Born: 1918 (Berlin, Germany)
Died: 2006
Biography:
Marianne Laqueur (11 June 1918 – 5 April 2006) was a German Jewish refugee to Turkey, a computer scientist, and local politician. Born on 11 June 1918 in Berlin, Marianne Laqueur was the daughter of August (b. 1885) and Ilse Laqueur (née Netto). Her father, August Laqueur, was a director level doctor and physiotherapist at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin.
In 1935, due to the Nazis’ persecution of those with Jewish ancestry, August Laqueur was forcibly retired under the terms of the 1933 Berufsbeamtengesetz (BBG) act, which was the first anti-Semitic law passed in Germany since 1871. In response to this discriminatory policy, Marianne and her parents emigrated to Turkey. They settled in Ankara, where August Laqueur became the head of the physiotherapy department at Numune Hospital. Initially granted a five-year contract in 1935, the Laqueur family became part of the Haymatloz, which were a group of around 1,000 German-speaking refugees, many with Jewish ancestry, who had emigrated to Turkey between 1933 and 1945 during the Third Reich. Haymatloz is a Turkish transliteration of heimatlos, which means homeless or uprooted in German.
As a German academic, August Laqueur was part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Westernization efforts in the Turkish university system. The Laqueur family was included in the 1939 Scurla Report by the Nazi academic Herbert Scurla, who was sent to Turkey to report on the status of these academics. Marianne’s older brother Kurt Laqueur also joined the family in Turkey to escape persecution after being denied the right to study or follow an apprenticeship in Germany. However, after 1938, as Turkey became less welcoming to refugees from Germany, Kurt Laqueur was interned in the Kırşehir internment camp. It was there that he married Aenne Baade, who was the daughter of Fritz Baade, a German economist and Social Democratic Party of Germany politician. Fritz Baade’s family were also part of the Haymatloz, as his second wife Edith had Jewish ancestry. Kurt Laqueur later became a German diplomat.
Marianne Laqueur initially sought work as a Sprachtippse (language typist) in a Turkish bank, translating Turkish into English and German. During the Second World War, she worked for the Turkish section of the Jewish Agency in Ankara. She remained in Turkey until 1960 when she began taking on worldwide assignments for various companies, including IBM and NCR. Her forty-year career in computer science made her one of the first female computer scientists. Laqueur worked in Beirut, Tel Aviv, North Africa, and the USA. It was not until the 1980s that she returned to Germany.
In addition to her distinguished career in computer science, Marianne Laqueur also dedicated herself to local politics. From 1993 to 1997, she served as a member of the city council for the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Green parliamentary group in the Wiesbadener Stadtparlament (the Wiesbaden city parliament).
Awards:
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