Clara Thalmann

Clara Thalmann
Clara Thalmann
	Clara Thalmann (1936)
Personal details
Born	Clara Ensner; 24 September 1908; Basel, Switzerland
Died	27 January 1987 (aged 78); Nice, France
Political party	Communist Party of Switzerland (c. 1924–1929)
Other political; affiliations	Left Opposition (1928–1936); POUM (1936–1937)
Spouse	Paul Thalmann (m. 1928; died 1980)
Occupation	Journalist, memoirist, athlete
Military service
Allegiance	Spanish Republic
Branch/service	Confederal militias (1936–1937)
Unit	Durruti Column (1936–1937); POUM Shock Battalion (1937)
Battles/wars	Spanish Civil War

Clara Thalmann (née Ensner; 24 September 1908 – 24 January 1987) was a Swiss journalist, athlete and militiawoman, who fought during the Spanish Civil War.

Born in Basel, she joined the Communist Party of Switzerland at an early age, but quickly developed sympathies for Trotskyism and anarcho-syndicalism, for which she was expelled from the party. Together with her husband Paul Thalmann, she went to Spain to participate in the People's Olympiad as a swimmer. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she joined the Durruti Column and fought on the Aragon front. After experiencing disillusionment with the anarchists of the column, she joined up with the militias of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), in which she fought during the May Days of 1937.

After being arrested and imprisoned by Communist officials, she fled to France, where she helped to hide Jewish refugees during World War II. After the war, she supported a number of political causes but eventually fell out of political activism for around a decade, moving to the French Riviera in order to open a guesthouse. There she and her husband supported the student activists of the French New Left and wrote their memoirs about the Spanish Civil War. Clara herself returned to Spain after the Spanish transition to democracy and revisited the sites she had fought on, reflecting on the events she had participated in before her death in 1987.