With the passing of Anneliese Staničić, the CWI, and it’s German section, Sol, have lost a comrade who would have celebrated the 40th anniversary of her membership next March. I have lost my mother, who played a very significant part in me becoming a socialist and an activist.
When, at the age of perhaps 18, as a Marxist Young Socialist, I had a political dispute with a then social democratic party (SPD) member of the state parliament, he said to me afterwards: “I’d even buy socialism from your mother”. I don’t know why he didn’t buy from me, but that sentence says a great deal about the impact my mother had on other people. She was genuine, convincing, and, in the truest sense of the word, ‘commanding of respect’.
I have often wondered where she drew her strength, her determination and her fighting spirit from. In truth, I do not know. But many other people would have been broken by the terrible experiences she had to endure from her earliest childhood – violence, physical and emotional abuse, being cast out, serious illness. She seemed to draw the conclusion from every blow that she wanted to ensure nothing similar should happen to others.
Her life could probably make for a gripping Netflix series. It was a life rich in highs and lows, in sorrow and joy, and a life that was, in many phases and in many respects, a struggle – the struggle not to be broken by violence, the struggle against injustice, the struggle against illness, the struggle to carry on living despite heavy losses. Her life was shaped by the typical experiences that children, women and female workers in this society had to, and still have to, endure but with such frequency and intensity that they could have filled two, three or many lifetimes.
My mother was the child of a Nazi SA man who was killed in 1932, probably in a clash with anti-fascists. This child, who, as the daughter of a ‘martyr’ during the Nazi dictatorship, was forced to present flowers to Adolf Hitler whenever he visited Aachen, became a ‘fervent anti-fascist’, as she herself put it, and a trade unionist, a socialist, and a member of a revolutionary Marxist organisation. She also became – and this too was extraordinary in the early 1960s – the wife of a Yugoslav migrant worker and the son of a partisan killed by fascists, who was, moreover, nine years younger. At the time, this cost her half her circle of friends.
My mother was a translator for the British occupying forces, a smuggler of coffee and cigarettes in the post-war period, a single mother in the 1950s, women’s representative for the German Postal Workers’ Union in Aachen, an active member of the SPD when that party was still a workers’ party, an activist for the rights of people with disabilities, a member of Sol and its predecessor organisations since 1987, and a worker, as a waitress, shop assistant, postal worker, telephone operator, childminder, library assistant and later as a legal guardian.
When left-wing youths squatted a house, she was one of the few SPD members to pay a visit of solidarity straight away; when my comrades and I organised our first school strike in Aachen in 1987, she was, of course, at the demonstration, just as she was at so many demonstrations against the Nazis or against Helmut Kohl’s government.
Even when I was a little boy, she would take me along when she was running information stands or providing social advice at the SPD’s local office. I was constantly exposed to political discussions; pictures of Tito and Lenin hung on the wall, and a biography of Marx sat on the bookshelf. But what particularly shaped me was the solidarity she practised in everyday life, even in small ways; the care and help offered to neighbours and friends (and, of course, to us children), and the fact that our door was always open to the friends of my siblings Ingrid and Marko and me. At one point she was sacked from the Post Office, where she was too much of a thorn in the side of the bosses as a trade unionist. They put registered letters in her locker and claimed she’d stolen them. A year-long labour court case, culminating in the termination of her employment contract on the grounds that the relationship of trust had been irreparably damaged. It was only much later that I came to understand the full implications of that dispute, from the division within the workforce, the cowering of the weak and fearful before the powerful, to the conciliatory role played by the bureaucracy within the trade union.
SPD
My mother was a left-wing Social Democrat back when the SPD was still a left-wing, reformist party, and, in an ultra-conservative Catholic city like Aachen, an almost rebellious force. When the SPD-led federal government authorised the stationing of Pershing II missiles in the then West Germany under NATO’s 1979 ‘Double-Track’ decision, she, like many others, left the SPD. However, she returned a few years later because she saw no effective left-wing force outside the party. Her involvement in the party was very much also a form of social commitment, and in the 1980s she became the Aachen SPD’s spokesperson on disability policy, taking the first steps towards accessibility at a time when the term did not even exist.
How she came to take on this role also says a great deal about her. After being sacked from the Post Office, she had taken up a new job as a porter and telephone operator at a care home for young people with physical disabilities. Within a very short time, she became the point of contact and a trusted figure for the young residents there, and I had the privilege, even as a child, of discovering that you can play basketball even in a wheelchair.
When I became increasingly politically active at the age of 15 or 16, I didn’t really want to end up in my mother’s party. But neither were the Greens interested in me when I asked for information at their office, nor did the VSP member at my school bother to inspire my classmates with Marxism (he’d rather be smoking cannabis) . And then I came across the Voran group, the predecessor organisation of Sol, which operated as a Marxist group within the Young Socialists in the SPD. Two months after I joined, my mother also joined the Voran group and found a new political home that gave voice to her unease with the SPD’s conformism and was in keeping with her steadfast principles. The fact that this step led to a significant cooling of her relationship with her best friend – an SPD left-winger whose political views were more aligned with the Stalinist GDR in East Germany – was a consequence she accepted without complaint. In the years since, she has participated in the life of the organisation as much as she could, and has been an important inspiration, particularly to many young members.
However, the years also brought with them the far too early loss of her husband Pero (who, before his death, had also become a member of the organisation, which had since been renamed SAV) and then of her daughter Ingrid. Supporting my father and my sister in their battle against cancer, and losing them to the disease, were probably my mother’s hardest struggles. And these setbacks took a greater toll on her than the many traumatic experiences of her childhood and early adulthood. In recent years, she was barely able to take part in Sol’s activities. The last time she was able to attend a seminar organised by the Aachen branch of Sol was in 2024, and she was delighted to have had the chance to meet so many new, young members. In the last few weeks and months, she regularly asked me how the organisation was getting on and repeatedly emphasised how important the struggle for socialist change in society was – and still is – to her.
She outlived many people, and in recent years she was no longer able to keep in touch with so many of them. But I know that she touched the lives of a great many people, often setting them in motion in the truest sense of the word. And I know how many will share our grief when they hear of her passing. Another comrade, who sadly also passed away far too soon, once said that what made my mother special was that she took every person seriously. That was true, and I hope I have learnt that from her. Someone else sent me the following words, which are so apt that I would like to share them here: “She was a strong woman! She experienced and lived through all the ups and downs of life, and yet she always remained steadfast. She was a kind person who lifted people’s spirits, and many found strength in her, because the way she dealt with her own fate put so much of what we ourselves had experienced into perspective.”
Over the last few years, we often talked about her turning a hundred years old and how there would surely be an article about her in the local paper. We joked about it, and she resolved that when the inevitable question from a journalist came as to what the secret of her longevity was, she would reply: ‘Marxism.’ Unfortunately, that will not now come to pass, and she can no longer contribute to the struggle for socialist change in society. Others will take up that task, not least those comrades who have walked part of the way with her and for whom she was an important comrade, friend, and mother.