Lore Agnes (4 June 1876 – 9 June 1953) was a German politician. A house-wife from

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in the state after Cologne and the List of cities in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, seventh-largest city ...

, Agnes was a leading figure in the

Social Democratic Party of Germany The Social Democratic Party of Germany ( , SPD ) is a social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany. Saskia Esken has been the party's leader since the 2019 leadership election together w ...

(SPD) and the socialist women's movement in the city. She was a member of parliament 1919-1933.
Frauengeschichte in Düsseldorfer Straßennamen - Lore Agnes - Weg
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Biography

Agnes was the daughter of a coal miner from Bochum. She moved to Düsseldorf in 1906. As a socialist women's activist, she founded a Domestic Workers' Association. At the 1913

Jena Jena (; ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Germany and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 in ...

congress of the SPD, Agnes belonged to the radical anti-militarist grouping, and supported

Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...

's call for general strike action. After the SPD split, Agnes became a leading personality in the

Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (, USPD) was a short-lived political party in Germany during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The organization was established in 1917 as the result of a split of anti-war members of t ...

(USPD). She was jailed in 1914, after having given an anti-war speech at an

International Women's Day International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on 8 March, commemorating women's fight for equality and liberation along with the women's rights movement. International Women's Day gives focus to issues such as gender equality, reproductive righ ...

meeting. In her speech she had called on the women of Germany to organize resistance against the

war War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

. At the time of the outbreak of the November Revolution, Agnes and other left leaders from Düsseldorf were jailed. Agnes belonged to the group that was freed as revolutionaries stormed the prison, and she immediately became a leading organizer of the revolution in Düsseldorf. She was put in charge of issues relating to food, health and welfare on behalf of the Düsseldorf

council A council is a group of people who come together to consult, deliberate, or make decisions. A council may function as a legislature, especially at a town, city or county/shire level, but most legislative bodies at the state/provincial or natio ...

. Agnes was elected to the

Weimar National Assembly The Weimar National Assembly (German: ), officially the German National Constitutional Assembly (), was the popularly elected constitutional convention and de facto parliament of Germany from 6 February 1919 to 21 May 1920. As part of it ...

in the 1919 election as a candidate of the USPD from the Electoral District no. 22 (Düsseldorf-East). The USPD had won 18.7% of the votes in that electoral district, in which Agnes had headed the list of the party.
Handbuch der verfassunggebenden deutschen Nationalversammlung
'', Weimar 1919 ; biographische Notizen und Bilder, Berlin, 1919 When the USPD split, Agnes sided with the rightwing tendency, that rejoined the SPD. As a SPD Reichstag member, Agnes represented a moderate leftist standpoint within the party. She was a member of the Reichstag presidium from 1922 onwards.Engel, Gerhard, Bärbel Holtz, and Ingo Materna.
Gross-Berliner Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte in der Revolution, 1918/1919: Dokumente der Vollversammlungen und des Vollzugsrates : vom Ausbruch der Revolution bis zum 1. Reichsrätekongress
'. Berlin: Akademie, 1993. p. 32 She was also a member of the Düsseldorf municipal council until 1928. At the age of 68, Agnes was arrested by the

Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...

. In 1945, she again became a member of the Düsseldorf municipal council. She remained a member of the Women's Commission of SPD until her death.

References