Ursula Hirschmann (2 September 1913 – 8 January 1991) was a German
anti-fascist activist and an advocate of European federalism.
Life and career
Hirschmann was born into a middle-class Jewish family to Carl Hirschmann and Hedwig Marcuse in
Berlin. She studied economics at Humboldt University of Berlin, together with her brother
Albert O. Hirschman
Albert Otto Hirschman (born ''Otto-Albert Hirschmann''; April 7, 1915 – December 10, 2012) was a German economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of de ...
, later a candidate for the Nobel Prize. In 1932, she joined the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party to participate in the resistance against the advance of the Nazis.
In the summer of 1933, Ursula and her brother moved to Paris, where they became re-acquainted with
Eugenio Colorni, a young Italian philosopher and socialist whom they had already met in Berlin. She continued on to Trieste, the home town of Colorni, where she married him in 1935. They had three daughters: Silvia, Renata, and Eva (who, in 1973, married the Indian economist
Amartya Sen
Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economi ...
; earlier she had been married in 1962 to Italian economist and statesman
Giorgio La Malfa; while married to La Malfa, she met at MIT and Chicago in the USA about 1964-1965 the Indian economist
Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri; she left her husband and went with Datta Chaudhuri to Delhi. Later she left Datta Chaudhuri and married Sen after their respective divorces came through).
The couple became engaged in the clandestine anti-fascist opposition. In 1939, Eugenio was arrested and sent to confinement on the island of
Ventotene
Ventotene (; locally ; la, Pandataria or , from grc, Πανδατερία, Pandatería, or ) is one of the Pontine Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the coast of Gaeta right at the border between Lazio and Campania, Italy. The municipality of ...
. Ursula followed her husband there, but as she was not herself held in confinement, she could travel back to the mainland.
Among the other prisoners and friends of
Eugenio Colorni on Ventotene were
Ernesto Rossi and
Altiero Spinelli
Altiero Spinelli (31 August 1907 – 23 May 1986) was an Italian politician, political theorist and European federalist, referred to as one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
A communist and militant anti-fascist in his youth, he sp ...
, who, in 1941, co-authored the famous
Ventotene Manifesto
The Ventotene Manifesto ( it, Manifesto di Ventotene), officially entitled ''For a Free and United Europe. A Draft Manifesto'' (''Per un'Europa libera e unita. Progetto d'un manifesto''), is a political statement written by Altiero Spinelli while ...
"for a free and united Europe", i. e., an early sketch of a post-war democratic European Union. Ursula managed to bring the text of the manifesto to the mainland, and took part in its dissemination. On 27 and 28 August 1943, she participated in the foundation of the
European Federalist Movement in Milan.
Having escaped from Ventotene in 1943, Ursula Hirschmann's husband Eugenio Colorni was murdered by fascists in Rome in May 1944. Thereafter, Altiero Spinelli became Ursula's second husband and adopted her daughters. The couple went to Switzerland, and from there to Rome, where they settled after the war. They had three daughters: Diana,
Barbara, and Sara Spinelli.
In 1975, Ursula Hirschmann founded the Association Femmes pour l'Europe in Brussels, then in the first days of December of that year, suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage, followed by
aphasia
Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in th ...
, from which she was never to recover completely.
Sources
*Silvana Boccanfuso,
Ursula Hirschmann. Una donna per l'Europa', Genova, Ed. Ultima Spiaggia, 2019,
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hirschmann, Ursula
1913 births
1991 deaths
Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to France
European integration pioneers
Eurofederalism
Italian resistance movement members
Jewish resistance members during the Holocaust
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
Burials in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome
Female resistance members of World War II