She is commemorated in Berlin, among other places, at Boelckestraße 121 in Tempelhof: “This house was the last residence of honorary citizen of Berlin Louise Schroeder,” says a commemorative plaque.
On June 4, 1957, the SPD politician, who had served as mayor of Berlin from 1947 to 1948, died when her party friend Otto Ostrowski resigned and his elected successor Ernst Reuter was not admitted by the Soviets. She was convincing as mayor, even as a candidate for Chancellor and Federal President she was later discussed.
West Berlin said goodbye in a public ceremony. Louise Schroeder’s coffin was “taken in a carriage drawn by six horses via Breitscheidplatz, Wittenbergplatz and Lutherstrasse to the Schöneberg town hall”, wrote the Tagesspiegel, and there “lay out in the vestibule”.
The sympathy was great: “A dense trellis on both sides of the street awaited the funeral procession.” In the obituary for Louise Schroeder, the Tagesspiegel wrote, among other things: “The respect was due not least to a person who loved to work in silence, but who Duty to work in public not withdrawn.”
Reads like a recipe for our time, in which there is often a lack of proportion between talkativeness and ducking away.
The Tagesspiegel newsletter, which you can order here free of charge, is available for all twelve Berlin districts with more than 263,000 subscriptions. In it we inform you once a week in a bundled and compact way about what’s going on in your district. We also often let readers have their say in the newsletters, after all nobody knows Berlin’s neighborhoods as well as the people who live there.
