page_title: Clara Zetkin
section_title: Background and education
hierarchical_section_title: Clara Zetkin / Biography / Background and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Clara Zetkin (left) &amp; Rosa Luxemburg in their way to the SPD Congress. Magdeburg, 1910 Čeština: Rosa Luxemburgová (vpravo) s Klárou Zetkinovou, 1910 Deutsch: Clara Zetkin (links) und Rosa Luxemburg auf dem Weg zum SPD-Kongress in Magdeburg 1910.
context_page_description: Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and advocate for women's rights.
  Until 1917, she was active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany, then she joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and its far-left wing, the Spartacist League; this later became the Communist Party of Germany, which she represented in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933.
context_section_description: The eldest of three children, Clara Zetkin was born Clara Josephine Eissner in Wiederau, a peasant village in Saxony, now part of the municipality Königshain-Wiederau. Her father, Gottfried Eissner, was a schoolmaster and church organist who was a devout Protestant, while her mother, Josephine Vitale, had French roots, came from a middle-class family from Leipzig, and was highly educated. In 1872 her family moved to Leipzig where she was educated at the Leipzig Teachers’ College for Women. While in school she established contacts with the infant Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party).
  Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zurich in 1882 then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator. During her time in Paris she played an important role in the foundation of the Socialist International group. She also adopted the name of her lover, the Russian-Jewish Ossip Zetkin, a devoted Marxist, with whom she had two sons, Maxim and following two years later Konstantin (known as Kostja). Ossip Zetkin became severely ill in the early period of 1889, passing away only a few months later, in June. Following the loss of her husband, she moved to Stuttgart with her children. Zetkin was married to the artist Georg Friedrich Zundel, eighteen years her junior, from 1899 to 1928.
caption: Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, 1910
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72009/1000", "Image YResolution": "72009/1000", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop", "Image DateTime": "2013:11:01 03:02:36", "Image ExifOffset": "150", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "872", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1232"}