Wolfstein, Rosie

Rosie Wolfstein was born in the family of Jewish merchant Samuel Wolfstein and his wife Clara, nee Adler. Rosie studied at the Witten City Lyceum and subsequently worked as an employee. In 1907, Wolfstein joined the Workers' Union for Women and Girls in Hagen, in 1908 - in the SPD, and in 1910 - in the free trade union of employees. In the same year, Wolfstein met and became friends with Rosa Luxemburg, and in 1912–1913 she studied at her at the imperial party school of the SPD in Berlin. With the beginning of the First World War, Wolfstein strongly opposed the policy of civil peace in the SPD and became part of the " Union of Spartak " in Duisburg . During the war she was repeatedly arrested. In 1916, she took part in the work of an illegal youth conference in Jena and in 1917, as a representative of the “Union of Spartak”, was a delegate to the founding congress of the NCSDP in Gotha . In the November revolution of 1918, Wolfstein was elected to the council of workers 'and soldiers' deputies in Düsseldorf. Wolfstein, of small stature, possessed a great oratorical talent and passed on to the Kaiser police file as a “dangerous agitator.” The Düsseldorf group "Union of Spartak" delegated Wolfstein to the founding congress of the KPD in 1918. In 1920, she was a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd and met with V.I. Lenin .

After the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, her heirs handed over to Rosie Wolfstein her archive, on which she worked with her husband Paul Froelich . Biography “Rosa Luxemburg. Thoughts and deeds "saw the light in 1939 in Paris. The life of Rosa Luxemburg remained an important theme in the work of Wolfstein throughout her life. In 1985, Rosie Wolfstein consulted Margaret von Trotta on the set of the film “Rosa Luxemburg”.

In 1921–1924, Wolfstein was elected to the Prussian Landtag from the United Communist Party of Germany and held the position of deputy chairman of the faction there. In 1921–1923, Wolfstein was on the board of the party and its organizing bureau, which was responsible for holding party congresses. In 1924, in protest against the “ultra-right” leadership of the KPG, led by Ruth Fischer and Arkady Maslov, Wolfstein resigned from all posts and with Paul Froelich engaged in publishing the works of Rosa Luxemburg, and also worked as an editor at the publishing house Malik-Verlag. In early 1929, for deviating from the party, the party was excluded from the KPD and joined the Communist Party - the opposition . Together with Paul Froelich , Jacob Walcher and August Enderle , they belonged to the party minority, which in the spring of 1932 passed to the Socialist Workers Party of Germany , to its left revolutionary wing, which in the spring of 1933 came to the leadership of the party. In the SPD, Wolfstein met Willy Brandt , their friendship remained until the 1980s, when Brandt visited Wolfstein in a nursing home.

After the national socialists came to power in 1933, Wolfstein left first to Brussels , then moved to Paris , where she was a member of the underground administration of the SRPG and published her works under the pseudonym Martha Koch. Since the beginning of World War II, she was interned in France. In 1941, she was able to emigrate to the USA through Lisbon and Martinique together with Fröhlich, thanks to the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee of Varian Fry . In the United States, Wolfstein has worked in New York in various charitable organizations since 1945. In 1948, she officially married Fröhlich. In 1951, Wolfstein returned to Frankfurt and joined the SPD, although, like Paul Fröhlich, she still held leftist views and advocated a “third way” which, in certain historical circumstances, could have been the SPD. She also joined the union IG Druck und Papier, where she was involved in the creation of the German Union of Journalists. After the death of Paul Frohlich in 1953, he managed his archive and edited some of his works. Rosie Wolfstein is buried at the Frankfurt main cemetery .

• Sie wollte und konnte nie etwas Halbes tun. Die Sozialistin Rosi Wolfstein-Frölich 1914 bis 1924. Hrsg. Rosi-Wolfstein-Gesellschaft Witten, bearbeit von Frank Ahland and Beate Brunner, Witten: Eigenverlag 1995, ISBN 3-930031-01-9
• Hermann Weber : Rosi Wolfstein: Eine zweite Rosa Luxemburg. In: Wittener. Biografische Porträts. Hrsg. Frank Ahland und Matthias Dudde in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Stadtarchiv Witten, Witten: Ruhrstadt-Verlag 2000, ISBN 3-935382-02-2
• Riccardo Altieri: Paul Frölich, American Exile, and Communist Discourse, Russian Communist History , Vol. 17 (2018) 2, pp. 220-231 .

• Wolfstein, Rosie in the German National Library .
• Biography (English)
• Biography (German)