Hilde Koplenig

Koplenig, Hilde; born Oppenheim (1904–2002), historian, journalist and lawyer

Koplenig Hilde, née Oppenheim, historian, journalist and lawyer.  Born Karolinenthal, Bohemia (Praha, CZ), August 31, 1904;  died Vienna, April 16, 2002;  mos.  Daughter of → Samuel Oppenheim and Helene Oppenheim, née Löbl, from 1928 wife of the communist politician Johann Koplenig (1891–1968), mother of the translator Elisabeth Markstein (née Vienna, 1929).  - From 1915 K. attended the Cottage Lyceum and the Black Forest School in Vienna and, after graduating from high school in 1922, studied law and political science at the University of Vienna, completing a semester abroad at the University of Zurich in 1924;  1927 Dr.  rer.  pole.  with a dissertation “On the constitutional regulation of the peasant question in the French Revolution” with → Max Adler and → Hans Kelsen.  She also took part in a course at the Social Academy in Vienna, which she completed with a welfare diploma.  K., who had joined the Socialist Workers' Youth in 1922, switched to the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) in 1924 and worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow from 1927-28.  Then back in Vienna, from 1931–33 she worked as a secretary at the trade agency of the USSR.  After the KPÖ was banned in 1933, the couple fled to Prague - where K. supported her husband as a secretary -, to Paris in 1938 and from there to Moscow in 1939.  It was during this phase that she began to have doubts about the party's policies, including:  because of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union as well as the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Evacuated to Nižnij Novgorod in 1941, K. lived with her children in the holiday children's home of a large company and was next to a.  Assistant to the pediatrician practicing there.  At the end of 1942 she was able to return to Moscow and worked there from 1943 for the Austrian radio station of Radio Moscow under Walter Fischer, but also as a writer and editor.  In 1945 K. returned to Vienna, where she was part of the editorial team of the communist daily newspaper “Volksstimme” and the magazine “Voice of the Woman” from 1946–64, despite increasing distance from the politics of the KPÖ and the Soviet Union.  After her retirement in 1964 she worked inter alia.  in the journal “Wiener Tagebuch” under Franz Marek and published on topics of the French Revolution, such as the study “Birth of Freedom.  Shapes and Events, France 1779–1794 ”(1964) or the collection“ The Debate about the French Revolution ”(1975), edited together with Walter Grab.  As early as 1959 Evgenij V. Tarlés had translated "Napoleon" from Russian.  It was also important to her to review the biography of her husband, to which she dedicated two articles. (The text has been translated into English from the original German text using Google translate and contains errors).  

source Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon ab 1815 (2. überarbeitete Auflage - online) http://www.biographien.ac.at/oebl/oebl_K/Koplenig_Hilde_1904_2002.xml