German journalist, writer and left-wing political activist, known for her 1946 book Aus der Tiefe rufe ich, a semi-autobiographical novel about the lives of Jewish people in Berlin between 1938 and 1943, swinging between resignation and hope along the route to annihilation. A new edition of the book, edited by Monika Melchert, was published in 2004.
After finishing secondary school she came into contact with the circle of Berlin-based expressionist poets around Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler and, most notably, Franz Pfemfert. Fritz Mierau would later describe her as “the soul and muse of the little circle”. Pfemert edited a left-wing political and literary magazine called Die Aktion: Cläre Otto got to know his fellow contributors to Die Aktion, among them the restless anarchist poet Franz Jung whom she would later marry and under whose shadow, according to some evaluations, she would spend much of her life. However, her first marriage was to another Die Aktion contributor, the writer and political activist Richard Oehring: the two of them were divorced after two years, in 1917.
During the war she worked as a medical assistant at the Moabit Hospital in Berlin between 1915 and 1916. In 1916 she obtained a position as press agency secretary, work with which she continued till 1921. During the revolutionary period that followed the war she was contributing to the journal Russische Korrespondenz, and she was also working as a secretary for the Communist Workers’ Party, a breakaway grouping founded in April 1920 by Franz Jung and others.
Franz and Cläre managed to cross into Denmark at the end of August 1921, and then obtained a passage to the Soviet Union on a freight steamer; the pair settled in Moscow. Cläre obtained work as a secretary in the Moscow office of the Comintern Central Committee. After this she helped with reconstruction within the framework of Workers International Relief, and was involved in setting up orphanages.
She returned to Germany at the end of 1923 with Franz Jung and in 1924 (or 1928) they were married. Jung lowered his political profile and both of them found work in press agency and publishing work. Between 1924 and 1927 she was working for a literary and political publisher in Berlin.
In January 1933, the NSDAP (Nazi Party) took power, which was followed by a rapid retreat from democracy in favour of one-party government. From 1933 Cläre Jung was combining her publishing work with (now illegal) anti-Nazi activism, working with Harro Schulze-Boysen and others to help Jewish and political victims of government oppression, and producing press releases on behalf of non-Nazi, illegal news services. In 1937, Franz and Cläre Jung were divorced when Franz had to escape to Switzerland.
The end of the war in May 1945 put an end to the Nazi regime and Cläre Jung lost no time in joining the Communist Party and Socialist alliances. Jung obtained a job as a literary, cultural and popular education editor with Berliner Rundfunk. In 1952, she took a job as Party Secretary and teacher at the National Ballet Academy in Berlin. She left the ballet school position in 1955, now working as a freelance writer, making contributions to East German newspapers and magazines.
Cläre Jung died on 25 March 1981, aged 89, in East Berlin. Her memoir, Paradiesvögel (Birds of paradise), appeared posthumously in 1987.
Link to Wikipedia biography