Emma Döll (née Hohmann, 3 March 1873 – 1930) was a German politician (

SPD 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 wi ...

USPD 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 ...

/ KPD).

Life

Emma Hohmann was born in Rastenburg, a small garrison town then in the

Province of Prussia The Province of Prussia (; ; ; ) was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1824 to 1878. The province was established in 1824 from the provinces of East Prussia and West Prussia, and was dissolved in 1878 when the merger was reversed. König ...

. Her father was a railway official. Her school career included a stint at the agricultural academy in the nearby town of Prussian Holland. She then trained for employment as a cook: for several years she worked as a cook on large farming estates in East and West Prussia. At the beginning of the twentieth century she was living in the southern part of the country, in

Meiningen Meiningen () is a town in the southern part of the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in the region of Franconia and has a population of around 26,000 (2024).

, where she married the tailor Eduard Döll (1873–1947). In 1906 the couple moved north, settling in Danzig. Here she became a member of the Social Democratic Party (''"Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands"'' / SPD). The issue of support for funding 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 ...

was contentious within the party from 1914, and in 1917 the

split apart over the issue. In 1918 or 1919 Döll switched to the breakaway group, launched the previous year as the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (''"Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands"''/ USPD). After the

ended, Danzig, for reasons of geography and history, was given a quasi-autonomous status by the victorious powers as a so-called "free city". The arrangement was presented as a compromise between the wishes of the German-speaking majority, who wished for their city and the surrounding region to remain part of Germany, and the Polish-speaking minority, who wished for it to become part of the newly re-created

Polish state Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

; the compromise satisfied neither community, which opened the way for a few fractious decades in local politics. In May 1920 Döll was elected as a

member of the constitutional assembly mandated to come up with a constitution for the newly redefined territory. Later, in December 1920, the constitutional assembly became the free city's 120 seat legislative assembly (''Volkstag''). Around this time, it was the

that split. Döll was part of the leftwing majority that then joined the newly formed

Communist Party of Germany The Communist Party of Germany (, ; KPD ) was a major Far-left politics, far-left political party in the Weimar Republic during the interwar period, German resistance to Nazism, underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and minor party ...

. At the

Volkstag The Volkstag (English: ''People's Diet'') was the parliament of the Free City of Danzig between 1919 and 1939. After World War I Danzig (Gdańsk) became a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations. The first elections to a const ...

election in November 1923 the Communist Party vote share of just over 9% was well below the 17.5% achieved by the

in the elections for the constitutional Assembly election held in May 1920, but by 1923, the Communists had received sufficient votes to give them 11 seats in the assembly, and one of these went to Döll. She served the full term, until November 1927, after which she was no longer a member. Three years later, in 1930, Döll died at the age of 56 or 57.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Döll, Emma 1873 births 1930 deaths People from Kętrzyn Politicians from the Province of Prussia Social Democratic Party of Germany politicians Independent Social Democratic Party politicians Communist Party of Germany politicians Free City of Danzig politicians