Berta Lask (1878–1967)

Berta Lask was born to a Jewish family in Wadowice, Poland, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father was a paper manufacturer and a teacher. The philosopher Emil Lask was her older brother. In 1885 the family moved to Brandenburg, Germany, where Berta went to school in Bad Freienwalde, During this time, she started writing. She also attended a girls' secondary school in Berlin, where she was taught by feminist Helene Lang. In 1901, she married Louis Jacobsohn, 15 years her senior, a neurologist and lecturer at the Berlin Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, with whom she had four children. Her first play was written in 1912 and her poetry collections Stimmen and Rufe aus dem Dunkel were published in 1919 and 1921. She was an activist in the women's movement, and became a Communist in the early 1920s. She began writing for the Rote Fahne and other Communist papers.
In 1925, she visited the Soviet Union for the first time. She was repeatedly accused of treason during the Weimar Republic and her plays were banned. On the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933, Berta Lask was arrested but released, and she fled Germany for the USSR; her husband, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter followed in 1936. One of her sons was murdered by the Nazis in Dachau concentration camp. Berta Lask continued to write in Russia, at times under the pseudonym Gerhard Wieland, and her husband worked as a doctor in to Sebastopol in the Crimea. After his death in 1940, Berta lived with her son Hermann in Arkhangelsk and in Moscow. In 1953, she went back to live in East Germany.