Ruthild Hahne (19 December 1910 – 1 September 2001) was a German sculptor. Her most productive phase coincided with the early years of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
Life
Provenance and early years
Ruthild Hahne was born in Berlin. Her father is variously described as a businessman and as a factory owner. Elsewhere her parents are described as distant and domineering. She grew up in a prosperous household in a substantial family home in Berlin's Schmöckwitz quarter. The household included a housekeeper, a gardener and a chauffeur. She attended the single-sex secondary school in the city's Neukölln quarter. While she was there someone lent her a book by Karl Marx which she took home and read. Uncomprehending but captivated, this in due course triggered Hahne's enduring commitment to socialist values which was at variance with her parents' middle-class conservatism.
Career choices
On leaving school she trained as a gymnastics-orthopedics teacher, and for several years worked as a gymnastics teacher, pursuing this career till 1936. Despite her background she had already made contact with elements of the labour movement and Communist Party. In 1930 she first met Jean Weidt, and in the early 1930s was a member of Weidt's expressionist "Red Dancers" company. Between 1931 and 1933 she took part in performances at Communist Party events. In 1933 she even took part in the first Theatre Olympiad Review in Moscow. However, 1933 was also the year in which, in January, the political backdrop was transformed when the Nazi Party took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Jean Weidt himself fled abroad in May 1933, and Ruthild Hahne's parallel career as a member of a communist expressionist dance company came to an end. A couple of years later she quit her teaching job, and between 1936 and 1940 studied sculpture at the Berlin Arts Academy. Here she eventually became a "master student" of . Another of her teachers was Arno Breker, who was by now becoming a high-profile government supporter. In 1940/41 she received a bursary to study at the Villa Massimo art institute in Rome. This period saw her produce her classically formed small sculptures and portraits of children.
Resistance
Wilhelm Gerstel's other master students included Fritz Cremer and Cay-Hugo von Brockdorff. After the coming to power of the Nazis it was through these fellow students that Huhne came into contact with with whom she fell in love. In 1941 they moved in together. Since 1938 Ruthild Hahne had been identified by the Gestapo as a member of the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle"), a classification used by the authorities that included those believed to be involved in political activism or espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union. In the case of the Berlin Arts Academy there was indeed a resistance group among the arts students and Ruthild Hahne, reflecting her socialist beliefs, participated in it.
Her apartment at Nachodstraße 20 in the Berlin quarter of Wilmersdorf became a meeting point for resistance members and appears to have been one of the places where she worked with comrades on production of "Die innere Front" ("The Home Front"), an illegal anti-government news-sheet.
In Autumn 1942 the resistance cell was uncovered and its members were arrested on 21 October 1942. They faced the special "people's court" on 21 August 1943 and were convicted of performing illegal actions. Hahne's partner, Wolfgang Thiess, was sentenced to death and executed on 9 September 1943. Ruthild Hahne received a prison sentence of slightly less than five years. By this time, however, the world war had turned against Germany and the Soviet army had started a long advance from the east that would culminate in the capture of Berlin. In February 1945 Hahne was able to escape from the women's prison in Cottbus where she was being held: she now joined up with the Red army. War ended in May 1945 and in June 1945 Ruthilde Hahne returned to Berlin, penniless but free. She now lost no time in joining the Communist Party of Germany and when, in April 1946, within what would later become East Germany the party was controversially merged to form the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), she was among the thousands who lost no time in signing their membership across to what quickly evolved to become the ruling party for a new kind of German dictatorship.