The argument nevertheless persists, underpinned by the lack of consensus over the nature and extent of Faßhauer's involvement in a series of politically related terrorist explosions, in connection with which she was several times arrested between 1920 and 1924.
[4][5] Minna Nikolai was born into a working-class family in Bleckendorf [de] (as Egeln-Nord was known before 1950), a village in the flat countryside to the south of Magdeburg.
[2][6] Factory work was significantly better paid, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, than any of the jobs available in the German countryside, and many rural workers were drawn to the cities as a result.
Nikolai was 18 when she relocated to nearby Braunschweig in search of work and immediately found it, initially in domestic service and later in a canning factory [de].
At the end of 1907 the "Bildungsverein jugendlicher Arbeiter" ("Young Workers' Educational Association") was inaugurated in Braunschweig as an SPD youth wing.
Other founder members who later achieved prominence as political or resistance activists included Fritz Benke [de] and Otto Grotewohl.
In 1908 she attended the party's fifth Women's Conference which was held, that year, at Nuremberg under the joint presidency of Luise Zietz and the formidable Clara Zetkin.
She delivered talks on these themes and took frequent opportunities to raise them at party meetings, for example in her address the first Wolfenbüttel Women's Day on 2 March 1913.
The commission was charged with monitoring compliance with the 1904 Child Protection Regulations, and other measures intended to support the health and cultural well-being of children.
[13][16] During the war years Minna Faßhauer sustained contact with August Merges who would emerged in November 1918 as the president of the revolutionary "Socialist Republic of Braunschweig [de]".
Minna Faßhauer could see no merit in the so-called "Burgfriedenspolitik" whereby leading figures in the SPD and in the trades unions aligned to it agreed to a parliamentary truce in support of a traditional vision of "Patriotism".
The move was contentious from the outset: Faßhauer was drawn increasingly towards the anti-war policies and the socialist ideas represented by Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht.
Minna Faßhauer, opposed to the war, was one of those who became a member of the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD).
They called for a one-party USPD state government and, in response to a proposal by Sepp Oerter who had arrived back from Leipzig two days earlier, unanimously proclaimed/selected August Merges, to be its president.
[17][20] The revolutionaries drew much of their inspiration from the success of the so-called Petrograd October Revolution of the previous year, even if the finer points of Leninist constitutional theory had yet to become apparent.
[25] Between 1920 and 1924 Faßhauer was repeatedly arrested in connection with "terrorist actions against churches and civil (or bourgeois) institutions", and on several occasions she found herself before the courts.
[1] On 16 July 1921 she was ordered by a court to pay a 300 Mark fine and sentenced to four months in prison for a violation of the Disarmament Act of 5 August 1920.
It was alleged that on 17 September 1920 she had participated in a "public communist meeting" at Nordhausen, and on that occasion stated that the workers would have to be idiots to lay down their weapons while the bourgeoisie held on to theirs.
During the course of July 1921, with governance over the Free State of Braunschweig again in the hands of a(nother) SPD/USPD coalition administration under Sepp Oerter, the city experienced several "politically motivated explosives attacks".
[26] Targets included the Braunschweig Tennis and Hockey facilities in the "Bürgerpark", the Garrison Church between the "Stadtpark" and the "Prinz Albrecht Park" and the home of Ernst Lekebusch, a major land owner in the region.
[26][27] Another was the laboratory of Dr. Paul Nehring, possibly in account of his contributions to the justice system locally as a "court chemistry expert" ("Gerichtschemiker").
[28] On 6 September 1921 Faßhauer was one of a number of suspects arrested and then eventually charged "having been involved in procuring dynamite" in connection with the explosions two months earlier.
That would indicate that by the time she was convicted and sentenced, she had already spent a considerable amount of time - albeit not as much as nine months - in pre-trial detention, and the warrant for her to serve the months remaining following sentencing was rescinded by the court "having regard to then long period of detention during the investigation", and possibly reflecting some unease on the part of the justice officials involved as to the reliability of the trial verdict.
From 1946 her name began to appear on the party candidate list for local government elections, but Braunschweig had ended up in the British occupation zone.
At the time no comprehensive biographical record of Faßhauer's life was in the public domain: on 13 November 2012 the "Institute for Braunschweig Regional History" at the "Technical University of Braunschweig", under the directorship of Gerd Biegel, was mandated to compile a biographical report for submission to the council, in order that they might reach a properly informed decision on the matter.
There could be no question of discussing an honour for Faßhauer in the context whereby this would make her a potential role model, given the still unclear nature and extent of her "entanglements" in the 1921 bomb attacks experienced in Braunschweig during 1921.
[37] On 28 September 2013 there was a vote of the council on the original proposal from the "Die Linke" ("the Left") party group that Minna Faßhauer should be appropriately honoured by the city.
[38] Grounds reported for the failure of the proposal to gain traction with the council were again Faßhauer's "problematic" relationship with parliamentary democracy and her still "unclarified involvement" in the explosives attacks of 1921.
[39] The SPD group then came up with a new proposal, providing that a number of historical Braunschweig personalities from the time of the "November Revolution" and the "Weimar" years, tight up till the National Socialist take-over, might deserve a "critical appreciation" in the context of the continuing controversy over how and whether to honour Minna Faßhauer.
[4][41] A slightly unconventional tribute was premiered in November 2014 in the form of "Minna - a life in Braunschweig", a musical revue staged at the "Brunsviga" arts, communications and performance venue.