Ursula Hirschmann, a Woman for the United States of Europe

Giulio Saputo
Chief Editor of the online journal Eurobull

Today we would like to remember a woman who has been the living proof of the European vocation of the Resistance, who has always fought for the rights of the weakest and who was committed to realizing the Ventotene project to which she was dedicated from the very beginning. A project that she has spread and defended risking her life during the Nazi-fascist dictatorship in Italy and in Europe, a revolutionary project through which she dreamed to realize also all women’s emancipation, unifying them in the fight for common individual and collective goals.

From “Noi senzapatria” [“We with no homeland”] by Ursula Hirschmann, 1993:

“I am not Italian, despite I have Italian children, I am not German, although Germany has been my homeland once. And I am also not Jewish, although it was just a coincidence that I was not arrested and then burned in one of those furnaces in some death camps. We “déracinés” of Europe that have ‘changed more borders than shoes’, as Brecht says – this king of the “déracinés” –, we also have nothing to lose except our chains in a united Europe and therefore, we are federalists.”

Ursula Hirschmann was born in Berlin on the 2^nd of September of 1913, from a family of the middle class with Jewish origin. She attended the University of Berlin with her younger brother Albert Otto (who would be a candidate to the Nobel Prize) and she met there, for the first time, Eugenio Colorni. In those years, Ursula carried out a clandestine anti-Nazi activity together with other socialist and communist youngsters, since the social-democratic party in which she was previously engaged had not taken any initiative to oppose concretely the emergent Nazi wave.

Once left Germany and escaped to Paris with her brother, she started attending the European anti-fascist circles and she got closer to communist groups. Convinced in not joining the communist party, she remained with the socialists to support the politics of the "united front" and she got more and more distant from her ex-companions because of the continuous attacks to the people around her conducted by the supporters of the Soviet doctrine, with the accusation of "deviationism" (treason). Reunited with Colorni, she closed the communist parenthesis and she decided to go to Trieste, marrying him in 1935. Once concluded the studies in languages at the Venice University, she took part in the antifascist activities together with her husband. When he was arrested, in 1938, she decided to follow him in his confinement on the island of Ventotene.

She participated with the group of the confined in the discussions about the “Manifesto for a united and free Europe” and worked for its diffusion on the continent together with Ada Rossi and Spinelli's sisters. She moved to Melfi with Colorni and when he escaped from the confine to join the Resistance in Rome, she considered their sentimental relationship in crisis, and decided to go to Milan with her daughters to continue the Resistance activity and the federalist propaganda: she cooperated with Guglielmo Usellini, Cerilo, Fiorella e Gigliola Spinelli in the publication of the clandestine review “L’Unità Europea”. After the foundation of the Italian European Federalist Movement, she emigrated in Switzerland with Spinelli and Rossi. The European Resistance owes very much to the coordination work of Ursula from Geneva, that will continue with the organization of the first convention for the United States of Europe in a newly liberated Paris (Orwell, Camus, Mumford and many others will attend the event).

She married Spinelli and decided to cooperate with him in the fight of all his life, convinced that democracy can develop only if it is founded on a historical new basis: the one of the federated peoples (from her letter to Rossi, 4 January 1948). Ursula will always operate actively with a leading role in the organization of the federalist activity, until the foundation in 1975 of Femmes pour l’Europe in Brussels. This association aimed at reuniting the front of European women engaged in politics and in the cultural field, focusing on concrete problematics ranging from the promotion of access to education to the defence of equal pay, until the fight for the improvement of life conditions of immigrant women and in developing countries.

Ursula Hirschmann believed that it is necessary to put an end to the reciprocal distrust existing among women actively engaged in political life and feminists. It was essential for her to collect all energies – participating on an equal basis in the political, social, cultural and economic choices – for common goals:

To arrive there, they have to overcome another obstacle in the path of their fight. For them in fact, women must begin first to free themselves from their individual chains (the fight for abortion, for equal pay, etc.) and ‘afterward’ they can be engaged in politics […]. Women should, on the contrary, fight on all fronts […]. The fight for the political unification of Europe can be an important step and a model for women […]. Women will have to start considering Europe as a city in formation, susceptible of taking the form that will be given to it.

Shortly after, Ursula will get ill and she will never be able to get back actively to a commitment that today is probably more relevant than ever, looking at the fragmentation of the struggles of our contemporary civil society.

Federica Turco will say about her: “Ursula represents a powerful figure of political militant that, at the same time, is engaged in organizing a complex familiar life (…). Her freshness, her determination, her dedication have always been the one of the young Berliner that decided, in July 1933, that Europe was her home and, therefore, from that moment on, she has been feeding on Europe”.