Anita Kugler

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Anita Kugler (* 1945 in Thuringia as Anita Lenz ) is a German bookseller , historian , journalist and writer .

Career

Kugler was born as the daughter of Baltic Germans in Thuringia after the Second World War and lived as a child in West German refugee camps for six years . After an apprenticeship as a bookseller in Ulm and years of traveling in the USA , she was one of the co-founders of the two Göttingen bookstores Polibula ("Politischer Buchladen") in spring 1970 and "Rote Straße" in October 1972, and did her A-levels . Kugler studied political science and modern history in Göttingen, Detroit and Berlin and did research at the International Metalworkers Union in Geneva. In the 1980s she conducted studies on the American automotive industry and forced labor in Nazi Germany . In 1989 she became an editor at taz as a career changer . There she managed the department "Political Book" and has written numerous articles on contemporary history and current Jewish life in Germany .

When the Baltic states became independent as part of the dissolution of the USSR , Kugler's articles on the forgotten fate of the Baltic Jews resulted from numerous trips to Latvia . Anita Kugler was also committed to compensating Nazi victims in Riga . The Museum Jews in Latvia named Kugler a second honorary member. In 1996 the NDR published a half-hour report by Tilman Jens on the work of Kugler and her colleagues Arno Luik and Thomas Schmid on the taz under the title “Kleine Zeitung - Kluge Köpfe”.

When, on the anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials in 1995, Kugler investigated how German courts punished crimes against humanity in the immediate post-war period , she came across the story of the “Jewish SS officer” Fritz Scherwitz . In a collection of judgments on National Socialist homicides, she found the trial against him in Bavaria; it was the first to end with a criminal sentence. After two years of research without much knowledge, she found the essay by Alexander Lewin on Eleke Sirewitz; it was the name under which Scherwitz was born. In 1999, Kugler took leave of absence from the taz to write the story of a man who led the SS by the nose and saved the lives of many Jews in Riga.

During her research for her book about Scherwitz, Kugler wrote an autobiographical novel under her maiden name Anita Lenz at the turn of the millennium within just seven weeks. The book, which reached first place on the bestseller lists , ran in July 2002 with Iris Berben and Robert Atzorn in the leading roles as a literary film under the title " Whoever loves is right " on ZDF . Susanne Katzorke ( taz ) found the adultery of her husband, relentlessly portrayed by Lenz from the first person perspective, "fascinating", in the overly detailed, "voyeurism" almost compelling description of her feelings at the same time "difficult and exhausting". For Marianne Wellershoff the book was a “radical protocol of jealousy, hatred, self-accusation and the attempt to patch up an almost broken marriage”, which “derives its force and persuasiveness from the author's exhibitionism and from the fact that the Treason actually played out that way ”won.

Anita Kugler has lived in Berlin since 1974.

Reviews of Scherwitz

Susanne Heim considered Kugler's book to be worth reading primarily because she had succeeded in “sensitively and meticulously sketching the various milieus in which someone like Scherwitz could succeed - and ultimately crash”. The book reads "as exciting as a thriller" and is "at the same time [...] a historical study that is as rich in facts as it is knowledgeable".

Harry Nutt speaks of a "breathtaking historical thriller" about someone "who defies historical clarity." Kugler has "never acted" as a historian vying for "recognition of a guild"; She held back "with speculations about the history of mentality that would have offered themselves in many ways". Her more than six years of research on the “reconstruction of a life story” left many questions unanswered, which is why critics were rather confused about her work. The “persistent historical work” would be “an invaluable service” that “cannot be valued highly enough”.

“Despite her meticulousness”, “Kugler's research often led to contradictions”, wrote Igal Avidan ( NZZ ), “the flow of the exciting story” she often interrupted by testimony. Best of all , she “succeeded in depicting life in the Bavarian province under American denazification ”, while Scherwitz only perfected with his lies “what the majority of Germans also tried: namely to wash themselves of all guilt.” Kugler said able to show "that an SS officer could also be a person". The book is “both a search for traces and an epic of the downfall of the 30,000 Jews in Riga; a chapter of history that was concealed in Soviet times ”.

Hans-Jürgen Döscher found the "singular life story of Fritz Scherwitz alias Eleke Sirewitz" presented by Kugler to be exciting, but criticized the fact that the book conveyed "little certain knowledge". This already begins with the book title “The Jewish SS Officer”, because “despite intensive archive studies and numerous witness interviews [...] the Jewish ancestry claimed by Scherwitz after 1945 is 'still uncertain'” and it is the “term 'SS officer' of the nomenclature of the SS-Personalhauptamt ”.

For Hans G Helms, on the other hand, the exciting thing about Kugler's study is "in any case not the question of whether Scherwitz is actually of Jewish descent or not, rather the carelessness and arbitrariness of SS practice that Scherwitz exploits for his Jews": for example, like Scherwitz only on the basis of the statements of friends in 1933 was accepted into the SS "committed to Aryan racial purity" or received his marriage license in 1935.

The question of whether Scherwitz was “now a war criminal or a benefactor” moved Günther Schwarberg after reading the book, which describes “a completely unbelievable gap between fear of death and cheerfulness”. Scherwitz “made the time in the camp a little easier for the Jews. But when they were picked up to be shot ”he“ probably even shot them. ”Whether he“ was punished too mildly or too harshly by the court for manslaughter with six years imprisonment ”was above all in comparison“ with the scandalous proceedings against German concentration camps - Criminal "irrelevant: there would be" no right to equal treatment in the wrong ".

Books (selection)

  • Anita Kugler: Work organization and production technology of the Adam-Opel-Werke (from 1900 to 1929). International Institute for Comparative Social Research at the WZB Berlin 1985
  • Anita Kugler: pirated prints - free love, please next to the cash register. In: Christiane Landgrebe, Jörg Plath (Ed.): 68 and the consequences: an incomplete lexicon. Argon Berlin 1998 ISBN 9783870244620 , pp. 103-108.
  • Anita Lenz: He who loves is right: Roman. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2000 ISBN 978-3-462-02949-9 .
  • Anita Kugler: Scherwitz. The Jewish SS officer. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004 ISBN 9783462033144 , limited preview .
  • Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings , Anita Kugler, Nicholas Levis: Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War. Berghahn Books, New York 2004. ISBN 9781782387855 , limited preview .
  • Anita Kugler: Home cooking sweetened with stevia. Wagner Gelnhausen 2012 ISBN 978-3-86279-293-1 .
  • Anita Kugler, Stefanie Bisping: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Comet Cologne 2017 ISBN 978-3-86941-754-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jan Feddersen : Liaison with a madman. In: taz . September 18, 2004.
  2. ^ A b Uwe Sonnenberg: From Marx to the mole: Left book trade in West Germany in the 1970s. Wallstein Verlag, 2016 ISBN 978-3-8353-1816-8 , p. 563, limited preview .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Author profile Anita Kugler. In: Kiepenheuer & Witsch .
  4. ^ Hans Altenhein: The politicization of the book market: 1968 as an industry event. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007 ISBN 9783447055901 , p. 138, limited preview .
  5. ↑ Billstein, Frings , Kugler, Levis: Working for the Enemy. Berghahn Books, New York 2004. ISBN 9781782387855 , pp. 301f, limited preview .
  6. ↑ Article by Anita Kugler. In: taz .
  7. ^ Tilman Jens : Small newspaper - bright minds: a visit to the Berlin "taz". In: NDR . 1996. OCLC 916417950 .
  8. ↑ Alexander Levin: The Jewish SS Officer . Translated from Russian into English, in: Gertrude Schneider : The Unfinished Road. Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back . Praeger Publishers Inc, 1991, ISBN 9780275940935 , pp. 67-79, limited preview .
  9. ^ A b Marianne Wellershoff : The suffering of the deceived. In: Der Spiegel . 45/2000, pp. 2013f.
  10. ↑ ZEIT bestseller fiction. In: The time . 09/2001.
  11. ^ ZDF yearbook television games and films. In: ZDF . 2002.
  12. ↑ Susanne Katzorke: 87 lines of Ehekampf. In: taz . August 8, 2000.
  13. ↑ Susanne Heim : More shimmering than Schindler. In: taz . January 22, 2005.
  14. ↑ Harry Nutt : The good warehouse manager. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . May 3, 2005.
  15. ↑ Igal Avidan: The Incredible Life of the Jewish Concentration Camp Commandant. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . November 14, 2004.
  16. ^ Hans-Jürgen Döscher : Thinner than tissue paper. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . January 26, 2005.
  17. ↑ Hans G Helms : Anita Kugler: Scherwitz - The Jewish SS officer. In: Deutschlandfunk . October 11, 2004.
  18. ^ Günther Schwarberg : Little crook, great murderer. In: New Germany . April 5, 2005.
personal data
SURNAME Kugler, Anita
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lenz, Anita (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic bookseller, historian, journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Thuringia