Gertrud Mathilde Bertha Gaudin was born in
Ruhla, a small town in the hills west of
Gotha. Her father was a doctor. She attended the
University of Jena, moving on to the Arts Academy in
Eisenach and then to the
Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. She funded her education by working as a teacher of drawing. She met
Eduard Ludwig Alexander (1881–1945) in 1902. He was a law student at
Jena and later, from 1911, a
Berlin lawyer. Gertrud Gaudin and Eduard Ludwig Alexander married one another in Berlin in 1908. The marriage produced two recorded children, but ended in divorce during the 1920s. She got to know
Clara Zetkin in 1907 and began working for the
social democratic press: one of her early assignments involved writing a series of articles during 1909 entitled "Die Prometheussage" (
"The Prometheus Saga") for the women's news journal "Die Gleichheit" (
"Equality"). In her married name, as Gertrud Alexander, she became a member of the
Social Democratic Party (SPD). During the
First World War (1914–1918) she engaged in illegal political work, and in 1917 she was a co-founder, with her husband, of the
Spartacus League which had originated as the anti-war faction within the SPD, but became increasingly separated from it as the ramifications of the contentious SPD leadership decision taken back in 1914, to call what amounted to a
political truce for the duration of hostilities, became ever more acute. As the political left continued to fragment, at the end of 1919 Gertrud and
Eduard Alexander became founder members of the
Communist Party of Germany. The party was consciously modeled on structures devised by
Lenin, and within its
Agitprop department, Gertrud headed up the culture department. She took responsibility for the "
Feuilleton" supplement in the party newspaper
Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag"). Her rejection of
"Dadaist anti-art" was set out clearly in her address on the opening of Berlin's first proletarian theatre by
Erwin Piscator at the end of 1920. In 1923, together with
Hermann Duncker and
Karl August Wittfogel, she devised the "Emergency Cultural Political Programme of the Communist Party". With her husband and elder son she participated in the
Marxist Work Week (conference) in May 1923 which prepared the way for the creation of the
Frankfurt based Institute for Social Research. In Moscow she was accepted into the women's secretariat of the
Comintern. In 1926 Alexander joined the
Soviet Communist Party. Between 1931 and 1939 she held a position of responsibility with the "Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs" ("
Glavlit" / "Главное управление по делам литературы и издательств" / "Главлит") (which was concerned with censorship). She also held a job as political editor at the "Main Moscow National Library" and at the "
Lenin Library". During the
Stalin purge she was detained in 1937, but only briefly. Between 1939 and 1944 she was evacuated from Moscow. After the
war ended, formally in May 1945, she remained in Moscow, supporting herself as a freelance translator and contributing editor for the
Soviet Information Bureau and for the magazine
Soviet Literature, which was produced in Moscow various languages including, between 1946 and 1991, German. Gertrud Alexander died in Moscow on 22 March 1967. She was 85. ==References==