Book of the day: Memories of the Resistance

The story of Grete, the resistance to Nazism...

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was an architect and a communist activist in the Austrian resistance to Nazism.

Margarete, also known as Grete, was born in Vienna on January 23, 1897. She became the first female student at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She studied architecture and won prizes for her designs even before her graduation. In 1923, she became a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP). In 1927, she married the architect Wilhelm Schütte, with whom she would share a productive partnership of more than a decade. In 1930, she went to the Soviet Union with her husband for an architectural project and worked there for seven years. In 1937, they left Russia. Margarete and her husband agreed on many issues, as well as on the resistance against Nazism in their own country. Together with her husband, she was called to Istanbul in 1938 to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts. They stayed in Istanbul for about two years. In 1939, she joined the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) and returned to Vienna in 1940. On January 22, 1941, she met a leading Resistance member nicknamed "Gerber" at the Cafe Viktoria, where they were arrested by the Gestapo.

This book tells the resistance story of Grete during World War II in Austria. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky died in Vienna in 2000, at the age of 102. She was interred in the Vienna Central Cemetery.