Cläre Jung
| Cläre Jung | |
|---|---|
| Born |
23 February 1892 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | 25 March 1981 (aged 89) East Berlin, East Germany |
| Other names | Clara Jung |
| Occupation |
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| Spouse(s) | |
Cläre Jung (2 February 1892 – 25 March 1981) was a German journalist, writer and political activist.
Cläre Otto enjoyed a middle-class upbringing. Her father was a feed merchant. After finishing at her single-sex secondary school she came into contact with the circle of Berlin-based expressionist poets around Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler and, most notably, Franz Pfemfert. would later describe her as "the soul and muse of the little circle". Pfemert edited a left-wing political and literary magazine called Die Aktion: Cläre Otto got to know his fellow contributors to Die Aktion, among them the restless anarchist poet Franz Jung whom she would later marry and under whose shadow, according to some evaluations, she would spend much of her life. However, her first marriage was to another Die Aktion contributor, the writer and political activist Richard Oehring: the two of them were divorced after two years, in 1917. By September 1918 she was living with Franz Jung, although it would be another ten years before the two of them got married.
During the war she worked as a medical assistant at the in Berlin between 1915 and 1916. In 1916 she obtained a position as press agency secretary, work with which she continued till 1921. During the revolutionary period that followed the war she was contributing to the journal Russische Korrespondenz, and she was also working as a secretary for the Communist Workers' Party, a breakaway grouping founded in April 1920 by Franz Jung (together with Alexander Schröder, Alexander Schwab and Bernhard Reichenbach) as part of the bewildering political splintering that was a feature of left-wing politics in Germany at the time.
In August 1921 she traveled to Moscow with Franz Jung. The previous year he had visited Lenin, arriving in May 1920 with party comrade Jan Appel. Travel between two states in revolutionary turmoil was not without its challenges. In the absence of regular rail links, a Hamburg-based Communist called Herrmann Knüfgen was able to smuggle the men onto a steam boat called Senator Schröder: once on board they persuaded the captain to alter course, and were thereby delivered to Murmansk. His journey being illegal, in order to return home he traveled under a false name. Back in Germany, Jung's political activity earned him several months in prison during the early part of 1921. He had already received Soviet citizenship in June 1920 during his visit at that time, and Franz Jung would never lose his compelling enthusiasm for Soviet Russia. Jung was banned from overseas travel, but nevertheless Franz and Cläre managed to cross into Denmark at the end of August 1921, and then obtained a passage to the Soviet Union on a freight steamer called "Flora": the two of them now settled in Moscow. Cläre obtained work as a secretary in the Moscow office of the Comintern Central Committee. After this she helped with reconstruction within the framework of Workers International Relief, and was involved in setting up orphanages in Perm and Jekaterinburg. She later worked, along with Franz Jung, on the rebuilding of the "Ressora" metalwork plant in Petrograd which, by the time circumstances had persuaded them to leave the country in November 1923, was back to producing steel oil barrels and ship building components.
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