The
French-German channel Arte has just released a series in 8 chapters:
"Broken dreams of the inter-war years". One can follow the
dramatic, often tragic, lives of thirteen characters, French, German,
Russian, Italian, Austrian, British. The characters actually existed,
some are known, like the communist Hans Beimler, the Nazi Rudolf Höss
(not Hess), the young English aristocrat Unity Mitford, the star of silent film Pola Negri.
The subject of this blog is the period 1918-1933. The Weimar Republic ends when the Nazi nightmare begins. The Arte series goes further: it embraces also those terrifying years in Germany that followed 1933.
Margarete Buber-Neumann would have deserved a place in the series. Born in Potsdam, near Berlin, in 1901, she was still a teenager at the time of the fall of the German Empire. In the 1920s, she joined the KPD (Communist Party of Germany). She marries Rafael Buber, son of philosopher Martin Buber and communist. They divorce and Margarete then lives with Heinz Neumann, a leader of the KPD.
In 1932, Neumann opposed Stalin on the strategy to be followed vis-à-vis the Nazis and was pushed aside in the party. The Nazis came to power, the couple left Berlin for Moscow, where they faced the fate of so many German refugees in the USSR. In 1937, Neumann was a victim of Stalinist purges. Margarete is arrested by the NKVD in 1938.
One may wonder why Neumann, who was already frowned upon because of his criticism of Stalin, did not choose instead to go to France, or to Czechoslovakia, like other German anti-nazis. But what we know today about the throes of Stalinist communism was not yet known at the time. Rumors ran, but they were - in leftist circles - dismissed as imperialist propaganda.
So, Neumann disappeared forever in the depths of Siberia. In 1940, Margarete moved directly from the Gulag to the Ravensbruck Nazi camp: a gift from Stalin to his new friend Hitler, with whom he had just signed a non-aggression pact. The infamy of the Stalinist regime will never be stressed enough.
In the camp, Margarete meets journalist Milena Jesenská, former partner of Franz Kafka. She survives and dies in 1989 in the Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of "Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler", where she tells her terrible experiences.
It seems difficult to find a destiny more dramatic than hers, which sums up the whole, often nightmarish, history of the twentieth century.
The subject of this blog is the period 1918-1933. The Weimar Republic ends when the Nazi nightmare begins. The Arte series goes further: it embraces also those terrifying years in Germany that followed 1933.
Margarete Buber-Neumann would have deserved a place in the series. Born in Potsdam, near Berlin, in 1901, she was still a teenager at the time of the fall of the German Empire. In the 1920s, she joined the KPD (Communist Party of Germany). She marries Rafael Buber, son of philosopher Martin Buber and communist. They divorce and Margarete then lives with Heinz Neumann, a leader of the KPD.
In 1932, Neumann opposed Stalin on the strategy to be followed vis-à-vis the Nazis and was pushed aside in the party. The Nazis came to power, the couple left Berlin for Moscow, where they faced the fate of so many German refugees in the USSR. In 1937, Neumann was a victim of Stalinist purges. Margarete is arrested by the NKVD in 1938.
One may wonder why Neumann, who was already frowned upon because of his criticism of Stalin, did not choose instead to go to France, or to Czechoslovakia, like other German anti-nazis. But what we know today about the throes of Stalinist communism was not yet known at the time. Rumors ran, but they were - in leftist circles - dismissed as imperialist propaganda.
So, Neumann disappeared forever in the depths of Siberia. In 1940, Margarete moved directly from the Gulag to the Ravensbruck Nazi camp: a gift from Stalin to his new friend Hitler, with whom he had just signed a non-aggression pact. The infamy of the Stalinist regime will never be stressed enough.
In the camp, Margarete meets journalist Milena Jesenská, former partner of Franz Kafka. She survives and dies in 1989 in the Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of "Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler", where she tells her terrible experiences.
It seems difficult to find a destiny more dramatic than hers, which sums up the whole, often nightmarish, history of the twentieth century.
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