Margarete Buber-Neumann

Margarete Buber-Neumann (21 October 1901 - 6 November 1989), was a leading member of the Communist Party of Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic. She survived imprisonment during World War II in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the war, she wrote a prison memoir and served as a star witness during the so-called "trial of the century" in the Kravchenko Affair in France.

Career

Early life

Margarete Buber-Neumann was born Margarete Thüring in Potsdam, and in her youth was active in socialist youth organisations. After World War I she became more radical and joined the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD). In 1922 she married Rafael Buber, communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber, who was Jewish. They had two daughters. Following her divorce in 1929, she married again, to a leading German Communist named Heinz Neumann. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Neumanns went into exile in the Soviet Union. During the 1930s they both worked for the Comintern, first in France and then in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

In 1920, Buber-Neumann's sister, Babette Thüring, had married Fritz Gross of Vienna, who moved to Germany after World War I and became a member of the KPD. They had a son in 1923, then separated. Babette retained her married name of 'Babette Gross' for the rest of her life. (Fritz Gross moved to England in the 1930s, helped refugees during World War II, and died in 1946 with a considerable corpus of mostly unpublished work.)^[1] Babette then became communist (commonlaw) wife of Willi Münzenberg, under whom Otto Katz and Arthur Koestler worked in Paris. In Münzenberg's office, Koestler met both sisters.^[2] Koestler would remain a friend after both he and Buber-Neumann had left the party. (As "Babette Gross," Buber-Neuman's sister later wrote a biography of Münzenberg.^[3])

Internment

In 1937, while living at Moscow's Hotel Lux, Heinz Neumann was arrested as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and later executed. Buber-Neumann never learned her husband's exact fate. Instead, she found herself arrested the following year and sent to a labour camp in Karaganda^[4] as a "wife of an enemy of the people." Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, she became one of a number of German Communists handed over in 1940 by the Soviets to the Nazis.^[5]

Buber-Neumann was then imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she became friends with Orli Wald.^[6] Because she had renounced communism as a result of her experiences in the Soviet Union, she was treated as a relatively privileged prisoner. This enabled her to survive five years in the camp. She worked in a clerical capacity in the Siemens plant attached to the camp, and later as secretary to a camp official, SS-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld. She was freed in April 1945.

Kravchenko Affair

After World War II Buber-Neumann spent some years in Sweden. In 1948, she published Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (published the following year in German, French, and English -- "Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler"). At the urging of friend Koestler, in this book she gave an account of her years in both Soviet prison and Nazi concentration camps.^[2] The book aroused the bitter hostility of the Soviet and German communists.^[7] In 1949, she testified in Paris in support of Victor Kravchenko, who was suing a magazine connected with the French Communist Party for libel after he was accused of fabricating his account of Soviet labour camps. Buber-Neumann corroborated Kravchenko's account in great detail, contributing to his victory in the case.^[8]

Anti-communism

In the 1950s, Buber-Neumann returned to Germany as a staunch anti-communist. She also continued to write for the next three decades. In 1957, she published Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges ("From Potsdam to Moscow: Stations of an Erring Way"). In 1963, she published a biography of her Ravensbrück friend Milena Jesenská Kafkas Freundin Milena. In 1976, she published Die erloschene Flamme: Schicksale meiner Zeit ("The Extinct Flame: Fates of My Time"), in which she argued that Nazism and Communism were in practice the same. By this time, she had become a political conservative, joining the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1975.

In 1980, Buber-Neumann was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She died in Frankfurt am Main in 1989. Her daughters by her marriage to Rafael Buber were raised at the home of their grandfather, Martin Buber, and settled in Israel.

Works

(From the Library of Congress catalog)

• Fånge hos Hitler och Stalin (1948)
  • Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (1949)
  • Déportée en Sibérie. Traduit de l'allemand par Anise Poster-Vinay (1949)
  • Under two dictators; tr. by Edward Fitzgerald (1949)
• Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (1957)
• Kafkas Freundin Milena (1963) - Mistress to Kafka: the life and death of Milena; introduction by Arthur Koestler (1966)
• Kommunistische Untergrund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der kommunistischen Geheimarbeit (1970)
• Dokumentation einer Manipulation (1972)
• Freiheit, du bist wieder mein ..." : d. Kraft zu überleben (1978)
• Plädoyer für Freiheit und Menschlichkeit: Vorträge aus 35 Jahren - Janine Platten und Judith Buber Agassi (2000)

References

1. ^ "Gross, Fritz: unpublished writings". Archives in London and the M25 area. http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=7903&inst_id=104. Retrieved September 28, 2010. 
2. ^ ^{a b} [|Scammell, Michael] (2010). Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. New York: Random House. p. 105 (Münzenberg), 351 (Under Two Dictators). http://books.google.com/books?id=bO7ANkFkH0UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=scammell+koestler&hl=en&ei=gcugTKaOC4P78Aa_7_1N&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=buber&f=false. Retrieved September 28, 2010. 
3. ^ Gross, Babette (1974). Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 
4. ^ Books: One Who Survived, TIME Magazine (January 15, 1951). Retrieved November 13, 2011 (subscription required)
5. ^ Hermann Weber, Hotel Lux - Die deutsche kommunistische Emigration in Moskau (PDF) Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung No. 443 (October 2006), p. 60. Retrieved November 12, 2011 (German)
6. ^ Manfred Menzel, Brochure about Orli Wald (PDF) Hannover Municipal Archive. Retrieved July 14, 2011 (German)
7. ^ Margarete Buber-Neumann (2008), Under Two Dictators. Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, Pimlico, London ISBN 9781845951023
8. ^ Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949, Hamish Hamilton 1994, 341

External links

• Frauen.Biographieforshung bio
• Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies bio
• Arcade Publishing bio
• Random House - Australia bio
• Fundacio Andreu Nin review
• Corbis photo

Persondata
Name	Buber-Neumann, Margarete
Alternative names
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Date of birth	21 October 1901
Place of birth
Date of death	6 November 1989
Place of death