Portrait of Clara Zetkin

Birthday profile

Clara Zetkin

Clara Zetkin, German theorist and activist (died 1933)

Born
July 5, 1857
Died
June 20, 1933
Zodiac sign
Cancer
Birth year
1857

About Clara Zetkin

Clara Zetkin (; German: [ˈtsɛtkiːn]; née Eißner [ˈaɪsnɐ]; 5 July 1857 – 20 June 1933) was a German Marxist theorist, communist activist, and advocate for women's rights. Until 1917, she was active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She then joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and its far-left wing, the Spartacist League, which later became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She represented that party in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933. == Biography == === Background and education === In July 1857, Clara Josephine Eißner (Eissner) was born the eldest of three children in Wiederau, a peasant village in Saxony that is now part of the municipality of Königshain-Wiederau. Her father, Gottfried Eissner, was a schoolmaster, church organist and a devout Protestant. Her mother, Josephine Vitale, who 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. There, she established contacts with the infant Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party). Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Otto von Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zürich in 1882 and then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

Clara Zetkin timeline

  1. This party had been founded in 1875 by merging two previous parties: the ADAV formed by Ferdinand Lassalle and the SDAP of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
  2. Ossip Zetkin became severely ill in early 1889 and died in June of that year.

The world when Clara Zetkin was born

Clara Zetkin was born in 1857. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineDred Scott decision — Supreme Court denies Black citizenship
  • Technology milestoneFirst passenger elevator installed (NYC)
  • World population~1.37B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderJames Buchanan
  • U.S. population27.8M

1857 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Clara Zetkin's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18572026
Population27.8M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.