The Memoir of Ilse Seger: Wife, Mother, Hostage, Nazi Resister

Elisabeth ＂Ilse＂ Seger was the wife of Gerhart Heinrich Seger, a German Social Democratic member of the Reichstag from 1930 to 1933. He was reelected for the last time on March 5, 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. A week later, the Nazis arrested him and held him in ＂protective custody＂ for three months in a local prison in Dessau and then sent him to Oranienburg concentration camp for six months, until he escaped to Czechoslovakia.

In The Memoir of Ilse Seger, Ilse tells Gerhart’s story, but more importantly, she tells her own story: of her early resistance to the Nazi regime as a political opponent herself; of her solidarity with the Jews during the early years of Nazi persecution; of her defiance of expectations for women at the time; of her time as a hostage alongside her daughter, Renate, in Rosslau concentration camp and how they got out with help from members of Parliament; and, lastly, of her first years living in exile in France and Switzerland as her husband went on an anti-fascist speaking tour in the US. Ilse’s story is an incredible contribution to our understanding of gendered political resistance, life in early German concentration camps, and Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, by showing what everyday life was like for the wife of a political opponent in Nazi Germany.

The Memoir of Ilse Seger is a gripping narrative of adventure and intrigue about the wartime life of an ordinary, decent woman.

Melissa Kravetz is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Longwood University. She also teaches at The Alexander Lebenstein Teacher Education Institute at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. She is author of Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics, and Professional Identity.Mark Brandt is Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He is Ilse Seger’s grandson.