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  • Jutta Schwarzkopf, 1953–2016
  • Logie Barrow

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Fig. 1.

Jutta Schwarzkopf at conference on ‘Political Networkers: Women's International Co-operation 1830–1960’, Bremen 2005. Photo Anne Summers.

Jutta’s death dumbfounded almost all friends and acquaintances: she had been keeping her multiple myeloma (a bone-marrow cancer that unexpectedly accelerated) as good as secret from all but the few friends who knew of her sudden confinement to a wheelchair in late 2015. She had also, for example, been refereeing an article a mere fortnight earlier.

Her parents originally moved, or were expelled, from Poznan/Posen. As Germans under Polish rule from 1919, they were bilingual and subject to many temptations once the Nazis arrived in 1939, perhaps all the more as her mother, Hildegard Hettmer, had for some years been a secretary at the German consulate. There, as elsewhere till far later, such a job was too ‘good’ to lose because of the marriage bar. The sole political story Jutta had about either of them was that her mother had dithered when a Gestapo man asked her to become an informant. Her refusal had not taken long, [End Page 295] though. One reason was that he had firmly kept his feet on his office desk throughout their conversation: very low upbringing! The other was that the first target he wanted her to spy on was not only Polish (of course), but a priest: theologically worrying for a Catholic. Perhaps her parents and grandparents had known of Bismarckian persecution of Catholics, not least in the Posen archdiocese, during the late nineteenth century. As refugees (separately) with about 10,000,000 other ethnic Germans around 1945, Jutta’s parents began in Berlin before moving to Hanover. There they married, having been friends since before the War. She was forty-two years old when she had Jutta, her sole baby. Whatever Mrs and Mr Schwarzkopf’s opinions on the East German regime, her father always insisted that communist economic methods were ‘far more rational’. In Jutta’s presence, her parents always spoke Polish when they wanted to exclude her from the conversation. Jutta was to channel that frustration into learning Polish for many years to, I gather, a high standard.

But another major frustration she channelled negatively. Her father’s cousin Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was already world-famous as a classical singer. Jutta later talked of her as an ‘aunt’ in the most negative sense available to German-speakers. Elisabeth seems to have had a talent for making her feel an all-round disappointment, simply wrong in anything she did or said or, for all I know, sang. This time, Jutta responded by excluding music from her life. Her attitude to other arts was or became rather similar: more areas where felt humiliation nurtured utter disinterest. Later exclusions would include those of her women-friends who, she judged, subordinated themselves to servicing children and menfolk.

Politically, she was in a Marxist discussion-group at Goettingen University. During her year abroad (1974–5) at Lancaster University, she increasingly identified with the women’s movement and with an organization that was open to it, if only in Lancaster, the International Socialists. Until the year 2000 and formalization of BA and MA structures, German students frequently switched university, once or more. From Lancaster, Jutta’s switch (autumn 1975) was to West German academia’s pariah institution, the tumultuously innovatory new university of Bremen. There, she was particularly encouraged by teachers such as Juergen Martini. He in turn had been in fruitful contact with Richard Johnson and others at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Her three subjects were English, History and Politics. In all three (as in most academic departments), academics tended to engage in mutual excommunication, into the 1990s at least. Many a leftwing reflex was now starting to follow this tradition. From its start during 1971, Bremen University had been famous for the strength of students and leftists at every level of decision-making. In the English Department Martini belonged to the minority critical of the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP, pro-East German). But all unaffiliated left-wingers (apart from the most intellectualist) shared with members of...

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