Carola Bluhm

Last updated
Carola Bluhm (2017) 2017-11-16 Carola Bluhm by Sandro Halank.jpg
Carola Bluhm (2017)

Carola Bluhm (formerly Carola Freundl; born 16 November 1962) is a German politician (Die Linke). Since 1991 she has been a member of the Berlin House of Representatives. [1] In 2009 she became a member of the Senate of Berlin in which, between 16 October 2009 and 2011, she served as senator for Integration, Work and Social Affairs in the Red–red coalition administration of Klaus Wowereit. [2]

Carola Freundl was her married name. However, following the break up of her marriage she announced in 2005 that she was reverting to her maiden name. [3]

Life

Carola Bluhm was born in East Berlin. Her parents were both lawyers. [4] Despite spending her first two and a half decades in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), she grew up in an "open academic household" where "critical debate [on the issues of the time] took place every day". By her own account, she was encouraged to think for herself, an attitude of mind which later found its way into her political approach. [5] She undertook a vocational education at school, passing her school leaving exams (Abitur) in 1982. This opened the way for a career in fruit and vegetable production, a valued profession in a country where, at least in the cities, fresh produce was usually in short supply. The experience was formative. After ten years at school in Berlin with the same classmates she was based in Brandenburg an der Havel, for the first time away from the capital and working with new colleagues. Ruefully she would look back on the apple harvest period when comrades started work sometimes as early as 04.00 in the morning each day, not taking time off at weekends, in order to harvest the apples with a teutonic determination to ensure that apples sorted and packed were of perfect quality, only to suffer the bitter experience of seeing their work become pointless as the fruit deteriorated in the crates because of logistical failures whereby the authorities were unable to arrange timely transportation to the shops. She joined the party in 1982 [1] and became a candidate for local political office soon afterwards, but was never blind to the practical imperfections of the one-party East German state in action. [5]

Passing her Abitur and her "fruit gardening education" had opened the way to a university level education: between 1982 and 1987 she attended the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her mother was fiercely opposed to her subject choice, preferring that she should obtain a degree in something less politically charged, possibly involving landscape gardening. However, Bluhm picked Sociology which, consistent with the time and place, was taught through the prism of party approved Marxism–Leninism. The teaching was nevertheless soundly structured and she emerged with a degree in 1987. [1] Much of the focus of her studies involved the difficulties arising with the massive housing redevelopments that were a feature of East Germany in the 1980s. Older people whose children had left home were reluctant to relocate and lose all the friends and associations of the areas where they had brought up their families, while for younger people with children there was a resulting shortage of sufficiently large apartments. There was no attempt to avoid studying social issues and processes arising in the country, but any thought of discussing the interaction of such issues with the overall political structure of the country was a total taboo for academics involved in sociological or empirical social research work. [5]

Her daughter was born in 1985. East Germany had long suffered from a desperate shortage of working age population thanks to the slaughter of war in the 1940s and industrial scale emigration from east to west during the later 1940s and through the 1950s. The government was eager to encourage more children: supported by a flexible system and by her family Bluhm was able to combine intense study with motherhood. [5] Her son was born in 1988 after she had concluded her undergraduate studies. [6] Between 1987 and 1991 she was employed as a research assistant at the Institute for Socialist Economic Management at the Berlin Economics Academy ("Hochschule für Ökonomie Berlin"). [1]

During the later 1980s the East German political establishment suffered a crisis of confidence as the winds of Glasnost blowing across from Moscow left old certainties looking less than certain, while intensifying industrial and commercial rivalry between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic made the future look less secure, highlighting the dire fiscal position of the savagely indebted East German economy. In university sociology departments there was little appetite for undermining the state by focusing on the increasingly stark dysfunctionalities of the socialist state, but nor was it possible to overlook objective facts. Someone in Bluhm's position might have been expecting to work towards a doctorate and pursue a university career as a sociology professor, but as academic career opportunities faded away Carola Bluhm switched to politics not necessarily by design, but in response both to her personal situation, as the mother of two very young children, and to national events. [5] [7]

Matters came to a head after November 1989 when protesters breached the wall and it became apparent that the fraternal Soviet forces had no instructions to suppress the street protests by force, as they had in 1953 (and, more recently, in Prague in 1968). A succession of seemingly unstoppable events were set in train, leading to East Germany's first (and as matters turned out last) free and fair election in March 1990 and then, formally in October 1990, German reunification. At the hitherto important Berlin Economics Academy Carola Bluhm's career prospects disappeared. In 1990 she was informed succinctly in writing that she was being temporarily laid off ("in Warteschleife geschickt") and six months later, her job disappeared permanently (although according to her own website she remained, at least formally, an employee of the Berlin Economics Academy till early in 1991). Unemployment, hitherto a theoretical issue that she had researched and on which she had taught as an academic, became her personal reality. [7]

The old Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), hitherto the ruling party in the East German one-party dictatorship, now embarked on a sometimes uncomfortable relaunch for a democratic future, part of which involved rebranding itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Bluhm was one of those who stuck with the party, becoming a PDS member during 1990. [6] The switch to more active involvement in politics happened almost by accident that same year when an elderly longstanding friend from her local district became ill and asked her to attend a party meeting called to select candidates as his representative. She attended and was herself and spontaneously decided to apply for a candidacy on her own account. Her commitment to using the unfolding political changes as a chance to reform the German Democratic Republic from a left wing perspective but embracing emancipation and democracy in ways that, traditionally, the SED had not. There was talk of a "third way". Her ideas caught the mood of the meeting and she found herself selected as a PDS candidate for the city centre electoral district of East Berlin in the forthcoming city council elections - the first such elections to be held on a free and fair basis. The party's lead candidate was a man called Hans Luft, but Bluhm's second place on the party list turned out to be sufficient to ensure her election to the city council (""). [7]

Following reunification, from January 1991 she became a member of Berlin's House of Representatives ("Abgeordnetenhaus"), now covering what had previously been both East and West Berlin. Working with city politicians who had cut their teeth with the very different socio-economic preconceptions and in the very different democratic context of West Berlin involved an intense learning curve for all concerned, and "very intensive debates" were not infrequent. [7] Between 1995 and 2001 she chaired the PDS group in the Berlin House of representatives, jointly with Harald Wolf: then, in 2001, she became deputy chair. [8] Between 2006 and 2009 she was herself chair of the PDS parliamentary group in the assembly. [8] Directly before that, from 2004 and 1006, she was a member of the assembly's enquiry commission "A future for Berlin". [6]

between 2009 and 2011, she served as senator for Integration, Work and Social Affairs in the Red–red coalition administration of Klaus Wowereit, [2] taking on the post following the retirement 0of the previous incumbent, Heidi Knake-Werner. [9] At the 2011 local election the Red–red coalition lost its majority. The PDS went into opposition while city governance passed to a grand coalition of the SPD and CDU. Bluhm, with the other PDS senators, accordingly resigned her senatorial responsibilities. The party recovered its position in the 2016 state election and returned to city governance. Bluhm now returned, albeit briefly, to her position as chair of the party group in the assembly, this time jointly with Udo Wolf. [10]


Related Research Articles

Gregor Gysi German lawyer and left-wing politician

Gregor Florian Gysi is a German attorney, president of the Party of the European Left and a prominent politician of The Left political party.

Gesine Lötzsch German politician

Gesine Lötzsch is a German politician of the left-wing party Die Linke. In 2010, with Klaus Ernst, she was elected president of the party.

Sahra Wagenknecht German politician (born 1969)

Sahra Wagenknecht is a German politician, economist, author and publicist. Since 2009, she has been a member of the Bundestag for The Left. From 2015 to 2019 she served as parliamentary co-chair of her party.

Beate Klarsfeld Franco-German journalist and anti-Nazi activist

Beate Auguste Klarsfeld is a Franco-German journalist and Nazi hunter who, along with her French husband, Serge, became famous for their investigation and documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers, Kurt Asche, and others.

Katja Kipping German politician

Katja Kipping is a German politician of The Left who is serving as Senator for Integration, Labour and Social Affairs in the Berlin state government since December 2021. She was previously a member of the Bundestag representing Saxony from 2005 to 2021. She was federal co-leader of The Left from 2012 to 2021 alongside Bernd Riexinger.

Freundel, Freundl may refer to:

Lucy Redler German politician

Lucy Redler is a German politician, Socialist Alternative activist, and member of the Left Party. From 2005 to 2007, Redler served on the executive committee of the Berlin section of the Labor and Social Justice List (WASG), and she was its chief candidate in the 2006 Berlin state elections. The German media has given Redler the nickname "Red Lucy".

Carmen Everts is a German politician, political scientist and civil servant, a former member of the Parliament of Hesse for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and an expert on political extremism. In 2009, she was appointed by the government of Hesse as head of department at the Hessian State Agency for Civic Education, responsible for research on the communist dictatorship in East Germany and demographic research.

Angelika Gramkow German politician

Angelika Gramkow is a German politician.

Helga Adler spent the earlier part of her career as an East German historian and, latterly, politician. She was politically engaged during the build up to German reunification, but in November 1991 resigned, sidelined and disillusioned, from what had by then become the Party of Democratic Socialism, Since then she been formally unaffiliated politically, but very far from uninterested.

Ursula Fischer is a German former national politician (PDS).

Petra Bläss German politician

Petra Bläss is a German politician. She served in the German parliament (Bundestag) between 1990 and 2002, and was a Bundestag vice-president between 1998 and 2002.

Angelika Barbe German biologist

Angelika Barbe is a German biologist who became a politician.

Birgit Klaubert German politician

Birgit Klaubert is a German politician and former vice president of the Thuringian regional parliament ("Landtag"). From 2014 to 2017 Klaubert served as Thuringia's Minister for Education, Youth and Sport.

Dagmar Enkelmann German politician

Dagmar Enkelmann is a German politician.

Ina Leukefeld German politician

Ina Leukefeld is a German politician for Die Linke and a member of the Regional Parliament of Thuringia.

Jutta Braband is a former German politician. In the German Democratic Republic she was a civil rights activist who after 1990 became a PDS member of the Germany parliament (Bundestag). Her parliamentary career ended in May 1992 after it had become known that fifteen years earlier she had worked for the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) as a registered informant .

Katrin Lompscher

Katrin Lompscher is a German civil engineer and politician who served as Senator for Urban Development and Housing in Berlin in the Senate of Governing Mayor Michael Müller from 2016 to 2020. A member of The Left, she previously served as Senator for Health, Environment and Consumer Protection from 2006 to 2011 in the third Senate of Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit, and as a member of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin from 2011 until her resignation in 2017.

Heidi Knake-Werner is a German politician. She served as a member of the German parliament ("Bundestag") between 1994 and 2002. Between 2002 and 2009 she was one of Berlin's more high-profile senators.

Gerhard Riege

Gerhard Riege was a respected East German law professor.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Helmut Müller-Enbergs. "Bluhm, Carola * 16.11.1962 PDS-Politikerin". "Wer war wer in der DDR?". Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin & Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Berlin. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
  2. 1 2 "3. Senat Wowereit (2006-2011)". Senatskanzlei Berlin. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
  3. Sabine Beikler (14 April 2005). "HINTER DEN KULISSEN". Tagesspiegel Online. Verlag Der Tagesspiegel GmbH, Berlin. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
  4. "Carola Bluhm". Munzinger-Archiv GmbH, Ravensburg. Retrieved 4 May 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Carola Bluhm as interviewee. Interviewer not identified in this source. "Erste Politisierung ... Die Zeit in der Schule und in der Universität". Carola Bluhm ... Gespräch mit Carola Bluhm über ihren eigenen politischen Werdegang. DIE LINKE. Berlin. Retrieved 4 May 2017.{{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)[ permanent dead link ]
  6. 1 2 3 "Kurzbiografie Carola Bluhm". DIE LINKE. Berlin. Retrieved 4 May 2017.[ permanent dead link ]
  7. 1 2 3 4 Carola Bluhm as interviewee. Interviewer not identified in this source. "Auf dem Weg in die Politik". Carola Bluhm ... Gespräch mit Carola Bluhm über ihren eigenen politischen Werdegang. DIE LINKE. Berlin. Retrieved 4 May 2017.{{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)[ permanent dead link ]
  8. 1 2 Carola Bluhm as interviewee. Interviewer not identified in this source. "Von der Opposition in die Regierung". Carola Bluhm ... Gespräch mit Carola Bluhm über ihren eigenen politischen Werdegang. DIE LINKE. Berlin. Retrieved 8 May 2017.{{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)[ permanent dead link ]
  9. "Heidi Knake-Werner geht, Carola Bluhm kommt". WeltN24 GmbH, Berlin. 12 July 2009. Retrieved 9 May 2017.
  10. Frederik Bombosch (4 October 2016). "Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin Eine Doppelspitze soll die Linksfraktion führen". Berliner Zeitung. Retrieved 9 May 2017.