Luise Kautsky

Kautsky was a socialist and active social democrat. She married the prominent Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky.^[1] She was also a friend of Rosa Luxemburg and Berlin city councilor for the USPD.

In 1938, because she was Jewish, she had to flee to Prague and then the Netherlands. The Dutch Labour Party was preparing to help her emigrate to England but she refused, fearing she would lose contact with her son Benedikt who was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1944, she was deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz, where she died "from heart failure" shortly before the camp was liberated by the Red Army.^[2]

The S-bahn arch between Kantstraße and Fasanenstraße in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf is named after her. In 1999, Charlottenburg district council resolved to erect a plaque in her memory at Wielandstraße 26.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Luise Kautsky.

• Luise Kautsky Archive at marxists.org
• Rosa Luxemburg: Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918 (edited by Luise Kautsky), 1922
• Stolperstein memorial stones project