Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich (15 September 1901 – 16 June 1979) was a German novelist, activist, professor of ancient history, and the first woman to be elected full member of the German Academy of Sciences. She was a life-long supporter of Native American causes and the author of two series of revisionist Western novels, retelling US history centered on an Oglala Lakota hero. In 1965, during a visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation, she was given the Oglala name Lakota-Tashina. Oglala Lakota painter Arthur Amiotte referred to her as the “German Ella Deloria: grandmotherly, kind, and very interested in people.”
Life
Background and early life Welskopf-Henrich was born in Munich, daughter of Rudolf Henrich, a lawyer, and his wife, born Marie Bernbeck. As a child, Welskopf-Henrich enjoyed mountaineering in the Alps. In 1907, her family moved to Stuttgart, where Welskopf-Henrich first enrolled in school. At age nine, she was gifted by an uncle James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, which sparked in her a lifelong interest and solidarity with Native American peoples.
At age ten, she read in a newspaper about Mexico's president deploying armed troops against the Yaqui people of Sonora resisting displacement and wrote a letter to Mexican president Francisco Madero. She pleaded for compassionate treatment of the Yaqui and Madero replied, by letter to Welskopf-Henrich, stating he had instructed his troops to treat the Yaqui humanely. In 1913, Welskopf-Henrich's family relocated to Berlin, where she attended the Auguste-Victoria Lyceum and then the Augustaschule, a humanistic girls' Gymnasium, taking her Abitur in 1921. At Frederick-William University, she studied philosophy, ancient history, law, and economics. In May 1925 she received her doctorate in economics, "magna cum laude", with a dissertation on the organisation of the international shoe trade. She was urged to pursue a post-doctoral degree (habilitation), but her academic career was cut short by her family's finances due to hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic. Her father died in 1926. She worked in a department store 1925–27, at the Social Women's School in Berlin-Charlottenburg 1927–28, and from 1928 to 1945 at the Reich Statistical Office. In 1933 she declined an academic post rather than join the NSDAP.
Resistance activity During Nazi reign, Welskopf-Henrich took part in the Confessing Church, a movement within German Protestantism in opposition to Nazi efforts to unify Protestant churches into a single, pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church. She was a confirmed opponent of National Socialism active in the resistance movement. She clandestinely delivered food and medication to interned Jews and French prisoners of war and assisted inmates from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp brought into Berlin as laborers. In 1944, she helped one, Rudolf Welskopf, whom she later married, escape after ten years in captivity. She hid Welskopf for months in what remained of her home after the Allied bombings. She was first questioned by police in 1940 over her aid to French prisoners of war and interrogated by the Gestapo on 11 August 1944. In the last months of the war, she helped Welskopf produce leaflets urging German soldiers to surrender to the Red Army. Her 1953 autobiographical novel Jan und Jutta summarizes some of her resistance activity.
After the war War ended in May 1945, leaving a large region surrounding Berlin administered as the Soviet occupation zone and Welskopf-Henrich remained in what would later become East Berlin. From 1945 to April 1946, she was personal secretary to the mayor of Charlottenburg and head of the district's statistics office, then moved to the Soviet Sector. In 1947, she took a position with "Baustoff-Ost GmbH", a building materials business.
In April 1946, following the Merger of the KPD and SPD creating the Socialist Unity Party (SED), Welskopf-Henrich was among hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members, who adopted SED membership while the SED developed a one-party state. In order to better inform herself, Welskopf-Henrich attended evening classes in Marxism–Leninism. Welskopf-Henrich's son, Rudolf, was born in 1948.
Political views In 1946, Welskopf-Henrich joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Her decision to join the Communist Party may have been influenced by her 1946 marriage to Rudolf Welskopf, who had been a member of the KPD since 1930.
Welskopf-Henrich's son, writing in his foreword to the 2015 posthumous edition of her novel, Bertholds neue Welt, identifies the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary as a turning point in his mother's political position. After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, she abandoned her Stalinist positions. She remained in the party — in 1978 she told the Zeit journalist Dieter E. Zimmer that she had always been politically engaged, but was no "organization man" — but in a discipline dominated by Marxism-Leninism, accepted a plurality of theories and methods; she was in dialogue with the dissident Robert Havemann, was, in Lorenz's words, "an often uncomfortable person" for the GDR leadership, and, after 1956 and 1968, smuggled money to persecuted writers in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was Wolf Biermann, expatriated from the GDR two years earlier, who put Zimmer in touch with her in 1978, as Zimmer revealed in 2010.
Bertholds neue Welt (Berthold's New World) was conceived as a sequel to her earlier novel, Jan und Jutta, and set in post-war Germany. Welskopf-Henrich did not seek publication during her lifetime, knowing her critical perspective of the GDR would foil publication. The novel was posthumously published in 2015.
Academic background In 1949, Welskopf-Henrich was accepted at the Humboldt University of Berlin to a course in Ancient History.Wolfgang Schuller: Inhalte althistorischer Forschungen in der DDR, In: Isolde Stark (Hrsg.): Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf und die Alte Geschichte in der DDR. Beiträge der Konferenz vom 21. bis 23. November 2002 in Halle/Saale. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag 2005, p. 80 From 1952 she held a teaching post without yet having habilitated; in 1959 she habilitated with Die Muße als Problem im Leben und Denken der Hellenen von Homer bis Aristoteles (Leisure as a Problem in the Lives and Thoughts of the Hellenes from Homer to Aristotle), published in 1962 as Probleme der Muße im alten Hellas. In 1960, she was appointed Dozent and professor of Ancient History; she had led the Ancient History department in an acting capacity since May 1958 and was confirmed in the post on 1 January 1961, and in 1964 she became the first woman to be elected a full member of the German Academy of Sciences. Her first habilitation thesis had been rejected in 1954 by Werner Hartke, who later opposed her election to the Academy; only seven women had preceded her there, as corresponding, or honorary, not full, members. She personally paid up to eight research assistants from her royalties, protected politically suspect colleagues — one, the ancient historian Peter Musiolek, she took into her home after his release from a Soviet camp and found him work. Although emerita from 1966, she led the department in an acting capacity until 1968. In 1968, she declined an international congress in Indiana in solidarity with colleagues denied U.S. visas. Academic works In 1969, Welskopf-Henrich launched a research project into city states – "Polis" – in Ancient Greece. Supported by over sixty academics from East and West Germany and other countries, Hellenische Poleis (The Hellenic Poleis) was published by Akademie Verlag, Berlin, in 1974 in four volumes; she financed the project largely from her novel royalties.
In her follow-up work, supported by more than one-hundred contributors from forty countries, Welskopf-Henrich, classified social classes in Ancient Greece. Soziale Typenbegriffe im alten Griechenland (Social Classes of Ancient Greece), was completed after her death and published by Akademie Verlag, Berlin, in 1985.
Travels abroad Welskopf-Henrich's academic standing in the GDR allowed her to travel abroad. Her son writes of holiday trips to Hungary after 1956 and to Czechoslovakia after 1968. As her revisionist Western novels grew popular internationally, Welskopf-Henrich was able to travel beyond the confines of Soviet sponsored "fraternal socialism".
Travels to the US and Canada Welskopf-Henrich travelled to North America five times — Canada in 1963 and the United States in 1965, 1968, 1970, and 1974 — to engage with the Lakota and to deepen her understanding of their lives, culture, and traditions. In 1963, at Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, she met the Lakota author John Okute Sica; after his death she sought a publisher for his manuscript in vain, and it appeared in German in 2009, as Das Wunder vom Little Bighorn, with her foreword. The Stasi opened a file on her in 1972 and closed it the next year as insignificant. In 1974, lacking a Canadian visa, but knowing that Native people crossed the border freely through the Jay Treaty, she entered Canada as an "Indian grandmother".
Novels
Novels about the Weimar Republic, Nazism, and aftermath of World War II Welskopf-Henrich lived through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the GDR. In the 1950s she wrote several novels in part based on her experiences. Zwei Freunde (Two Friends), written in shorthand during the war, to hide it from the Gestapo, concerns the Weimar Republic and early manifestations of Nazism. Jan und Jutta (Jan and Jutta), published in 1953, is in most aspects an autobiographical account of Welskopf-Henrich's experiences during World War II, including her relationship with her future husband, Rudolf Welskopf. Der Bergführer (The Mountain Guide), published in 1954 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag, centers on a mountain guide in the Dolomites in 1939. The novel deals with Nazism and its story was censored, leading to historical inaccuracies. The book met with little success upon initial release. Faithful to the original manuscript, it was re-issued in 2015. Bertholds neue Welt (Berthold's New World) a sequel to Welskopf-Henrich's earlier novel, Jan und Jutta, and set in postwar Germany, was posthumously published in 2015.
Revisionist Western novels Drawing on her decades-long engagement with the Lakota history and culture and her time among the Lakota, Welskopf-Henrich wrote two series of revisionist Western novels. The novels retell US history and center on Oglala Lakota heroes. Penny credits the novels with ethnographic seriousness; they give a humanistic portrayal of the Lakota and center on two pivotal events in US history: Custer’s 1876 defeat at the Little Bighorn and the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee. The novels were translated into 18 languages and Die Söhne der Großen Bärin alone sold more than 7.5 million copies. Both series remain in print. She also wrote a children's book, Der Steinknabe (The Stone Boy, 1952), based on The Stone Boy in Dakota author Charles Eastman's Indian Boyhood.
Die Söhne der Großen Bärin Die Söhne der Großen Bärin (Sons of the Great Bear) began publication in 1951. It is a series of six novels set in the years 1862 to 1877. The hero, Harka, later called Tokei-ihto, is an Oglala Lakota youth, who defends Lakota lands against the U.S. Army, gold-seekers, and settlers, when gold is discovered in the Black Hills, and he rises to become a visionary leader of his people. Held prisoner at a U.S. Army fort during the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, he escapes and leads his people to freedom across the Missouri into Canada. Die Söhne der Großen Bärin is a classic of youth literature and in 1963 UNESCO listed it among the best books for young readers in the world.