Katja Havemann (born Annedore Grafe: 30 November 1947) is a German civil rights activist and author.
Early life
Annedore Grafe was born into a peasant family in Neubarnim (Letschin) in a rural region on the left bank of the Oder river, at that time part of the Soviet occupation zone, and on the "German" side of the newly repositioned frontier with Poland. She attended the local school between 1954 and 1964, and then undertook a traineeship in animal husbandry, till 1967 at the agriculture college in Neuenhagen a short distance to the east of Berlin. In 1967 she moved on to the prestigious "Bruno Leuschner" Economic Academy in Berlin. However, after a year she voluntarily abandoned her course and in 1968 took work at a Berlin orphanage.
Marriage, early career
In 1973 she successfully completed a training as a home educationist in Hohenprießnitz (near Leipzig). By this time, back in Berlin, she had become part of a circle of intellectuals – artists and writers – critical of the ruling party. She first met the scientist and high-profile political and civil rights activist Robert Havemann (1910–1982) in 1970 at the apartment of the songwriter Wolf Biermann, another prominent political dissident. She married Havemann in 1974. Their daughter Franziska had been born the previous year. Annedore Grafe marked her marriage by changing not merely her family name but also her first name: Annedore Grafe now became Katja Havemann.
House arrest
Katja Havemann supported her husband in his dangerous work as a political writer in the German Democratic Republic and shared in the mounting surveillance and other destructive actions to which they were routinely subjected by officers of the Ministry for State Security, including slightly more than two years under house arrest between 1976 and 1979. In numerous critical articles and quotations that appeared in the western media, Robert Havemann's managed to share the basis of his opposition to the political structure in East Germany. His opposition centred on the assertion of one-party power by the SED (party) in the German Democratic Republic. He rejected this as dogmatic and undemocratic.
During the 1970s and 1980s there were times when she stayed at home as a "housewife", while at other times she supported the family budget working variously as a home educator, in a motor vehicle service centre and in a small ceramics factory which by 1982 she had set up with her friend and political ally, the artist Bärbel Bohley. Over the years Katja Havemann established political contacts with numerous opposition figures in East Germany.
Widowhood, continued activism
Thirty-seven years younger than her husband, she was widowed in 1982, after which she continued with her political opposition to the SED régime. In 1982 she was a co-founder in East Germany of "Women for Peace" ("Frauen für den Frieden"), together with Ulrike Poppe und Bärbel Bohley. Inspiration for the initiative came from the Women's Peace Movement in Northern Ireland and, more immediately, from an enhanced military service law in East Germany which was enacted, without warning or prior discussion, by the national parliament ("Volkskammer") on 25 March 1982, and which opened the way for women to be subject to compulsory military conscription. In 1986 Katja Havemann became a member of the newly emerging Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, widely seen as the first East German opposition group established outside the state and he church, and thereby a precursor to surge in street protests and other changes which led to German reunification, formally in October 1990.
