Frieda Rosenthal (born Frieda Schrinner: 9 June 1891 – 15 October 1936) was a Berlin local politician and, after 1933, active in resisting the Nazi régime. Concerned that, under interrogation, she had inadvertently implicated a fellow activist, she died by hanging herself, using a radiator, in her prison cell.
Life
Frieda Schrinner was born into a working-class family. At the time of her birth her father was working on the manufacture of horse-trams. She grew up in an artisanal quarter of south-east Berlin, in what is today the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. She attended school locally and then trained for work in the garments industry. Relatively little is known of her early years, but she continued to work in a garment factory till 1919, by which time she had in 1916 married and had a child with Richard Rosenthal, a clerical worker from whom she was later divorced.
After the war she worked as an (at this stage unqualified) nurse-carer, taking a job locally in Berlin's Lichtenberg quarter. It was an unconventional career decision at a time when nursing was seen as a middle-class preserve. Only in 1930 would she finally complete the exams necessary to become a qualified nurse.
In 1919 Frieda Rosenthal joined the Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD). The USPD had emerged a couple of years earlier in the context of a split of the mainstream Social Democratic Party, following ever more acute tensions arising, primarily, over the party leadership decision back in 1914 to implement what amounted to a parliamentary truce over funding for the war. In 1920 she was elected to the party's Lichtenberg district committee ("Bezirksversammlung"). As the USPD itself split apart, later in 1920 Rosenthal was part of the left wing majority that now joined the newly formed Communist Party ("Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands" / KPD). She appears never to have abandoned her nursing completely, employed by the welfare department in Berlin-Lichtenberg and from the mid 1920s working in Berlin's main health counselling office. Any more detailed official records concerning her employment during this period were destroyed in the Second World War. In any case, during the 1920s political work became the priority. In 1924 she was elected a member of the party leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for Berlin-Brandenburg. Her specific responsibilities lay on the areas of agitation and propaganda (in the portmanteau word of the time, "Agitprop") and, later, women's training and education. The same year she was elected to the Berlin city council ("Stadtverordnetenversammlung"), representing "Electoral District 14" (Berlin-Lichtenberg). During the next few years her party affiliations changed, but she continued to be elected to the Berlin city council without interruption until 1933.
During her time in the city council she could be outspoken. She was involved in an advertisement that insulted President Hindenburg, still widely revered by many as one of the most successful military leaders during the First World War. Citing his wartime exploits she identified him as a mass murderer. Her outspokenness resonated with the party leadership, especially after 1924 when the left-wing took control. In 1927 she was on the receiving end of a court action issued on behalf of the president. She defended her position in the following terms: "It was unthinkable for me to meet the individual who is the current state president. In my position as a local representative I believe I am entitled to voice criticism in respect of the pre-revolutionary period. I simply wanted to make an observation concerning another time." Nevertheless, despite being happy to "name the guilty men" her greater concern was with the clouds of social deprivation which had never really lifted in the years of acute economic hardship that had followed the war, and in that sense her practical approach was never entirely aligned with the more theoretical and doctrinaire concerns that underpinned the party leadership. During the internal party ructions that followed the death of Lenin, she backed the opposition line of the ultra-left at the time of the so-called "Open letter" in September 1925, but by November 1925 had already swung behind the party majority.