Dear Doctor Paulmann, I know that the “men’s society” in which I live has its own norms in many respects, and that the égalité proclaimed in 1789, even though more than 150 years have passed in the meantime, has still
not been implemented in reality. As an old adherent to realpolitik, I have also come to terms with this. Nevertheless, there must be a possibility of finding a middle way here. For example, it would largely correspond to the facts if my official job title were to be changed to “Authorized Signatory Managing Director” or the like.1
Krones, who had been with the company since 1930, had become the de facto head of her department due to her competence and the war-related absence of her male colleagues—a role she now formally asserted. But she also had another identity: having grown up in Red Vienna, the Austrian capital of municipal socialism between 1918/19 and 1934, she had been an activist with the proscribed Revolutionary Socialists (Revolutionäre Sozialisten) during the years of Austro-fascism and Nazism. The fact that a socialist opponent of the Nazis invoked the unredeemed values of the French Revolution in her struggle for professional recognition—reminiscent of a contemporary feminist—from her superior, a manager in a key Nazi firm, astonished me as a reader. The letter from Hilde Krones’s archive incorporated, it seemed to me, the Jetztzeit, or “now-time,” that Walter Benjamin writes about in his famous formulation about temporality and leftist history.2 Krones’s reference to the Enlightenment in the midst of the madness of National Socialism resembles the “tiger’s leap into the past”3 described by Benjamin: it was a bold argument she courageously advanced in order to advocate for her interests. In her letter, Krones associated herself with the realm of realpolitik, but she would not become a full-time politician until after the liberation in 1945, when she was one of the leading functionaries of the Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs, spö) in the brief period before her suicide in 1948. Yet she never became a pragmatic advocate of realpolitik; instead, in the context of the budding Cold War and the Allied occupation, she was marginalized as an uncompromising representative of the left wing by her power-conscious opponents within the party.
1 Melancholy, Hauntology, and the Imaginative Archive
Drawing on the theoretical and methodological concepts of hauntology and the imaginative archive, my chapter deals with some of the “haunting” materials from the archive of Hilde Krones,6 not least her death. In so doing, I am entering into a dialogue with the political feelings, terms, and concepts articulated in these materials—conducting a theoretical séance that addresses questions to these texts and searches for the buried hopes and lost futures of the emancipatory politics entombed in the rubble of twentieth-century history.
In this respect, the death of Hilde Krones can be placed in a long line of “necromancies”: in his account of the artistic and theoretical memory work concerning the left-wing history of revolution in the twentieth century, Enzo Traverso emphasizes the importance that funereal images have played in
It is no coincidence that Traverso focuses on the feeling of melancholy in his book. In so doing, he connects to a debate that has been wrestling with the legacies of leftist theory and practice and the political feelings associated with them since at least the 1990s. In an influential essay, Wendy Brown diagnosed what she saw as a backward-looking and unproductive left melancholy, caught in a ghostly spirit,9 a condition in which the “attachment to the object of one’s sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free in the present.”10 With reference to Walter Benjamin, she described this melancholy as a tendency of the Left to have settled into its own theoretical certainties and historical defeat—and in the process, to have lost its capacity for a critical analysis of the present directed toward the future, for a dialectical grasp of the Jetztzeit.11 This view did not go unchallenged; Jodi Dean, for example, describes the causes and manifestations of left melancholy in almost the opposite way. According to her, Benjamin criticized the Left not for its Marxist traditionalism but for “the sublimation of left ideals in market-oriented writing and publishing,”12 a Left that had “already conceded to the inevitably of capitalism.”13 Dean published her text some fifteen years after Wendy Brown, in the context of the global protest movements of the 2000s, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. In this temporal context, emancipatory hopes seemed to grow. Today, in the face of the global success of authoritarian populist parties and leaders whose rhetorical strategies resemble those of early fascism in many ways; the restoration of global capitalism after the 2008 crisis; and against the backdrop of the climate crisis, these hopes seem dampened to me.
One such—what I would call—“dampened” theory, which nevertheless tried to find traces of hope in a depressive mood, was formulated by the British
the straining to hear the voices that have never been heard, the attachments that cannot be given meaning, and the utopian desire for another future grounded in a different past. […] It grapples with the relationship between the dead and the living in order to enact the future one wants to bring about in the present.22
In a case like the death of Hilde Krones, the reasons for which cannot be completely clarified, working with her personal archive invites us to reflect on the tension between historical sources and our own projections and affective reactions, especially in relation to the uncanny—“that which the historian knows but must deny” (Joan Scott)—the contradictions, blind spots, and traumas of historical memory as well as contemporary political theory.23
2 Buried Archives
The reception of Hilde Krones’s life and work includes phases of empty time and Jetztzeit—of the deep burial and careful exhumation of the dead. Within the party, after her death at the age of thirty-eight—portrayed by the party press as the tragic end of a talented young politician—and funeral, efforts were made to quickly stifle the memory of the dissident Hilde Krones. Commemorative articles in the journal of the Socialist Freedom Fighters Association (Bund Sozialistischer Freiheitskämpfer) led to harsh internal criticism from party leader Adolf Schärf and other top spö politicians.24 Krones’s local party organization in the Ottakring district of Vienna held memorials at her grave in at least 1949 and 1968. In the years immediately after her death, Krones was vigorously commemorated in the publication The New Forward (Der Neue Vorwärts) by her comrade-in-arms Erwin Scharf, and the case of Krones was also used in polemics against the spö published in the communist People’s Voice (Volksstimme). Her “rediscovery” by scholars took place only in the context of the emergence of the New Left in the 1970s. In Fritz Weber’s assessment of the spö during the Cold War and his critique of the political orientation of social democracy after 1945, Krones’s character—along with Erwin Scharf, who stood center stage—plays an important supporting role.25
After the boom in workers’ history and history from below—including the gendered and feminist variants thereof—in the 1970s and 1980s, however, Krones’s archive was rarely touched. Only in last fifteen years or so has there been a new increase in interest in the (often forgotten) women protagonists of the workers’ movement in Austria. This applies both to the early period up to the democratic upheaval of 1918–1919, for example the social democratic icon Adelheid Popp or the participation of women in the council movement,27 but also to the traumatic ruptures of 1934 and 1938, and the democratic revival in 1945, for example with women politicians or activists such as Rosa Jochmann28 and Tilly Spiegel.29 Family constellations as well as private and political partnerships also garnered attention, as in the recent double biography of Marianne and Oscar Pollak,30 as well as in Gabriella Hauch’s group-biographical research on members of the socialist and communist Strasser family.31 The counter-history of a left-wing family, marginalized by Austrian historiography but reconstructed by Hauch from buried sources, shares, in my opinion, a “hauntological” interest with the search for traces of Hilde Krones presented here. Some scholarship published around the centennial of Red Vienna explicitly referred to Mark Fisher or Walter Benjamin and read concepts and debates from the awakening of communal socialism in Vienna as “space[s] of possibility” for the Jetztzeit of the present.32
2.1 Ways of Relating
Born Hilde Handl in 1910, Hilde Krones would become a child of Red Vienna, shaped politically and culturally by the legacy of the period that lasted from 1918 to 1934. After the early death of her father, a baker’s assistant, her mother took a job as a social worker so she could graduate from the Handelsakademie, the commercial high school,33 which was a prerequisite for her later career
Her longer-term romantic relationships were exclusively with her socialist comrades, and there is a striking parallelism in the political and private ruptures—between endings and new beginnings—she experienced in these facets of her life. A few months after the Austrian workers’ uprising in 1934, she began a relationship with Franz Krones, an engineer and municipal official eight years her senior. But both of them had to end their existing relationships in order to be together, and in Hilde Krones’s case, she was involved with Paul Schärf, a nephew of Adolf Schärf, who later became party chairman. Despite her reservations about patriarchal marriage law in Austria, Hilde Handl and Franz Krones would ultimately marry mere weeks after the outbreak of the war in 1939, when the German law permitting civil divorce was already in place in Catholic Austria.36 After her marriage to Franz, Hilde continued to work at the Bayer office. Given her commitment to the idea that equality of the sexes centered explicitly on women’s participation in the sphere of paid labour, a professional job offered her financial independence. This focus on women’s labour and women’s autonomy also informed her views on birth control and care work. Albeit with some regret, she decided not to bring children into a world that forced mothers to be dependent on men.37 Furthermore, due to her belief in “modern marriage,” she did not cook for her husband, instead relying on both her and Franz’s mothers to feed them.38 She also paid a cleaning woman and her sister-in-law for domestic labour. In the summer of 1945, shortly after the liberation, Hilde began a love affair with Erwin Scharf, four years her junior,
The documents and materials preserved in Hilde Krones’s archive—diaries, letters, photographs, drafts of political essays, and speeches—include both private and public texts, and the sentiments articulated in them connect these two levels, not least in light of the political ruptures of 1934 (the crushed Austrian workers’ uprising), 1938 (the Anschluss with Nazi Germany), and 1945 (the liberation). As a revolutionary socialist, the period from 1917 to 1919 (with the Russian Revolution serving as a model and example as compared to the democratic socialism of Red Vienna of 1919–1934) as well as the future—as a space of realized emancipation, played central roles in Hilde Krones’s papers. A concept that retrospectively brings together these private and public feelings is Beziehungsweisen or “ways of relating.” Coining this concept, Bini Adamczak examined the political gender models developed during the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Stalinist era of the 1930s, and the events of 196839 in order to pose the question—as a means of developing a central aspect of future emancipative revolutions—how “emotionality and rationality, intimacy and instrumentality [should be] related to each other, how relations of the private and the public, the intimate and the anonymous are mediated to each other.”40 Adamczak argues that before 1968, a “desire for solidary ways of relating” was historically “not intelligible,” “because it lacked a political language to articulate itself.”41 However the generation of activists who had spent their youth in Red Vienna was trained in the socialist youth movement with a pedagogy and vocabulary of affect, influenced by Freudo-Marxism and individual psychology.
Red Vienna was retrospectively described as a space of possibility, as an “era of great hope,” as the sociologist Marie Jahoda, who was involved in it, described it.42 Krones was one of those young activists whom party theorist Otto Bauer had once called the “generation of fulfillment,” i.e. those who would see the end of capitalism.43 In the era of fascism, this future seemed a long way off. Bauer’s promise continued to exist in their imagination, but Krones’s political circle of friends now spoke of themselves as the “generation of experimentation” whose fate was open.44 Along with hope came other feelings: melancholy and sadness—about what was lost with the end of Red Vienna—fear
How difficult it is when what we create is only a brick for the house of the future—only those who can see it completed have the final conviction, the happiness of the creator—to us, apparently only suffering prevails. […] Yes, to be fertilizer, too, […] is an extremely important function—a beautiful one it is not.47
When Franz Krones was called up in 1942 as an engineer for the military construction unit Organisation Todt,48 Hilde implemented a rigid program to structure her everyday life—and maintain hope for a shared private and political future. The day after her husband’s departure, she started attending a Russian language course in Vienna. The two of them had studied Russian in private, but now she continued her studies publicly as an act of hope for a revolutionary future and for a time when her skills of Russian would be of use. Hilde and Franz wrote each other a letter every day almost until the end of the war. Hilde also maintained her clandestine political work, including
While transcribing the 650 or so preserved field letters Hilde Krones wrote to Franz Krones between 1942 and 1945, this long wait for change, the draining years of silence and stillness seemed almost tangible to me. They were heading toward a euphoric moment that Hilde Krones described as—almost— revolutionary. About the self-liberation of her neighborhood in Ottakring by local communists and socialists—including Krones—in April 1945, when this part of Vienna was handed over to the Red Army more or less without a fight, Hilde wrote: “It was a joy to watch. A mess, a screaming match—but it had a primal revolutionary élan and much, much individual willingness to sacrifice.”51
Once upon a time? In a fairy-tale? Yes, since life was a fairy tale in the past years of death. For Kasperle and doe [pet names they gave themselves], life looked for its last refuge and found it. Kasperle and doe were the living rear guard of death. Strong and growing life overcomes death, fairy-tale becomes reality. […] It is a crying shame, but one must not be afraid of life, since in fact it is itself the fairy-tale.53
And in spite of all preoccupations—in spite of the fact that I am plunged into the maelstrom—I am miserable. In some way, I suspected that at the moment when life in general would become more bearable, our personal, individual lives would go to pot. But you see, at that time we still thought that at least the great general [sentiment after the war] would be such that momentum and enthusiasm would take hold of us and offer us a replacement for another piece of personal happiness. And in the meantime, the doorway, the famous one into which we can and must place our foot, has scarcely been opened. I am in an incessant struggle—in the party—in business—everywhere—I am so tense every minute—and am so tired and so despondent inside. You need to come very soon, for I don’t know how long I’ll be able to endure this alone.54
In the years that followed, a complicated spatial and relational arrangement developed out of the joint political work, life, and love Hilde shared with Erwin Scharf and, to an extent, with Franz Krones, who remained a close political confidant and advisor.
Politically, in 1945 the revolutionary dream soon turned into a nightmare for Hilde Krones. Scharf, Krones, and some comrades-in-arms from the circle of Revolutionary Socialists clung to their hope, which had kept alive despite repression, of a revolutionary upheaval in Austria, i.e., the time of fulfillment.
I can’t even say that I imagined it much differently—I remember that during [your] previous home leaves, we always kept in mind that, with the world constellation, the approaching politics will by no means be straightforward, by no means revolutionary in our sense—but now that it is there, I still suffer, nevertheless. We fervently hoped that the coming of the Russians would help us in this respect—but this did not happen either—on the contrary, the pressure on Russia to enter into treaties with the bourgeois world has only made it even more of a mess.57
Nevertheless, the summer of 1945 was initially also a euphoric new beginning for Hilde Krones. She plunged into a relationship with Ewin Scharf, with whom she quickly formed a close political and private partnership. Hilde and Erwin, however, could not carry on their relationship in public as both were still married: Erwin Scharf had a wife and children in faraway Carinthia. Draft letters from 1945 to 1947 suggest that Hilde repeatedly struggled with the fact that Scharf apparently did not profess his love with the same consistency as she did.
2.2 Egalité
Returning to the events described at the start of this chapter, Hilde Krones herself was aware that she had ventured far in her 1944 letter to Bayer Director Paulmann quoted in the introduction. The same evening she wrote the letter, she was overcome by “inhibitions about my own courage,” as she wrote to Franz Krones.58 She did not quite prevail in the matter; as of February 1945, her final job title was “Deputy Department Head with Signature Authority.”59 But
At first glance, the specter of the French Revolution haunting the 1944 letter gives us a sense of proximity to the present day: Krones’s argument seems to be in line with contemporary feminist texts that refer to the French Revolution’s promise of equality, which was still not fulfilled. If you question the “object” more closely, it becomes apparent that her own reference to the bourgeois revolution of 1789 contained the specific perspective of a revolutionary socialist: The French Revolution appears in several places in Krones’s papers, not least in several speech drafts from 1945 to 1948. In a radio speech on “The Woman in Parliament” (1946), Krones sketched a historical outline of women’s struggle for political equality from the era of primitive communism to the present. It was left to the French Revolution, she said, “to raise the revolutionary cry: ‘If a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to mount the tribune.’60 This call has not faded away; as a conscious political demand, it has been taken up and carried forward by the workers’ movements of the socialist parties.”61
Through her reference to the French Revolution, Krones drew on discursive frameworks that had been established by prominent Austrian social democratic women’s activists in the first decades of the twentieth century. In several articles and speeches, Adelheid Popp, Therese Schlesinger, Marianne Pollak, and Emmy Freundlich had pointed to the revolutions of 1789, 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871 to highlight the existence of women revolutionaries throughout history.62 At the same time, they portrayed the French Revolution as an unfinished legacy in a dual sense: in the Austrian context, the bourgeois revolution had only been fully realized by the constitutional revolution of 1918 that established the new (German) Austrian republic. But the “political democracy” that had been achieved in 1918 still lacked the features of social equality and social democracy for which socialism strived.63
And what did the stinking militaristic air of brutal Hitlerism, with its contempt for everything spiritual, feminine, and human have to offer us? Besides boundless misery and miserable death by bombing, at most an unedifying participation in an economy that served the most insane mass murder of all times. […] On an equal footing with men, we [women] have had to take upon ourselves all the sufferings of fascism. In the armaments factories—in wartime work, we were equal. Now we demand full equality in the opportunity for advancement! (emphasis in the original).67
As an executive employee of the Bayer Group, Hilde Krones had also been personally involved in the war economy until 1945. Even if the area of crop protection in which she worked was not directly linked to the war industry—or to IG Farben’s technical involvement in the Shoah—“participation in the mass murder” of the war must have been problematic for Krones herself. Indeed, in the theory of fascism and the analysis of the war motives she shared with her husband Franz Krones and with Marxist theorists of the time, “monopoly
3 Liberation from Fear
[W]e cannot make women’s right to work a slogan at a time when so many women must be laid off from the post office and the railroad because otherwise, they will come to us for help, which we cannot afford to give them. The wives of those [war] returnees who cannot go back to their old jobs because of women’s work would also turn against us.73
Her comrade Ferdinanda Flossmann added that she hoped “that the motto would express that women want to fight for their independence and not against men. Perhaps a motto will be found that also speaks of peace.”74 This reference to peace was typical of the time. As early as 1945, women were addressed by the spö as “representatives of a better and more peaceful future […] and therefore, in a special way, serve as advocates of peace.”75 The motto of Women’s Day 1946 was “For World Peace,” and this would prevail again in 1948, when the motto finally chosen was “Women of two world wars fight for world peace.”76 In this meeting, however, Hilde Krones formulated a different proposal: she was against the motif of children proposed by Marianne Pollak, hoping that “a motto would be found that offers something to everyone, such as ‘The Liberation from Fear’ or the ‘Right to Work, Right to Life, Right to Peace.’”77
Her reference to the “right to work” seems obvious given her own conception of women’s emancipation, and the mention of “life” was in line with her hope for life overcoming death after the devastating years of war. Her approval of the “peace” motto, though, might also be linked to her attempted politics of cooperation with the kpö. In two reports most likely addressed to her confidants in the Communist Party, she suggested “world peace”—soon to become also a central tenet of Communist political campaigning in Cold War Europe78—as a common signifier that might help the two rival parties organize joint public events.79 Striking in relation to the haunting terms and political feelings held within her archive was her emphasis on liberation from fear: Krones repeatedly addressed the concept of fear in her letters and public appearances, for example, in her speech at the spö party congress in 1946 in which she warned
In her wartime letters to Franz Krones, she also repeatedly wrote of her “fear and anxiety” for her loved ones, and it was presumably Franz Krones who, in an obituary in The Socialist Fighter (Der Sozialistische Kämpfer), also described her fear of Nazi terror, a feeling she tried to counter with bravery: “In her beloved mountains, when we ridiculed her for her hesitation at a tricky crossing, she once coined the formulation: ‘Courage is simple and easy; bravery is an achievement. Courage does without hesitation; bravery does in spite of hesitation.’ In that sense, she was very brave.”81
From the perspective of our current political moment, which in many countries is characterized by an authoritarian-populist politics of fear82 that intentionally minimizes hope—Hilde Krones’s motto also appears to be filled with Jetztzeit. Bini Adamczak reminds us that Theodor Adorno once described “the goal of the revolution” as “the abolition of fear”83—an idea that resonates with the formulation of the revolutionary socialist Krones and which concretely references the traumatic experiences of National Socialism, which haunted the victims much more than the perpetrators.84
4 On the Threshold of Hope and Death
In their political struggle, which was directed primarily against the spö’s governmental coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, övp) after the 1945 elections, the left-wing socialists around Scharf and Krones very quickly fell apart.85 After the party congress in 1947, Scharf lost his position as party secretary, and the left-wing opposition within the party gradually lost its ability to publish in party press organs. Scharf
But we are still alive. And if we want to go on living, then we have to clear away the rubble that hinders us; then we have to look for a way out. There is no choice for us: we must go up and out with all our strength and abilities or we must perish.89
Hilde Krones threw herself into the project of reconstruction, of working for a different future, with enormous personal commitment and in numerous political capacities: as a member of parliament, a speaker and author, in the Women’s Central Committee, in political training, in her district (Ottakring), in the Vienna state party organization, and on trips throughout Austria. In 1945, the photojournalist Franz Blaha produced a series of images showing Hilde and Franz Krones, together with Erwin Scharf, pushing a cart during cleanup work in Vienna.
Hilde and Franz Krones, together with Erwin Scharf and a female comrade yet to be identified (from right to left), pushing a cart during cleanup work in Vienna, Austria, 1945
source: photograph. franz blaha (verein für geschichte der arbeiterinnenbewegung [austrian labor history society], hilde crones papers)
Hilde Krones (2nd from right) during cleanup work in the district of Ottakring, Vienna, Austria, 1945
source: photograph. franz blaha (verein für geschichte der arbeiterinnenbewegung [austrian labor history society], hilde crones papers)
“Perhaps it will come to fulfillment once again” read the last sentence of your letter. I replied to you […] that I live for this “perhaps.” If today I am certain that this “perhaps” is blocked and buried for me, then I don’t know what I would do. Perhaps I would then throw off the fulfillment of duty. But still, I have a glimmer—Whoever carries the spark of the holy fire—knows nothing of the end and knows only the eternal becoming. I will get the spark—perhaps—and if not—even the darkness is beautiful.94
But what was the role played by “ways of relating,” that is, the relationships in her life in which the political and the private were linked and intertwined—particularly her relationships to her closest confidants like Erwin Scharf? The archive contains only a few letters from the last year of her life, but Rosa Jochmann, remembering a conversation shortly before her death, pointed to these relationships (highlighting a “private” motive for her suicide): “[S]he was very unhappy because she was expecting a letter from the comrade she loved (the letter came on the day Hilde had already been found unconscious).”98
Those who conjure spirits must know they will not bring back only friendly ghosts but also repressed horror. One of the gaps in Hilde Krones’s archive is any explicit concern about or reference to Stalinist terror, which was unfolding at the time in neighboring Central European countries as well as in postwar Vienna. This blind spot was used by the centrist party majority and by other left-wing socialists99 against the group gathered around Scharf and Krones. As mentioned earlier, the archive contains confidential reports by Hilde Krones about the Women’s Central Committee and the party executive, which, given their content, were possibly intended for her friends in the kpö or for others who supported “unity of action.”100 Krones was accused of divulging internal party information to the Soviet Union by her political opponents in the SPÖ.101
Through her grief for the “lost” and the “absent”—who, as revolutionaries, became victims of the communist project during Stalinism,102 Bini Adamczak meditates on how their “absence comes painfully into the consciousness of
Her current job title was “secretary” (Korrespondentin). Hilde Krones to Richard Paulmann, 23 August 1944, Folder 6, Box 1, Nachlass (hereafter: NL) Hilde Krones [Hilde Krones Papers], Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung (vga) [Austrian Labour History Society] (hereafter vga), Vienna, Austria. This article is part of a larger book project on the Hilde Krones archive that the author is currently working on. Translation into English by Jason Heilman.
Benjamin 2007 [1942], 261.
Benjamin, 2007, 261.
Studer 2020, 26–33.
Zimmermann 2021, 660–661. Similar to many of the international trade unionists portrayed by Susan Zimmermann, Krones never used the term feminist to describe herself, thus distancing herself from the bourgeois women’s movement.
NL Hilde Krones [Hilde Krones Papers], vga.
Traverso 2016, 106.
Traverso 2016, 119.
Brown 1999, 26.
Brown 1999, 20.
Brown 1999, 20.
Fisher 2009, 2.
Derrida 1994, 10.
Derrida 1994, 99.
Fisher 2014, 27.
Fisher 2014, 137.
Hemmings 2018, 8.
Hemmings 2018, 8.
Hemmings 2018, 26–28.
Felix Slavik to Rosa Jochmann, Otto Probst to Rosa Jochmann, 11 January 1951, pn6/258, Neues Parteiarchiv [New Party Archive], vga; Rosa Jochmann to Felix Slavik, 15 January 1950 [sic, 1951], pn6/249, Neues Parteiarchiv, vga; Duma 2019, 361.
See, for example, Hauch 2020, 2018, 2015, 2014.
Hilde Krones, “Biografische Skizze” [Biographical sketch], Folder 10, Box 1, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Krones, “Biografische Skizze” [Biographical sketch].
Hilde Handl, “Jugendpsychologie und Jugendbewegung,” Maturaarbeit [high school thesis, draft], 1928, Folder 37, Box 3, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Mesner 1997, 187–188.
Hilde Handl to Franz Krones [draft], n.d. [1934], Folder 28, Box 3.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, 23 March 1944, field letter, Folder 46, Box 6, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Adamczak 2017, 107.
Adamczak 2017, 286.
Bauer 1976 [1924], 872.
Hilde Handl to Franz Krones, 31 December 1938, Folder 38, Box 4, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Handl to Franz Krones, 31 December 1938.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, 31 December 1938.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, 22 October 1942, Folder 40, Box 4, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Organisation Todt (ot), named after its head Fritz Todt, carried out military construction work in occupied Europe, using forced labour. Since 1943, the organization was also involved in the construction of concentration camps.
Hilde Krones to Erwin Scharf, 18 July 1945, draft, Folder 35, Box 3, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones to Erwin Scharf, 18 July 1945.
Hilde Krones, “Tagebuch der Ereignisse” [Diary of events], 12 to 29 April 1945, Folder 49, Box 6, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
It seems that during the liberation, her basic Russian language skills were indeed helpful in negotiating with Red Army soldiers and the Soviet administration. Hilde Krones, “Tagebuch der Ereignisse” [Diary of events]; Schärf 1948, 91.
Franz Krones to Hilde Krones, 17 September 1945, Folder 49, Box 6, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Tagebuch [Diary] Hilde Krones 26 May to 27 June 1945, Folder 49, Box 6, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Bauer 1936, 312–336.
Mesner 1990, 479.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, draft, 20 May 1945, Folder 49, Box 6, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, 23 August 1944, field letter, Folder 49, Box 6, NL Krones, vga.
Deutsches Reich, Arbeitsbuch [Employee’s record book] Hilde Krones, geb. [nee] Handl, Folder 9, Box 1, NL Krones, vga.
A famous quote by Olympe de Gouges; for a detailed account of the French Revolution as a point of reference for German and Austrian Social Democracy until 1934 (such as Adler 1906), see Ducange 2019.
Hilde Krones, “Die Frau im Parlament” [The woman in parliament], radio speech, 17 July 1946, pn18/211, Neues Parteiarchiv, vga.
See Helfert 2021, 218–221, 267, 304; Popp 1918.
Hilde Krones, “Die Frau im Parlament” [The woman in parliament].
Hilde Krones, “Haben wir wirklich die Wahl?” [Do we really have the choice?], typoscript [n.d.], Folder 20, Box 2, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
In other letters, Dr. Paulmann was portrayed by her as a paternalistic but supportive boss. Despite his prominent position, she does not explicitly characterize him as an ardent National Socialist.
H. Krones, “Haben wir wirklich die Wahl?” [Do we really have the choice?].
See F. Krones 1946, 12; F. Krones, “Die Neue Demokratie” [The new democracy], 1 September 1945, speech at the Sozialistischer Klub, pn2/2813, Neues Parteiarchiv [New Party Archive], vga. On the contemporary debate, see Wippermann 1981.
Aufzeichnungen zu Hilde Krones [Notes on Hilde Krones], Folder 30, Box 3, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Frauenzentralkomitee 1947, 62. For interwar debates on the “right to work” on the level of international trade unions, see Zimmermann 2021, 427–464; for the equal pay debate in the contemporary context of the nascent Cold War, see Johanna Wolf’s contribution to this volume.
“Protokolle des Frauenzentral-Komitees der Sozialischen Partei Österreichs” [Protocols of the Women’s Central Committee, Socialist Party of Austria], 8 December 1947, 163, pn18/753, Neues Parteiarchiv, vga.
“Protokolle des Frauenzentral-Komitees” [Protocols of the Women’s Central Committee], 163.
“Protokolle des Frauenzentral-Komitees” [Protocols of the Women’s Central Committee], 163.
Niederkofler 2009, 121–122.
“Protokolle des Frauenzentral-Komitees” [Protocols of the Women’s Central Committee], 163.
For Austria, see Mugrauer 2020, 705–716.
“Wiedererrichtung der Frauenorganisation” [Re-establishment of the Women’s Organization], n.d. [1946]; [Report on the Women’s Organization], n.d. [1947], both Folder 54, Box 7, NL Hildes Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones, “Zur politischen Debatte” [On the political debate], draft, Folder 12, Box 1, NL Hildes Krones, vga.
“Hilde Krones” 1949, 2. See Ingrisch 1989, 301.
See, for example, Wodak 2015.
Adamczak 2017, 78.
Adamczak 2017, 80.
For more detail, see Weber 2011.
Erwin Scharf, “Für Susanne [Sohn] zum Aufsatz von Doris Ingrisch” [For Susanne, regarding Doris Ingrisch’s article], n.d. [1989], NL Erwin Scharf [Erwin Scharf Papers], Alfred-Klahr-Gesellschaft [Alfred Klahr Society], Vienna, Austria.
“Disposition für eine Wahlrede” [Disposition for an election speech], n.d. [1945], Folder 20, Box 2, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
“Schwelle des Todes, Schwelle der Zukunft” [Threshold of death, threshold of the future], draft, Folder 20, Box 2, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, 13 June 1944, field letter, Folder 48, Box 6, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Otto Leichter to Hilde Krones, 5 September 1948, Folder 22, Box 2, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones, “Wien im Oktober 1948” [Vienna, October 1948], transcript, Folder 10, Box 1, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones to Franz Krones, 9 November 1942, field letter, Folder 40, Box 4, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Hilde Krones, Diary, 23 October 1934, Folder 37, Box 3, NL Hilde Krones, vga.
Ingrisch 1989, 331.
Erwin Scharf, “Für Susanne [Sohn].”
For a discussion of agency and women’s labour activism, see Zimmermann 2021, 660–687.
Rosa Jochmann to Karl Mark, 24 August 1987, Folder 17, Box 2, NL Rosa Jochmann [Rosa Jochmann papers], vga.
See, for example, Hindels 1948, 267.
See, for instance, “Wiedererrichtung der Frauenorganisation” [Re-establishment of the Women’s Organization], n.d. [1946]; [Report on the Women’s Organization], n.d. [1947].
See Scharf 1988, 168.
Adamczak 2021, 108.
Adamczak 2021, 109.
Adamczak 2021, 115.
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