Margarete Buber-Neumann (1901–1989)
Autor de Milena
Sobre El Autor
Margarete Buber-Neumann was born in Potsdam, Germany, in 1901. She survived imprisonment during World War II in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and, after the war, wrote several books detailing her experiences. She died in Frankfurt in 1989.
Créditos de la imagen: Margarete Buber-Neumann am 21.10.1981 in Frankfurt am Main
Obras de Margarete Buber-Neumann
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Thüring, Margarete
- Otros nombres
- Thüring, Margarete (birth name)
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1901-10-21
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 1989-11-06
- Lugar de sepultura
- Cimetière principal, Francfort-sur-le-Main, Allemagne
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- Germany
- País (para mapa)
- Alemagne
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Potsdam, Germany
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany
- Lugares de residencia
- Potsdam, Germany
Ravensbruck Concentration Camp
Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany
Moscow, Russia
Stockholm, Sweden - Educación
- Pestalozzi-Fröbel Haus, Berlin (1919)
- Ocupaciones
- teacher
political activist
memoirist
author
public speaker
Communist activist - Relaciones
- Buber, Rafael (first husband)
Buber, Martin (father-in-law)
Neumann, Heinz (second husband)
Jesenská, Milena (friend)
Koestler, Arthur (friend) - Organizaciones
- German Communist Party
Christian Democratic Union of Germany - Premios y honores
- Great Cross of Merit (Federal Republic of Germany, 1980)
- Biografía breve
- Margarete Buber-Neumann, known as Grete, was born Margarete Thüring in Potsdam, Germany. World War I made her politically active, and she joined the Socialist Youth League and then the newly-founded German Communist Party (KPD). She worked briefly as a nursery school teacher. In 1922, she married Rafael Buber, the son of philosopher Martin Buber, who was Jewish. They had two daughters. After the couple divorced in 1929, her daughters were raised by their paternal grandfather and later settled in Israel. She fell in love with Heinz Neumann, a leading Communist, and lived with him. After the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, she and Neumann fled into exile in the Soviet Union. During the 1930s, they both worked for the Comintern, first in France and then in Spain. Neumann was arrested in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937 and executed. She did not learn his fate until 1961. She was arrested the following year, imprisoned in the Lubyanka, and sent to a brutal forced labor camp in Karaganda. Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, she was one of a number of German Communists handed back by the Soviets to the Nazis. She was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she became a close friend of Milena Jesenská. She survived five years in the camp and later wrote Jesenská's biography. After World War II, she spent some years in Sweden. In 1948, she published Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, a vivid account of her years in both Soviet prison and Nazi concentration camps. In Paris the next year, she testified in support of Victor Kravchenko, who was suing a magazine connected with the French Communist Party for libel for accusing him of fabricating his description of Soviet labor camps. She corroborated Kravchenko's story in great detail, contributing to his victory in the case. In the 1950s, now an anti-Communist, she returned to Germany, continued to write books and articles, and joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In 1980, Margarete Buber-Neumann was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 10
- Miembros
- 325
- Popularidad
- #72,884
- Valoración
- 4.0
- Reseñas
- 4
- ISBNs
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- Idiomas
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Milena Jesenská and Margarete Buber-Neumann met October 1940 in the concentration camp Ravensbrück. M. B.-N.’s husband, a German communist, was executed in Stalin’s purges, she herself imprisoned in Siberia, then in 1940 handed over to the Gestapo. They became friends. Only Margarete survived to write the book they planned together: to document what they experienced and saw in Ravensbrück.
Thus Margarete Buber tells of the life of Milena so that her friend will be remembered, this extraordinary woman, who had been 20 years earlier for brief intense months, the friend of Kafka (she had been his Czech translator and later became a journalist). But their passionate relationship broke on Kafka’s tragic inner strife.
So this book is both, the life-story of Milena and a report of life and death in the Ravensbrück concentration camp; but she gives also long citations from Milena’s political journalism that describe the 1938 dismembering of Czechoslovakia, betrayed by Britain and France, and the largely forgotten inhuman and human reactions of the German, Hungarian, Polish population to their Jewish neighbours in all the border regions (p. 167-199).
M. B.-N. describes forms of adjustment to the life in the camp: after the first chock new inmates start to change, to resign, all too often becoming callous and indifferent, loosing their resistance becoming submissive or, given a little bit of power, start to identify with the SS becoming presumptuous and tyrannical (p.254). She describes similarities in narrow behaviour shared by fervent believers: communists and members of religious sects. She also describes diverse reactions of newly recruited personnel, ordinary ‘normal’ women, who when hired, were given a false picture what they would face (p.277-78): Trained to see inmates as subhumans and to use violence against them most loose their humanity. But there are also exceptions.
A truly extraordinary scene stands out when Milena risks her life by daring to challenge the feared ‘SS-Bestie’ Ramdor (tried and executed in 1947: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Ramdohr) to prove that Margarete is still alive after 3 weeks of being thrown into the camp prison, the „Bunker“, there kept in total darkness, no food for days, forced to sleep without blanket on the cold floor (292, 295-298).
Essential reading for anybody interested in human nature under extreme conditions – I should say more precisely: how humans, who grew up in and were formed by 20th-century Western culture, react when faced with extreme imprisonment conditions. (XI-11)… (más)