Eva Schmidt-Kolmer

Eva Schmidt-Kolmer (1913 to 1991) was an Austrian-German physician, university teacher and social psychologist. Born Eva Kolmer in Vienna to a family of Jewish provenance, she was the daughter of a University of Vienna professor of medicine and biology, joined the Communist Party at seventeen and studied medicine in Vienna from 1931. While a student she worked as a research assistant at a bacteriological institute and earned money on cancer research for a foundation based in England. She left Vienna for London in March 1938, published a short account of Austria's takeover under a pseudonym, and worked in Austrian refugee relief as general secretary of the Austrian Centre. After 1949 she became an influential researcher into early childhood in the German Democratic Republic, working at the interface between medicine and pedagogy.