Anja Lundholm

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anja Lundholm (born April 28, 1918 in Düsseldorf ; † August 4, 2007 in Frankfurt am Main ; actually Helga Erdtmann ) was a German writer . She also used the pseudonyms Ann Berkeley and Alf Lindström .

Life

Anja Lundholm, born as Helga Erdtmann, was the daughter of the pharmacist Erich Erdtmann from Krefeld and his Jewish wife, Elisabeth Blumenthal , who came from a banking family in Darmstadt . She grew up in Krefeld and attended the Krefeld Lyceum . From 1936 to 1939 she studied piano, singing and acting at the State Academic University of Music in Berlin and took on minor roles in Ufa films . After her father, who had developed from a German national to a staunch National Socialist and member of the SS , drove his Jewish wife to commit suicide in 1938, Helga Erdtmann, who was a " half-Jew " in the Third Reich, was affected by the discriminatory provisions of the Nuremberg Laws , In 1941 he fled to Italy with the help of forged papers .

In Rome she joined an international resistance group , but was arrested by the Gestapo shortly after the birth of her first child Diana in 1943 because of denunciation by her father, who had already joined the SS in 1934 . After extensive interrogation and mistreatment , she was transferred to Innsbruck in November 1943 . There she was sentenced to death in a trial for high treason and in the spring of 1944 was taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , where she managed to avoid her intended “ extermination through work ”. From the end of 1944 she was a slave laborer in a subcamp from which she and other inmates were evacuated in April 1945 on a “ death march ” . She was able to flee and reached the British Army in Lüneburg through the Russian lines .

As a result, the author moved to Brussels , where she met the Swedish merchant Lundholm. She married Lundholm, took Swedish citizenship and lived with her husband in various places in Europe. During this time she worked as an interpreter and freelance journalist for British newspapers. After her marriage to Lundholm was divorced, Anja Lundholm settled in Frankfurt am Main in 1953 , where she lived as a freelance writer and translator until her death, severely disabled by her multiple sclerosis disease since the 1950s . She attributed the disease to the medical experiments carried out on her in Ravensbrück.

Anja Lundholm was the mother of two children: her daughter Diana was born shortly before her arrest in 1943 and was considered missing until the early 1950s; from the marriage with Lundholm in 1951 the son Melvyn was born. In 1953, at the instigation of her now denazified father, her custody of her two children was withdrawn.

Anja Lundholm was the author of predominantly autobiographical novels in which she dealt with her adventurous fate between 1927 and 1949; Especially with the description of her time in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp in Das Höllentor , she caused a sensation in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s, while the book was undesirable in the GDR .

Anja Lundholm was a member of the Association of German Writers .

She died on August 4, 2007 in Frankfurt after a long illness at the age of 89.

Awards and honors

Stumbling blocks for Elisabeth and Helga Erdtmann, in front of the pharmacy Uerdinger Straße 1, Krefeld

Works

Fiction novels

  • I love me, do you love me too? Hamburg u. a. 1971 (under the name Ann Berkeley) (also as Bluff at Luebbe, Bergisch Gladbach, multiple editions from 1982)
  • Ultimate test. Düsseldorf 1974.
  • Nestling. Munich 1977.
  • With a view of the lake. Hamburg 1979.
  • Narcissus in poste restante. Bergisch Gladbach 1985.

Autobiographical novels

title Year
of first
publication		 Treated period content
Half and half 1966 1935-1941 Experiences as a young half-Jewish woman in the Nazi state.
Dawn 1970 1945 Narrative perspective: past tense, 3rd person. After the end of the war, she escaped from Soviet-occupied Brandenburg to the British army in Lüneburg with a female inmate who was also from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Both prisoners are so traumatized by their time in the concentration camp that they can hardly remember their own names or the time before imprisonment, they hardly perceive themselves as women or even as people.
The green one 1972 1960 (or early 60s) Narrative perspective: epic present tense , 1st person. The half-Jewish first-person narrator suffers a nervous breakdown after the death of her tyrannical German father, who was with the SS. Her father's lawyer harassed her repeatedly in the clinic, because the father had persuaded him before his death that the half-Jewish daughter had usurped and hidden the considerable fortune of the suicide-driven Jewish mother that was actually due to the lawyer in the mid-1930s . In truth, the father squandered the fortune himself.

Lt. Spiegel online a "relentless analysis" of Lundholm's father, who appears in flashbacks on the one hand to the 50s as a bedridden, languishing but still tyrannical old man, on the other hand to the childhood and youth of the first-person narrator, when she and her siblings already suffered from the brutality and heartlessness of the father. Relaunched as An Honorable Citizen in the 1990s .
Those days in Rome 1982 1941-late 1943 Escape to Italy with forged papers and resistance there until his arrest in November 1943, shortly after the birth of her daughter Diana.
Orderly relationships 1983 1930 (approx.) Narrative perspective: epic present tense, 1st person. Childhood between the loveless German family of the tyrannical father and the loving Jewish family of the mother; The father, as a stupid German national, played down the electoral victories of the NSDAP, which to him still seemed a bit too proletarian.
The ultimate limit 1988 1946 Narrative perspective: past tense, 3rd person. Immediately after the war, there are still hardly any human concentration camp survivors in bombed-out Brussels.
The gate of hell 1988 1944-1945 Narrative perspective: epic present tense, 1st person. Imprisonment in the concentration camp in Ravensbrück from spring 1944 until his escape in early May 1945.
In the web 1991 1943-1944 Narrative perspective: epic present tense, 1st person. Gestapo imprisonment in Innsbruck from November 1943 until she was abducted to the concentration camp in spring 1944. Due to the fact that her father is a member of the SS, the narrator experiences surprising preferential treatment without torture or the like. However, after the father has been informed and has checked on the spot, the Gestapo commissioner, who made the preferential treatment possible, is immediately arrested himself. The narrator is then tortured for the first time and then deported to the concentration camp.

Translations

  • Peter Baker : The big game. Zurich 1970 (translated under the name Alf Lindström).
  • Peter Baker: Valetudo Private Clinic. Zurich 1971 (translated under the name Alf Lindström).
  • Richard Beilby : No medals for Aphrodite. Zurich 1970 (translated under the name Alf Lindström).
  • Mala Rubinstein : Beautiful and charming with Mala Rubinstein. Zurich 1975.
  • Gordon Thomas : The cloud of fire. Zurich 1970 (translated under the name Alf Lindström).

Reviews

Documentaries

  • The two lives of Anja Lundholm. Chronicle of a Century. Documentary by Christian Gropper, Germany 2007, 90 min. (First broadcast on August 28, 2007, ARD, 10.45 p.m., table of contents ).
  • The Odyssey of Anja Lundholm. Documentary by Freya Klier for Hessischer Rundfunk. Germany 1998, 45 min.

literature

  • Magdalene Heuser: Holocaust and memory: autobiographies, diaries and autobiographical reports of persecuted women. In: Ortrun Niethammer (Ed.): Women and National Socialism. Osnabrück 1996, pp. 83-99.
  • Ursula Atkinson: Liberation from the fetters of the past. Darmstadt 2000.
  • Irma Hildebrandt: Odyssey Rome - Ravensbrück - Brussels - Frankfurt. Anja Lundholm actress and writer. In: ders .: Let's take the next step - 18 portraits of women from Frankfurt. Munich 2000, pp. 175-192.
  • Raimund Hoghe: More than a life. The writer Anja Lundholm and the story of a family in Germany . In: Ders .: When nobody sings, it's quiet . Portraits, reviews and other texts. Berlin: Verlag Theater der Zeit 2019, pp. 138–145.
  • Kay Less : 'In life, more is taken from you than given ...'. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. Acabus-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 156 f.
  • "The Gate of Hell": Author Anja Lundholm has died. In: Der Spiegel . Online 2007 ( spiegel.de ).
  • Obituary. In: The Times & The Sunday Times. August 17, 2007 (English). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: timesonline.co.uk )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.timesonline.co.uk

source

  • Critical lexicon for contemporary German literature. Volume 8.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ rp-online.de (from February 15, 2017): Memories of Anja Lundholm , accessed on June 10, 2017.
  2. ↑ rp-online.de (from June 12, 2015): The pharmacist Elisabeth Erdtmann , accessed on June 10, 2017.
  3. ↑ frankenpost.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.frankenpost.de
  4. ↑ Laudation "The degree of her awareness is in contrast to the great importance of Anja Lundholm's message."
personal data
SURNAME Lundholm, Anja
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Erdtmann, Helga (maiden name); Berkeley, Ann (pseudonym); Lindström, Alf (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH August 4, 2007
Place of death Frankfurt am Main