Klara Marie Fassbinder (1890-1974) and Women's Peace Activities in the 1950s and 1960s

Klara Marie Fassbinder was a radical pacifist in the Cold War era. Her understanding of pacifism was founded on her religious views, according to which pacifism, economic and social reorganization, and Catholicism belonged together. This perspective brought her into conflict with representatives of the Catholic church. She strongly believed that the desire for peace in both the East and the West could overcome the different ideologies, which is why she courageously traveled the world to promulgate her message. Due to women's perceived natural role as mothers, they, in Fassbinder's opinion, were predestined to become involved in peace activism and avert the worst effects of patriarchal strategies. She led an independent life, committed to shaping policymaking and thus heralding a different reality.

"An unusual woman who never fit into a particular category . . ."

Klara Marie Fassbinder was born in Trier, Germany, on 15 February 1890 as the fifth of seven children. In 1896, her family moved to Brühl near Bonn, where her father, an elementary school teacher, had taken on a position as a supervisor of teacher training and schools inspector. Although scholars have described Fassbinder's parental home as Catholic, patriotic, and imperialistic, her parents raised their children to be openminded about social and political issues. ¹

In contrast to most middle-class daughters of the time, Fassbinder's mother did not rear her to become the "marrying kind"; rather she wanted her to "learn something respectable and be able to stand on her own two feet." ² She attended the teacher training college in Koblenz, Germany, and became an educator, one of the few professions open to middle-class women at the time. After returning to school in Münster to obtain her Abitur (upper secondary leaving certificate) in the spring of 1913, she became one of the first female students to matriculate at the University of Bonn. In her memoirs, she described her ambivalence. On the one hand, she was aware of the difficulty of having to hold her own ground against a male-dominated institution still skeptical of women who studied. ³ On the other hand, she was convinced that her "thirst for the light of knowledge, for enlightenment" could only be satisfied at a university. ⁴

As her knowledge grew, Fassbinder would eventually be forced to recognize many of her earlier ideas as idealistic. She was disappointed by the deep rift that developed in the hierarchical relationship between male lecturers and students. She was also disappointed by the tremendous patriarchal "snobbery" of academic circles who praised the trained reason of the women who were officially admitted to universities beginning in 1908, while at the same time declaring those women whose university education enabled them to earn an independent livelihood no longer socially acceptable. ⁵ Although she was hardly familiar with "women's issues" at the time, she detested both the insinuation that women were willing to subordinate themselves to the desires of men as well as the assumption that the highest goal of every "normal" girl was marriage. ⁶

Like many women students of her generation, the patronizing attitude of many men as well as the fact that she had made "inspiring discoveries with other women" encouraged Fassbinder to bond more closely with her "comrades-in-gender." ⁷ They founded a female student association, Hochwart (The High Guardian). Although a member of the Association of Catholic German Women Teachers and the Catholic German Women's Association since 1909, she considered demands for women's greater political participation to be unwarranted. She was not interested in the suffragist struggle for the right to vote. "Why?" she asked. "Weren't German men doing it right in this world full of treacherous enemies?" For Fassbinder, it was enough that women were able to obtain university educations and participate in social...