Eleonore Staimer

Eleonore Staimer (born Eleanore Pieck: 14 April 1906 - 7 November 1998) was a German Communist Party activist and official. After 1945 she undertook work for the party, later becoming an East German diplomat. She served as her country's first Ambassador to Yugoslavia between 1966 and 1969.

She was the president's youngest daughter.

Life

Family provenance

Eleonore "Lore" Staimer, the youngest of her parents' three recorded children, was born in Bremen, one of Germany's largest port cities, at a time of accelerating social and political change, driven by rapid industrial and commercial expansion. Wilhelm Pieck, her father, was an active trades unionist and an instinctively adept political strategist. He was a carpenter by training and profession, but the year before Eleonore's birth he had taken a full-time position as party secretary with the by now increasingly mainstream Social Democratic Party (SPD). Her mother, born Christine Häfker, had been a garments worker at the time of her marriage, and also at some point worked as a "home worker" for a Bremen cigarette factory: Christine Häfker appears to have grown up in a relatively unpoliticised household.

Early years

Eleonore attended junior school briefly during 1912/13 in Berlin-Steglitz, after which the family evidently returned to Bremen where she attended middle school ("Bürgerschule") between 1913 and 1918. It was presumably in connection with her father's political involvement that in 1918/19 she was back in Berlin-Steglitz for her final year at school. Pieck had been on the anti-war wing of the SPD from the outset, and powerfully vocal in his opposition to the party's parliamentary support for war funding: Wilhelm Pieck joined the new Communist Party in January 1919, two and a half week after its launch. Eleonore Pieck as still only 14 when she joined the Young Communists later that year. She had already been a member of its socialist precursor organisation since 1918. More usually, in view of her age, sources also indicated that she joined the Communist Party in 1920.

While still at school Elenore Pieck attended a succession of business college evening classes, undertaking courses in shorthand, typing, and book-keeping. There is also reference to half a year spent at a "household school" ("Haushaltsschule"), presumably mastering "domestic sciences". Between 1920 and March 1923 Elenore Pieck found office work with a succession of businesses.

Party worker / party official

In April 1923 she took a job as secretary-assistant to Leo Flieg, who at that time was one of two secretaries to the Organisation Office ("Orgbüro") of the party politburo - effectively the party's ruling committee of the party. She moved on to work as secretary-assistant to Gustav Menzel, a left-leaning lawyer who since 1921 had served as one of 31 communist members in the 421 seat Prussian Landtag (parliament). Mentzel's principal focus in the parliament was on securing proper treatment of political prisoners, but there are indications that Elenore Pieck's duties were relatively broadly based, and that her work for the parliament involved providing secretarial and administrative support to the entire Communist group in it.

1930 brought a change of direction, when Eleanore Pieck went to work for the (implausibly large) Soviet trade mission in Berlin. In 1932 she was sent to Moscow where she worked for the "Peoples' Commissariat for Foreign Trade". However, at the end of that year or the start of 1933 her contract was terminated "due to the insufficiency of [her] language skills".

Hitler years and Moscow exile

In January 1933 the Hitler government took power and quickly transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. By the end of February 1933 it was clear that known Communist Party activist members were at particular risk of enhanced surveillance by the security services, targetted government persecution and worse. Eleanore Pieck appears to have stayed on in Moscow despite no longer being employed by the Foreign Trade commission. Her parents and siblings all fled Germany during 1933, and by the end of 1935 they all seem to have been based in Moscow. Eleanore's mother died from a recurrence of her by now chronic pneumonia in a Moscow clinic at the start of December 1936. (The urn containing her ashes were returned to Germany in 1956.)