in which his father’s family lived in Berlin before fleeing Germany in 1933 and moving to Israel. On the stones are engraved the names of Prosor´s grandparents Elfriede and Berthold Proskauer, father Ulrich and aunt Liselotte. Prosor’s family settled down in Haifa, too.
The ceremony, in the presence of the president of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas of the SPD, and Günther Demning, the German artist who founded the Stumbling Stones project 34 years ago, was planned to take place on October 8 last year, 90 years after Prosor’s family left Germany, but was postponed due to the Hamas massacre in Israel.
“Postponing this ceremony charged this special event for me with a national meaning, not only personal,” said Prosor. “While Israel’s citizens are under constant fire, I stand today in Germany as the ambassador of the national state of the Jewish people, which is fighting for its existence but unfortunately for its right to defend itself as well.
“If the four members of my family would have not escaped in 1933, maybe another wording would be engraved on these stones. Down this street there are stones with the names of persons who were taken from their home in 1942, expelled, and murdered. That is what differentiates my family’s stones from so many others.
“With every Stumbling Stone we bring back names to people and rescue them from forgetfulness. Every name is a small victory.
“The four stones of the Proskauer family tell the story of fear, sorrow, loss, and life left behind. But they also tell the story of a successful escape. They tell the story of building a new life and building the renewed State of Israel 76 years ago.”