Ruth von Mayenburg

Ruth von Mayenburg (born July 1, 1907 in Serbitz , Bohemia; † June 26, 1993 in Vienna ) was an Austrian publicist, writer and translator.

Life

Ruth von Mayenburg was the daughter of a noble mine director and grew up in a cosmopolitan aristocratic family in the small Bohemian town of Teplitz-Schönau . She began studying architecture at the Technical University of Dresden . In 1930 she moved to Vienna to live with Baroness Netka Latscher-Lauendorf, a friend of her mother's and life companion of the later Austrian Federal President Theodor Körner (Edler von Siegringen). Through the two of them, Ruth (von) Mayenburg came into a group of young socialists, where she met intellectual friends like the writer Elias Canetti or the Arbeiter-Zeitung editor Ernst Fischer , who shaped her political thinking. Also in 1930 she met General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord , who had become Chief of the Army Command at the end of the year , and after 1933 exchanged conspiratorial messages with the head of the Soviet Army for him. In 1932 she married Ernst Fischer.

In 1934 she took an active part in the February uprising and then had to flee abroad (Prague, then the USSR). From 1938 to 1945 she lived in the Hotel Lux . During her emigration she became a member of the illegal KPÖ , spied for the Red Army , provided courier services and worked for the Communist International (press office). During the Second World War , she worked in the propaganda department of the Soviet Army , most recently as a colonel .

After her return to Austria in 1945, she became General Secretary of the Austrian-Soviet Society , worked as a film dramaturge at Wien-Film and worked, among other things, on Willi Forst's film Wiener Mädeln (1949) . In 1946 she gave birth to her daughter Marina (see Marina Fischer-Kowalski ). In 1966 she resigned from the KPÖ, but in her autobiographical novel “Blaues Blut und Rote Fahnen”, published in 1969, she described the events and leading figures of her time in the Soviet Union largely positively. Since the death of Ernst Fischer in 1972, however, she increasingly refrained from doing so. In her book “Hotel Lux”, published in 1978, she finally criticized the situation in the Soviet Union at that time and the numerous German emigrants she had met at the Hotel Lux, including Herbert Wehner . Her second marriage was to the conservative publicist Kurt Dieman-Dichtl . Most recently, she concentrated on her work as a writer and translator.

Works

• Blue blood and red flags. Revolutionary women's life between Vienna, Berlin and Moscow. Molden, Vienna a. a. 1969. (various editions, most recently: Promedia, Vienna 1993. ISBN 3900478724 )
• Hotel Lux. Bertelsmann, Munich 1978. ISBN 3570022714 (various editions, most recently: Hotel Lux - die Menschenfalle. Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, Munich 2011. ISBN 3938045604 )

literature

• Hans Magnus Enzensberger : Hammerstein or stubbornness. A German story. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008. ISBN 978-3-518-41960-1

Web links

• Literature by and about Ruth von Mayenburg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Ruth von Mayenburg  in the German Digital Library
• Ruth Mayenburg. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)