Ella Kay (16 December 1895 – 3 February 1988) was a Berlin city politician (SPD) with a particular interest in workers' welfare and youth matters.
[1] The apprenticeship remained uncompleted, however: after her father died she was obliged immediately to find factory work in order to provide financial support for the family.
[2] She herself had joined the textile workers' trades union in 1917,[6] and towards the end of 1919, following her father's example, she became a member of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands / SPD).
[7] For many commentators the early 1920s in Germany were dominated by political unrest driven by economic austerity and hunger, topped off by currency collapse, but there were also some positive developments.
[2] During this time a new approach to youth welfare work was developed in Prenzlauer Berg, in response to the intensifying impoverishment and surging unemployment that took hold in Germany as the Great Depression spread across from the west.
Thanks to a recent dispensation by the Prussian minister for public welfare the training courses at the academy, originally intended only for male social work students, could now also be made available to women.
Interviewed decades later, Ella Kay shared her assessment that the high levels of unemployment had been "manufactured" in order to intimidate the workers.
In January 1933 the National Socialists exploited the political deadlock to take power, and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
One egregious piece of legislation, passed by the government on 7 April 1933, was the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, shortened to Berufsbeamtengesetz (literally, "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service") which was designed to remove from public office people who might be considered Jewish or anti-Nazi.
In Prenzlauer Berg 40 senior public officials, 210 local government employees and 31 "blue collar" workers were sent into retirement or otherwise removed from their jobs for reasons of politics or race.
The party responded with a rapid increase in the membership of Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, an organisation originally set up in 1924 as a response to Freikorps activism and widespread civil unrest, with the stated goal of defending parliamentary democracy against "subversion and extremism".
Friends and professional/political comrades from before 1933 with whom she managed to sustain some level of contact included Minna Todenhagen, Otto Ostrowski and Erna Maraun.
[6] Nevertheless, as a known member of the outlawed SPD, Kay was kept under increasingly effective surveillance, and unannounced visits, house searches and interrogations from the security services were not infrequent.
[6] Some sources describe it as Ella Kay's "hiding place", and although it was not entirely spared from security service house searches, these do seem to have been less frequent and less intrusive than they had been in her apartment in the city suburb.
[6] It is known that some of the resistance activists among her friends and contacts were involved in hiding Jews in order to preserve them from the extermination camps, which supportse inference that Kay was similarly engaged.
Either way, because of the requirement that the warrant be delivered "in person", it was not executed either then nor, thanks to the gathering chaos that descended on administrative structures in Germany during the final months of the war, subsequently.
[6] Relatively few details survive as to of how Kay lived during those years, but "casual meetings in small groups" at which one of the friends could pass on information discovered by listening (illegally) to foreign radio stations meant that she was not totally unaware of the unfolding of the war and other internationally reported events.
The first thing Ella Kay did on returning to Prenzlauer Berg was to seek out former Social Democratic comrades who had held political office in the municipality before 1933.
Kay later told an interviewer that if there was something to celebrate, then those participating would first need to get hold of a pan of fat in order that a banquet of fried potato peelings might be prepared.
[13] During April 1946 a meeting, which came to be known as the "Unification Congress", was held at the Admiralspalast (normally an entertainment venue), attended by delegates from both the SPD and the Communist Party.
However SPD delegates from the western sector, who had already held their own congress on the same issue two weeks earlier, stayed away, believing that the party merger idea had already been rejected.
The "Unification Congress" on 21/22 April 1946 unanimously endorsed the party merger, although in reality their decision had no effect in Germany other than in the Soviet occupation zone.
The three "western" occupation zones had already come together, five months earlier and been relaunched as the US-sponsored German Federal Republic (West Germany).
In 1949 Kay took on the leadership of the city's Central Youth Office, in an administrative post which meant that her direct boss was the mayor, at this time Ernst Reuter.
On 21 January 1955 Ella Kay was appointed West Berlin's first Senator for Youth and Sport,[14] remaining in office till her retirement on 6 December 1962.