German translator and resistance fighter against National Socialism (Nazism) who married the communist writer Hans Marchwitza.
After marrying Rudolf Schottlaender in September 1922, Hilde Schottlaender moved to Berlin with her husband and had two children. The marriage lasted until December 1926; the divorce took place in 1927.
In July 1933, according to Nazi racial law, she was dismissed from her job in the Civil Service. She then worked for the Jewish career counselling centre in Hamburg. A political and social activist, she joined a resistance group led by Hans Westermann. She provided the group with her apartment as a meeting place for discussions and study of the foreign press. Resistance activities ended with the arrest of leading figures in March 1935, including Hilde Schottlaender. The court imposed a two-year prison sentence on her in October 1935 on the basis of alleged “preparation for a treasonable enterprise”. Schottlaender spent the detention at the Lübeck-Lauerhof Women’s Prison.
After she had served her prison sentence, she fled the German Reich, travelling to Holland in August 1937, where her children were staying, and then to the USA. In New York, she worked from 1937 to 1939 as editorial secretary for the German-language weekly newspaper Deutsches Volksecho. From 1939 to 1942 she did office work and became involved as a social worker for several relief organizations serving Jewish emigrants. Meanwhile, from 1939 to 1941 she wrote several contributions to social policy issues that appeared in the column “Problems of Everyday Life” of the newspaper Aufbau.
In 1945 she married the communist writer Hans Marchwitza and returned to Germany after the end of the Second World War, in 1946. The couple initially lived in Stuttgart, moved in 1947 to Potsdam and in 1950 on to Prague, where Hans Marchwitza took over as a cultural attaché of the GDR. Hilde Marchwitza led the press office of the Diplomatic Mission there and assisted her husband in his work as a writer. In the GDR, she translated several works.
Hilde Marchwitza died on 8 September 1961 in Berlin, aged 61.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)