Family provenance and early years Anna Sophie Marie Auguste Behrend was born in
Penzlin, a small town in the flat marshy countryside to the west of
Stettin. Her father was a farm worker. Training to become a teacher was, for financial reasons, not possible, and on leaving school she therefore took a series of jobs in domestic service and as a children's nanny. Her work drew her to the cities, and during this time she lived successively in
Schwerin,
Hamburg and
Blumenthal, at that time a separate municipality directly to the west of the
Bremen city limits. Here she met the master tailor, Konrad Voigt. Their daughter, Anna Marie Sophie Wilhelmine Vogt, was born in 1902. They set up home together in Blumenthal and married one another in 1903. At their home they took out a subscription to the (''"Bremen Citizens' Newspaper"''), a regional Social Democrat newspaper which combined with her husband's political commitment to awaken her own political interest. She read with growing attention about preparations being made for the SPD national party conference which in 1904 was to be held in Bremen at the Casino Hall at the harbour. She was able to attend the party conference and listened enthralled to speeches by party stalwarts including
August Bebel and
Paul Singer. She later described the event as the key experience in her political life. The day before the main party conference, she had probably been present at the same location where the third SPD women's conference had been held, at which
Clara Zetkin had spoken on the need for reform of public schooling. Four months later the
SPD itself was formally outlawed, having already experienced several months of increasingly determined official harassment. With other Social Democrats, Anna Stiegler continued to be politically active, concentrating on practical support for the families of politicians who had been arrested. She also continued to organise meetings which might have been construed either as harmless women's social gatherings or else as political meetings of women unsympathetic to the government. In April 1945 20,000 women were sent out of the camp on an "evacuation march" which would become a
death march for many. Bremen had ended up as part of the
US occupation zone and the military authorities were keen to re-establish democratic structures in "their" part of Germany. In October 1946 Stiegler stood successfully for election to the re-instated
regional parliament ("Bremische Bürgerschaft"), elected a vice president of the chamber in 1947, and remaining a member of the assembly till shortly before her death in 1962. In 1946, aged 65, she was one of those who, for whatever reason, seemed to find her energy levels enhanced by the new challenges. Returning to themes on which she had spoken out during the
Weimar years, Stiegler campaigned for relaxation of the abortion laws (§ 118 StGB), advocating free access to contraception and modern effective methods for protecting vulnerable girls. She was energetically committed to women's rights. Mention should also be made of less eulogistic assessments, indicating that towards the end of her life she was not always accommodating to younger colleagues whose approach or tactics might not align unquestioningly with her own, however. There are suggestions of an excessive tendency to promote those colleagues who agreed with her. She was also vociferous in campaigning against West German rearmament, participating effectively in the
SPD's successful campaign during the late 1950s to resist the provision of nuclear weapons to the
West German army. == References ==