Queer Places:
Pragfriedhof Jewish Cemetery
Stuttgart, Stadtkreis Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Frida Perlen (April 4, 1870 - December 22, 1933) was a German pacifist. She fought in the bourgeois women's movement at the beginning of the 20th century for the civic equality of women. After The First World War, she co-founded the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom (IFFF), the German section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Frida Perlen comes from a Jewish family from Ludwigsburg. She was born on April 4, 1870, the second youngest of twelve children. Her father, Carl Kauffmann, was a manufacturer and married in his second marriage. He died when Frida was 13. In 1871 the Kauffmann family moved from Ludwigsburg to Stuttgart. Together with his brother Jacob, his father founded a mechanical cotton weaving mill there. Frida grew up well integrated in middle-class circumstances and received the school and general education that was common for girls at that time in order to prepare her for her role as wife and mother. She was a pupil of a higher-daughter school, which the girls usually left after 9 or 10 years without a qualifying degree. It was reserved for boys to attend a grammar school and complete their schooling with the Abitur. At the age of 19, Frida married Eugen Perlen, a Jewish merchant from Esslingen am Neckar. He was ten years older than her and a partner in the beakers of the cloth shop Perlen & Cie, which was opened by his father in Stuttgart in 1871. The couple had two sons, Karl Hans and Alfred, born in 1891 and 1894. Both sons took part in the First World War. The younger, Alfred, fell during the Western Offensive in March 1918 in northern France. The elder, Hans, returned with the Württemberg Silver Medal of Merit and the EK II. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Frida Perlen first stayed in Switzerland. After a stay in Geneva in April, she stayed in Zurich in the house of Clara Ragaz, the head of the Swiss section of the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom [IFFF]. In the autumn she returned to Germany seriously ill. She died on 22 December 1933 in the spa of the Jewish physician Dr. Carl Beer in Freudenstadt. The cause of death is not known. Some of her friends abroad suspected suicide. Her urn was buried anonymously in the Pragfriedhof Jewish Cemetery in Stuttgart.
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