Clara Zetkin was renowned for not pulling punches in her polemics and thus was no stranger to controversy in her time. Kaiser Wilhelm II referred to her as “the most dangerous witch” of the second German empire. In similar vein, Joseph Stalin later branded Zetkin as an “old witch.” More recently, the German weekly Die Zeit suggested that she was a “museum figure who is hardly of interest to anybody.”

But who was Clara Zetkin, and why is her largely forgotten political legacy worth revisiting today?  

Born in Saxony in 1857, she lived in exile for several years in Paris thanks to Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law, an attempt to repress the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that was in effect from 1878 to 1890. She spent most of her later life in the Soviet Union, where she eventually died in 1933, just months after the Nazis had taken power in Germany.