Marie Torhorst (28 December 1888 – 7 May 1989) was a German school teacher and political activist who became an East German politician. She served as Minister for People's Education in the state of Thuringia between 1947 and 1950. Some sources identify her as "the first-ever female minister (on state or national level) in the history of Germany". Others are content to record that, within Germany, she was the first-ever female minister in the state of Thuringia.
Marie Torhorst stated and proved what is today known as the Carathéodory-Torhorst theorem in her 1918 doctoral dissertation. The dissertation was subsequently lost and Torhorst's contribution was for many decades overlooked; but in the twenty-first century mathematics scholars are happy to acknowledge and celebrate her work.
Life Provenance Marie Torhorst was born at the end of the so-called "Year of the Three Emperors" in Ledde, then as now a sleepy village in the flat countryside west of Osnabrück. She was the seventh and youngest child of Arnold Torhorst (1841–1909), the local parson and his wife, born Luise Smend (1847–1923). The family seems to have been intellectually gifted. Marie's elder sister, Adelheid, would also achieve a measure of eminence in teaching and, after 1945, in politics. The sisters would later, jointly, have a secondary school named after them. Luise Torhorst had inherited a useful sum of money as a result of which she was able to see to it that not just her four sons, but also her three daughters, received a full education. Marie completed her own schooling at an "Oberlyzeum" (single-sex girls' secondary school).
Student Sources are not completely consistent as to when she embarked on her university education, much of which coincided with the First World War. She attended the University of Bonn, studying Geography, Mathematics and Physics. There are at least two reference to her having also studied at the University of Göttingen.It was from Bonn that in 1918 she received her doctorate: the work was supervised by Hans Hahn. Her dissertation was entitled "Über die Randmenge einfach-zusammenhängender ebener Gebiete": a core conclusion has become known among her scholarly admirers as the Carathéodory-Torhorst theorem or, more simply, as the Torhorst theorem. It might have been thought that her doctorate should have provided a launch pad for a life-long career in the universities sector. There were still vanishingly few women working in high-level academic research at this time, however, and at least one commentator has identified "a lack of confidence in her own mathematical ability" in her autobiography. Also, with Germany economically, militarily and politically broken and on the brink of a year of revolutions in the ports and industrial centres, there was widespread nervousness that Lenin's so-called October Revolution might yet spread uncontrollably through the European continent. Marie Torhorst's own student record of left-wing political activism was no secret.
She joined the socialist "Studenten-Arbeitsgemeinschaft" (apparently an umbrella group of socialist student associations) in 1917. According to one source she passed the exams necessary to qualify her for teaching in state schools in 1919 and 1920. Elsewhere it is indicated that she had already attended the "Stift Keppel" in Allenbach, where she successfully completed a two years teacher-training course in her early 20s, between 1903 and 1905. During the early twentieth century her political record made it hard for her to find a permanent teaching post. She was able to find a part-time teaching position at a Catholic girls' school in Bonn, however, and also found work with the university as a university librarian. It was probably in 1922/23 that she completed several terms of study at the "Handelshochschule" (loosely, "business college", at the time being subsumed into the university) in Cologne, studying business administration and economics, following which she received a qualification in teaching business studies.
Teacher In 1923 Torhorst took on the headship of a private business school for the "Frauenerwerbs- und Ausbildungsverein" (loosely, "Women's employment and training association") in Bremen. She continued to lead the business school till 1929. She also teamed up with politically like-minded teacher colleagues, during this period, to organise evening courses for young people who had been excluded from state schools in the area.
Her political and feminist beliefs had been deeply rooted in Torhorst's personal values and life choices since at least as far back as the First World War, but it was only in 1928 that she became a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was in the same year that she joined the "Freie Lehrergewerkschaft Deutschlands" / FLGD, a teachers' trades union committed to socialist principals. There are indications that within the SPD, as a left-wing member of the party, she often found herself out of sympathy with the party leadership.
Between 1929 and 1933, Marie Torhorst taught and worked as a "Studienrätin" (loosely, "student counsellor") at the Karl Marx School which had been set up in 1921 in Berlin-Neukölln by the education pioneer Fritz Karsen, and then progressively expanded under Karsen's direction during the years that followed. There was much about the school which was considered innovative at the time. In 1929 Karsen took the bold step of turning it into a "Gesamtschule" (loosely, "comprehensive school"), intended to educate children displaying the widest possible range of abilities. Another appealing feature for Torhorst was an underpinning philosophy which insisted that academically talented working class children should have the same opportunities as the children of more prosperous and/or well educated parents to pass the "Abitur" (secondary school final exam). The significance of the "Abitur" in Germany was (and is) that passing it opens the way to university-level education. Torhorst's four years at the school included, in 1932, a six month study trip to the Soviet Union. Her half year in the Soviet Union left a lasting impression.
The early 1930s were marked by an intensification of Germany's political polarisation. In the Reichstag (parliament) this was reflected in political deadlock. In January 1933 the Hitler government took power and rapidly transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. A progressive school in a traditionally left-wing district of Berlin named in honour of Karl Marx was, unsurprisingly, high on the National Socialist hate list. Bernhard Rust was installed as acting Prussian Minister for the Arts and Education on 4 February 1933 (following the dismissal of his predecessor in the office), and on 21 February 1933 Rust dismissed Karsen from the headship of his own school. The teaching staff were dismissed, and when the school reopened later that year it was with a new name, a new set of teachers, and a large swastika flag hanging in the main hall. Karsen emigrated. Marie Torhorst's teaching career was evidently over.
Twelve years of Hitler As soon as Hitler took power Marie's older sister, Adelheid, emigrated to the Netherlands and stayed there for the next twelve years. In 1934 she embarked on a six month marriage of convenience with a man called Jacob Jacobs. Her own resulting change of name, from Adelheid Torhorst to Adelheid Jacobs, turned out to have been prescient. After the German army invaded the Netherlands in 1940, her new name protected her from Nazi persecution. The two sisters had always been close, both politically engaged, both teachers, both unmarried and childless. But Marie Torhorst chose a different course and stayed in Germany. As far as her public self was concerned, hr first job after losing her teaching position was as a catering assistant. She later found a job as an appointments administrator at the Berlin University Hygiene Institute, and another as a typist in the travel office correspondence section of an American Express (AMEXCO) branch. She was, in addition, entitled to receive a pension in respect of the six years during which she had worked as head of a private business school in Bremen between 1923 and 1929, but this pension was payable by the "Reichsversicherungsanstalt", a government agency. It was not paid to her. According to her own understanding set out in a letter to a friend at the time, changes to the law implemented in 1934/35 meant that she was unable to litigate the matter. In addition to her day jobs, Torhorst gave every sign of being part of the new social order emerging in Germany. Between 1935 and 1940 she was a registered member both of the German Labour Front and of the German Red Cross.
According to her own detailed, albeit largely uncorroborated, records she was also a member of other organisations that operated, as far as possible, out of the sight of the homeland security. As soon as she lost her teaching job at beginning of 1933 she became an activist member of "Parole", a locally based resistance group in Berlin-Neukölln. In this group, together with former pupils from the progressive school at which she had taught between 1929 and 1933, she produced an underground anti-government newspaper, also called "Parole". There are indications that she was also involved in underground political discussion groups, and in smuggling out information about conditions in Germany to the exiled Communist Party leadership groups that had ended up after 1933 in Paris, Prague and Moscow, using her communications with her sister in the Netherlands as a conduit.
The authorities seem to have known (or suspected) that the teachers who had lost their jobs when the Karl Marx School in Neukölln had been taken over would (or might) have kept in touch and formed some sort of a resistance organisation. Marie Torhorst was first called in for questioning by the Gestapo in 1937. She was accused of undertaking political work for the (by now illegal) SPD, but she was able to refute the accusation and was released, presumably "for lack of evidence". War broke out in September 1939. Within Germany, government persecution of political opponents and of Jews intensified progressively till the Shoah reached its brutish nadir in 1942. During this time Marie Torhorst concealed one of her former pupils and his mother, also providing the two of them with food. The young man was in particular danger from the government, since he was both Jewish and a Communist. At some point during 1943 someone informed the authorities of the situation. Sources are silent over what happened to the people she had been hiding, but Marie Torhorst herself was detained and taken to the "Hallendorf labour camp" by Watenstedt, near Braunschweig. Given the personal network that she would have acquired during her teaching career, and given her strong political and social opinions, it is likely that Torhorst will have responded to many opportunities to help victims and potential victims of government persecution between 1933 and 1945, and commentators bemoan the lack of relevant research undertaken on the details of resistance activism in Berlin and other German cities. However, many of the actions involved will have depended on maximum secrecy to have been effective, and it therefore seems likely that most of the details will remain unknown.
Before the war ended Torhorst had been released from the labour camp and returned to Berlin. Here she returned to the job in the archives department job with the "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Betriebswirtschaft" (loosely, "German Society for Business Administration") in which she had already been employed between 1939 and her arrest in 1943. During the final months of the war she was also involved in looking after German prisoners of War under the auspices of the "Reichsgruppe Handwerk" (a government backed craftworkers' organisation).
1945 and new beginnings