Hanna Reuter

A biographical approach

The life and works of Ernst Reuter can hardly be evaluated without also giving thought to his second wife, Hanna Reuter (1899–1974). For more than 25 years, she remained at the politician’s side as his spouse but also as his companion and advisor. It was partly thanks to her courage and unceasing efforts that her social democrat husband was twice released from concentration camp imprisonment in 1934. She accompanied Ernst Reuter into exile in Turkey and then returned to Berlin with him in 1946. After his death in September 1953, she regarded herself as the trustee and guardian of her husband’s political and intellectual legacy. In the 1950s and 1960s, she had a considerable influence on exactly how West Berlin commemorated Ernst Reuter.

Within the context of the research project, historian Merle Büter systematically examined Hanna Reuter’s biography, which was intertwined with that of her husband in many ways, for the first time. This small study was largely based on documents within Hanna Reuter’s legacy that had so far been overlooked by scholars. The results were published in 2017 in Berlin in Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the yearbook of the Berlin Landesarchiv .