Margarete Buber-Neumann
Margarete Buber-Neumann was a German writer. As a senior Communist Party of Germany member and Gulag survivor, she was turned into a staunch anti-communist. She wrote the famous memoir Under Two Dictators, which begins with her arrest in Moscow during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, followed by her imprisonment as a political prisoner in both the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi concentration camp system, after she was handed over by the NKVD to the Gestapo during World War II.
Buber-Neumann was also known for having testified in the so-called "Trial of the Century" about the Kravchenko Affair in France. In 1980, she was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the West Germany.
Background
Margarete Thüring was born on 21 October 1901, in Potsdam, German Empire. Her father, Heinrich Thüring, was a master brewer; her mother was Else Merten. She had four siblings: Lisette, Gertrud, and two brothers, Heinrich and Hans. She disliked the militarism of German culture in her youth and the way that her father was awe-struck by officers of Potsdam's large Imperial German Army garrison. He was a "tyrant" while her mother was "well-read and liberal."Education and activism
In 1919, Buber-Neumann enrolled at Pestalozzi-Fröbel Haus in Berlin to learn to teach kindergarten. In 1921, she attended a memorial for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. She sought to become a member of groups of kindred spirits to fight injustice.Also in 1921, she joined the Socialist Youth League of Germany. In 1926, she joined the Communist Party of Germany. Buber-Neumann developed an interest in literature and Expressionist paintings.
Personal life
In 1921 or 1922, Margarete Thüring married Rafael Buber, the communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber with whom she had two daughters: Barbara and Judith. She lived on Babelsberger Strasse, where she took in communists like the Dimitroff couple, who were evading police.Following her divorce in 1929, she lived in an unmarried union with Heinz Neumann, the Comintern representative to Germany. He criticized Stalin's German policy in the 1930s, which led to his arrest and execution in the Great Purge. She married Helmuth Faust after she went to live in Frankfurt am Main; they divorced.
Her daughters lived with her and then with their paternal grandparents. Because they were part Jewish, they left Nazi-controlled Europe for Palestine.
Career
She obtained a job as an editor for Inprecor, the International Press Correspondence. In 1931 and 1932, the Neumanns visited the Soviet Union twice and then Spain, where they reorganized the Spanish Communist Party. In November 1933, Neumann received a recall from Moscow but instead left for Zürich, Switzerland. They were both deported to the Soviet Union in June 1935. They were watched by guards during their stay at the Hotel Lux, in Moscow, where they worked as translators.Internment
On 27 April 1937, while living at Moscow's Hotel Lux, Heinz Neumann was arrested as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. Buber-Neumann never learned in her lifetime that her husband was executed on 26 November 1937. On 19 June 1938, she was arrested for "counter-revolutionary organization and agitation against the Soviet state". She was held at the Lubianka Prison, then at Butyrka Prison, and was sent to labour camps in Karaganda and then in Burma, both in Kazakhstan.Image:Female prisoners in Ravensbrück chalk marks show selection for transport.jpg|thumb|right|Surviving female prisoners gathered when the Red Cross arrived at Ravensbrück
In February 1940, she was handed over to the Gestapo, as part of the NKVD-Gestapo co-operation that was initiated by the Stalin-Hitler Pact. She was sent to Germany, along with some other Soviet political prisoners, including Betty Olberg, a wife of a German communist who was executed in 1936. During the train ride, she had not known the plans and was crestfallen when she learned that she was not being freed.
She was then detained with other "political prisoners" in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she became friends with Orli Wald and Milena Jesenská. The conditions were especially inhumane, and many women died of starvation, disease and extermination. She worked long days of forced labour. Buber-Neumann was unpopular with most of the women, as communist inmates, who were influential in the camp, disapproved of her testifying to the hardships that she had endured in the Soviet Union. Her existence improved when she had the companionship of Jesenská.
She later wrote:
Buber-Neumann 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 remained in the camp until the end of World War II. On April 21, 1945, Buber was released with 60 other women with freedom papers. Seeking to avoid the advancing Soviet troops, she made it to Hanover, Germany, where she sent a telegram to her daughters in Palestine.
''Under Two Dictators''
After World War II, Buber-Neumann accepted an invitation by the International Rescue and Relief Committee to live in Sweden, where she lived and worked for three years. In 1948, she published Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler in 1949. At the urging of her friend Arthur Koestler, she gave an account of her years in both Gulags and Nazi concentration camps. Die Gazette said of these works that "they shook up the post-war generation in West Germany because they reported for the first time and in great detail on the camps of the Soviet gulag".Kravchenko Affair
On 23 February 1949, Buber-Neumann testified in Paris in support of Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector who was suing Les Lettres Françaises, a French magazine connected with the Communist Party of France, for libel after it had accused him of fabricating his account of Soviet labour camps. Buber-Neumann corroborated Kravchenko's account in great detail and so contributed to his victory in the case.Anti-communism
In 1950, Buber-Neumann returned to Germany and settled in Frankfurt am Main as a staunch anti-communist. She continued to write for the next three decades. She joined the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom with Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte and Sidney Hook.Image:Aktion 1914.jpg|thumb|right|Front page from Die Aktion that portrays Charles Péguy by Egon Schiele
In 1951, she became editor of the political journal Die Aktion. In 1957, she published Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges. In 1959, Koestler asked her to join him at his home in Alpbach to meet Whittaker Chambers and his wife, Esther Shemitz, while they were visiting Europe. On 24 June 1959, Chambers wrote in a letter:
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 in which she argued that Nazism and communism practically the same.
Regarding Communism and Nazism, Buber-Neumann wrote:
Later years and death
Buber-Neumann became a political conservative and joined the Christian Democratic Union in 1975. In 1980, Buber-Neumann received the Great Cross of Merit of the West Germany. She died at age 88 on November 6, 1989, in Frankfurt am Main, three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.Legacy
The poet Adeline Baldacchino wrote:The historian Tony Judt called her among "the most interesting political writers, social commentators, or public moralists of the age" in a list that includes Émile Zola, Václav Havel, Karl Kraus, Alva Myrdal, and Sidney Hook. Judt wrote that she had written one of the best accounts by an ex-communist and listed her among Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, Manès Sperber, Arthur Koestler, Jorge Semprún, Wolfgang Leonhard and Claude Roy.
The writer Camila Loew chose Buber-Neumann as with Ruth Klüger, Marguerite Duras and Charlotte Delbo as "main witnesses" to "reflect on the relationship between history and literature, or between the materiality of pain and its representation in text."
Works
Her works have been translated into many languages.- *
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- : Stationen eines Irrweges
- – Mistress to Kafka: the life and death of Milena; introduction by Arthur Koestler
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- . Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der kommunistischen Geheimarbeit
- : d. Kraft zu überleben
- : Vorträge aus 35 Jahren – Janine Platten und Judith Buber Agassi