Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck (1900–1957) was a German writer, teacher and anarchist activist. The wife of Russian anarchist Sascha Schapiro and mother of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, in 1933, she fled Nazi Germany to France, where she made a living as a German teacher. During World War II, she and her son were held in a number of French internment camps; the Nazis killed her husband in the Holocaust.
Biography
Johanna Grothendieck was born in the North German town of Blankenese, on 21 August 1900. Her surname, Grothendieck, comes from the Plattdütsch word for "big dike". After growing up, she moved to Berlin, where she married Alf Raddatz, with whom she had a daughter Maidi.
In 1924, she met Sascha Schapiro, a veteran of the Makhnovist movement. Schapiro introduced himself to Raddatz with the words "I will steal your wife", and the two began a relationship together. Throughout the 1920s, she was involved in far-left politics and became a writer. On 28 March 1928, she gave birth to their son, Alexander Grothendieck. The family lived together in the German capital until Adolf Hitler's rise...
Björn Gohla
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