Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich (1901–1979)

Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, née Elisabeth Charlotte Henrich, was born in Munich, Germany. Her parents were Marie (Bernbeck) and Rudolf Henrich, a liberal-leaning lawyer. In 1907, the family moved to Stuttgart, where Liselotte first attended school, and in 1913 they relocated to Berlin. She decided at a young age to become a writer and historian. In 1921, she passed her school final exams (Abitur) and went to Berlin to study economics, ancient history, law, and philosophy at the Friederich-Wilhelms-Universität (as Humboldt University was then known). She received her doctorate "magna cum laude" in 1925 and wanted to go on to study for the habilitation (higher ed teaching qualification), which would have opened up a career as a university professor, but the inflation of the 1920s had devastated her family's finances. She worked in Berlin as a government statistician between 1928 and 1945. In 1938, Welskopf-Henrich began to participate in resistance activity, which led her to the Confessing Church. As the realities of the Holocaust became apparent, she supported persecuted Jews and concentration camp inmates with food and medicines. In 1944, she was interrogated by the Gestapo but not arrested. One victim of Nazi persecution whom she was able to hide from the authorities in her Berlin apartment during 1944-1945 was a Communist named Rudolf Welskopf, whom she would marry in 1946. Although the precise nature and extent of her resistance activities remain unclear, some details were summarized in her 1953 autobiographical novel Jan und Jutta, After World War II ended in May 1945, a large region surrounding Berlin became the Soviet occupation zone. She remained in what would later become known as East Berlin. Between May 1945 and July 1946 Welskopf-Henrich worked as a senior secretary with the city administration, based at Berlin-Charlottenburg. In 1946-1947 she took on a leadership position with a building materials organization. Through the immediate postwar years. much of her writing focused on questions involving economic planning. In 1946 she joined the German Communist Party (KPD). The Welskopf-Henrichs had a son in 1948. The following year, she applied to teach a course in ancient history at the Humboldt University of Berlin and was accepted. Between 1952 and 1960, she worked as a research assistant at the Humboldt, and supervised lectures. She finally received her habilitation in 1959 with a dissertation on Leisure as a Problem in the Lives and Thoughts of the Hellenes, from Homer to Aristotle. In 1960, she was named a lecturer at Humboldt University and later that year, a professor in ancient history. A year later, she became the head of the Ancient History Department at the Humboldt's General Historical Institute. In 1964 she became the first woman to be elected a full member of the German Academy of Sciences. Welskopf-Henrich's academic standing enabled her to travel abroad. As her novels and nonfiction works became more popular at home and her international reputation grew. she was able to travel beyond the confines of Soviet-sponsored countries. Between 1963 and 1974, she undertook a succession of trips to the USA and Canada in order to study the lives and traditions of the Dakota Native Americans. After her retirement in 1968 Welskopf-Henrich launched herself into a new project, a study of the Greek polis. She funded it herself and worked on with support from 60 academics from both East and West Germany, along with researchers from other countries. The result was published in four volumes in 1974 as Die Hellenistische Polis – Krise – Wandlung – Wirkung (The Hellenistic Polis - Crisis - Transformation - Functioning). She followed up with an even more ambitious project, classifying social classes in ancient Greece, using inputs from around 100 contributors from 40 countries. That book appeared posthumously in seven volumes published between 1981 and 1985.