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Klaus Gysi b. 3 March 1912 d. 6 March 1999
From Rodovid EN
| Lineage | Gysi |
| Sex | Male |
| Full name (at birth) | Klaus Gysi |
| Parents | |
| Wiki-page | wikipedia:de:Klaus Gysi |
Events
3 March 1912 birth: Berlin, Germany, Neukölln
marriage: ♀ Irene Lessing [Lessing] b. 1912 d. 2007
13 July 1946 child birth: Berlin, ♀ Gabriele Gysi [Gysi] b. 13 July 1946
16 January 1948 child birth: Berlin, ♂ Gregor Florian Gysi [Gysi] b. 16 January 1948
6 March 1999 death: Berlin, Germany
Notes
Klaus’ Independent obit says that he was the son of a Berlin doctor and his Jewish wife. The doctor, non-Jewish, was Hermann Gysi. Hermann seperated from his wife Erna in 1938, according to Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel’s fantastic book Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism, noting that she survived the war in France, as also stated by the Indy obit: With the growing persecution of the Jews by the Hitler regime, Gysi’s parents divorced and his mother fled to France. Klaus and his fiancee, the Russian-born Irene Lessing (they had met while at university in Berlin, but Nazi racial laws made marriage impossible), visited her in 1939 – she pleaded with them not to return to Germany. They resolved to go back but the German invasion intervened and the young couple were briefly interned in Toulouse before escaping. Despite the dangers – Gysi was doubly under threat as a Jew and as a Communist – they moved back to Nazi Germany in 1940 (the party believed he would not be arrested as he did not “look Jewish”). He worked underground throughout the rest of the Nazi regime from a base in his fiancee’s mansion on Berlin’s Schlachtensee. It was only after the end of the war that he could at last marry Irene (sister-in-law of the novelist Doris Lessing).
Klaus was a lifelong Stalinist apparatchik, although removed from his posts in 1953, during the antisemitic turn in the Communist Party, later rehabilitated, purged again, and rehabilitated again. This story is also told in A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe by Jonathan Kaufman. Gregor Gysi, although a Party member, was very much a dissident, and sharply critical of his father’s politics.
Klaus’ wife, Irene Gysi, ne Lessing, was the sister of Gottfried Lessing. Gottfried, as a Jew and Communist, also fled Germany in 1938, for Southern Africa, where he met Doris Taylor, better known as Doris Lessing (not Jewish). I don’t know exactly how Jewish Irene was, but let’s say at least a bit, and therefore Gregor has Jewish heritage on both sides.
From grandparents to grandchildren
