Women's Portraits

Hannelore Don

Youth age and professional training

Hannelore Don is born September 5^th, 1929 in Bochum, an industrial town in western Germany. She has grown up in a workers‘ settlement and her self-understanding is to be a child belonging to the working-class. She is ten years old when the Second World War breaks out. Temporarly she can escape the terrible bombing nights when she is spending a certain time in a children’s home. The war episodes have formed her. About that time she has reported to her friends.

She finishes school and works on a farm because here „ is the only place you can subsist because there you must not starve“. She becomes a farm-girl, eine Bauernmagd as she puts it. Later she works with a family. as a house-maid.

Finally she goes to Zürich where she is trained to be an actress.

Family and political activity

Together with her family, husband and children, Hannelore moves to Gießen, a town north of Frankfurt, into the flat that she is still living in. She has two sons.

The municipal theatre cannot engage her, because there is no position offered. Being a housewife and mother she has to care for the family. When it comes up that the creek in the middle of the town should be covered in order to get parking space, Hannelore joines the citizens‘ action to protest against. This is the moment when she gets interested in politics.

So, when in 1970 Willy Brandt, the German Federal Chancellor, makes his sensational  prostration in the ghetto of Warschau, Hannelore Don enters the German Socialist Party, SPD. Together with her sons she walks many kilometres in participating in the Friedensmärsche, peace marches.

Helmut Schmidt, the German Chancellor who follows Brandt consents to.the stationing of the pershings, an intermediate-range missile, in 1981. Frau Don quits the party after ten years of membership. Three years later she joines the  Greens.

Salaried job and cultural social work

Hannelore has an employment in the social welfare office at the municipality. Here she can earn her own money. The burgomaster asks her: „Do you think you can do cultural work with seniors? We need a person who is able to handle with older women and men?“ It is the beginning of the cultural work with seniors in Gießen. Hannelore Don visits all senior clubs in the town and invites people to participate in activities like gymnastics or rôle playing.

One action she starts is still lively in her mind : The mannequin parade with men and women aged beyond sixty. The oldest woman is 83 years old. The idea to this action comes to her mind when she learns that a woman needs a new wintercoat, but doesn’t want to leave the shop as usual with a dark coat decorated by a false Persian collar. So Hannelore goes on asking the big shops downtown and can win them up for this extraordinary show. The town authorities make the town hall available for the event. The show is a full success.

It is the town jubilee, the 800 anniversity in 1997 when Hannelore represents Salome Countess of Gießen.

By the end of her business life Hannelore Don is elected into the town council and becomes the honorary female councillor in the city parliament. For thirteen years she will be there, reelected three times.

Retirement and final statements

2006 the municipal theatre plans to put on stage an Hommage to Anne Frank‘s, the young Jewish woman who was murdered in Auschwitz. It is Annes 75^th anniversary. Hannelore being of the same age is asked to represent a friend of Anne’s. She should act and talk about the time and the memory of their common youth. Hannelore agrees in doing the job. She acts in such a convincing way that afterwards people ask her, if she really has come from Israel to be on stage in Gießen.

Asked what has imprinted her most, Hannelore states: „It is the end of the war and what we call Kulturschock I have passed through. It is the late realization that we, the young people of that time, have been terribly cheated. When I remember this I still get furious.“

What her matters now are the disappeared and forgotten women.To the young generation she recommends to cut off the nuclear power stations.On my question what she wants for herself, she answers: „Reposing, finally.“

Notes on her rich life are privately owned.

Erdmute Dietmann-Beckert, August 2011