Dagmar Enkelmann (born Dagmar Ebert: 5 April 1956) is a German politician (Die Linke ("The Left")). In 2005 she became Parliamentary Party Manager ("Chief Whip") for Die Linke in the Bundestag (national parliament), a position from which she resigned in 2013 after losing her seat. In December 2012 she took on the chair of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a position to which she was elected in succession to Heinz Vietze. Life Early years and education Dagmar Gertraud Elsa Ebert was born in Altlandsberg, a small historic town a short distance to the east of Berlin and at that time in the Bezirk Frankfurt of East Germany. She attended school in nearby Strausberg, passing her school leaving exams (Abitur) in 1974, which opened the way to a university level education. Between 1974 and 1979 she was a student of the History faculty at Karl Marx University (as it was known at that time) in Leipzig. She emerged with an extensive knowledge of Marxist sociology and a degree in 1979. After that she taught history between 1979 and 1985 at the "Wilhelm Pieck FDJ Youth Academy" at Bogensee, near Bernau and just outside Berlin. From 1985 till 1989 she was a post-graduate student ("Aspirantin") at the ruling party central committee's Academy for Social Sciences. It was here that she submitted her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Analysis and critique of concepts of the bourgeois ideologues in West Germany: Identity Crises of East German youth" ("Analyse und Kritik des Konzepts bürgerlicher Ideologen der BRD: Identitätskrise der Jugend der DDR"). The modalities of what happened next were affected by the political changes that followed the breach of the Berlin Wall by protestors in 1989, but Dagmar Ebert nevertheless received what amounted to a doctorate, though probably not the form of doctorate she would have been anticipating when she embarked on her researches for the work four years earlier. Party career Dagmar Enkelmann joined the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands"/ SED) in 1977. The SED was the ruling party in what many people thought of as a one-party dictatorship. She engaged in trades union and women work. After reunification the party rebranded itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and scrambled to reinvent itself for a democratic future. Enkelmann stayed with the party. She served between 2003 and 2006 as deputy leader of the PDS. In regional elections in Brandenburg in 2004 she put herself