Fritz Heymann

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Fritz Heymann , also Friedrich (born August 28, 1897 in Bocholt ; died after 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German journalist, writer and translator.

Life

Fritz Heymann was born in 1897 (according to other sources, 1898) as the son of a Jewish merchant family from Geldern in Bocholt. In 1906 he moved to Düsseldorf with his family . As a high school student, Heymann registered as a war volunteer in 1914. He was taken prisoner by the English in 1917, from which he was able to escape. After the First World War , which he had finished as a lieutenant , Heymann began to study in Berlin . As early as 1919 he interrupted his studies to take part as an officer in one of the free corps in the fight against the Spartacists . Later he studied in Münster , Berlin, Bonn and Heidelberg literature and law and a doctorate in 1921 for Doctor Juris .

After completing his studies, he worked in business and soon turned to journalism. From 1927 he was a member of the editorial board of the Düsseldorf local newspaper and freelance worker for the Vossische Zeitung . In addition to articles on economic policy, he also wrote numerous articles on literature and Jewish history.

In 1933 Heymann fled to the autonomous Saar area and became a co-founder and employee of the anti-Nazi exile magazine Westland (later Grenzland ). When Saarland was annexed to the German Reich in 1935 , he fled via Paris to Amsterdam , where he worked as an English translator. In addition, he worked on his main work The Chevalier von Geldern. A chronicle of the adventure of the Jews , which was published in 1937 by the Querido Verlag in Amsterdam with some success. Another larger project was his Marranen Chronicle . He had compiled the extensive text on the history of the Marranas for the time being for lecture purposes. The manuscript was published posthumously in 1988 under the title Tod oder Taufe von Julius H. Schoeps .

After the occupation of Holland by the Wehrmacht in 1940, Heymann lived underground. How long he escaped arrest is not known. Presumably he and his mother were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in one of the first transports in 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 . His mother survived the concentration camp and emigrated to Argentina after the war . In 1959 she donated her son's estate to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York .

Works

  • The Chevalier of Geldern. A chronicle of the adventures of the Jews . Foreword by Hermann Kesten . Joseph Melzer , Cologne 1963
    • The Chevalier von Geldern (1937). Stories of Jewish adventurers . With an essay by Julius H. Schoeps. Königstein 1985 ISBN 3-7610-0379-X
  • Death or baptism. Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal . Jewish publishing house at Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1992 ISBN 3-633-54070-9
  • "Anyone who hits me on the right cheek, I'll hit two on the left". Unpublished letters from exile in the Netherlands . In: Dierk Juelich (Ed.): History as Trauma. Festschrift for Hans Keilson on his 80th birthday. Nexus, Frankfurt 1991 ISBN 3923301693 pp. 210-221

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julius H. Schoeps gives 1898 as the year of birth. Schoeps 2000, p. 83.
  2. ^ According to the Auschwitz Documentation Center. See Piel 1997. In older biographies, 1943 is assumed to be the year of death.
personal data
SURNAME Heymann, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heymann, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Bocholt
DATE OF DEATH 1944
Place of death Auschwitz concentration camp