Arthur Seehof

Arthur Seehof (born April 9, 1892 in Kassel , died September 1, 1966 in Wyhlen , Lörrach district) was a left-wing socialist journalist and writer and a member of the International Socialist Fighting League .

Life

He was the grandson of a rabbi, had Jewish parents and served as an interpreter during World War I. In 1917 he was imprisoned for "disobeying service orders" and "resisting state authority". In the young German republic he was first a soldier's council, until he could devote himself to writing and bibliophiles again. He directed and founded various publishing houses and the bookstore Li-Seehof in Berlin , named after the short name of his first wife, the bookseller Elise (Li) Remmer (1890–1972), who divorced him in 1921. His daughter Tanja was born on November 7, 1921 in Berlin and came from her marriage to Li.

In 1919 he published the magazine “Der Mitmensch. Journal for Socialist Culture ”, with which Bogdanov and Lunatscharski's idea of ​​proletarian culture was to be disseminated in Germany. In 1920 the magazine "Soviet" followed. Around 1928 he got involved with the Volksfilmverband. His publishing house had a successor company in Frankfurt, where works by Lu Märten were published. Béla Kun claimed: "The Seehof'sche Buchhandlung receives more literature from Russia than the representative of the KI ".

From 1923 to 1933 he was a permanent employee of Ossietzky's weekly newspaper Weltbühne . He also wrote regularly for the “New Generation”, “Humanity”, “The Other Germany”, “Kulturwille” and the “Chronik”, as well as a number of German daily newspapers. In 1933, after the German fascists came to power, he happened to be in Paris. When he was informed by his family in Berlin that he was wanted, he stayed in Paris and took his family, i. H. his second wife Ilse Seehof, née Fröhlich, married to her since 1925 and his two children Lore and Sascha after. He began to write for newspapers in Prague, Holland and also for magazines of the German emigration, so z. B. also for the socialist perspective . The National Socialists, fortunately unsuccessfully, carried out his transfer to Germany, claiming that he had committed perjury. This was demonstrably incorrect and the French authorities refused to expel him. On August 6, 1935, his German citizenship was revoked, as was his immediate family in 1937. Now he was expatriate and stateless. According to his own statements, his parents, Jonas and Cäcilie Seehof and his sister Sophie Langer were deported to Theresienstadt and died in this context.

In 1935 he went with his family to Mallorca, to Cala Ratjada , where the third child Michael was born. There he lived with a group of German writers and artists in the "Inselgarten", named after a poem by the writer Erich Arendt, who also belonged to the group in the artists' colony. Their meeting point was the famous Wikiki bar. In 1935 he joined the Munzenberg Group. On July 18, 1936, General Franco launched a coup against the legitimate democratic government in Madrid. Within 24 hours Mallorca and Ibiza were in the hands of the Franco fascists. With the help of the English, Seehof managed to return to Paris in time via Marseille, where he was first interned, then deployed as a work soldier at Tours and shortly afterwards found himself a work soldier in the Petain government. In order to avoid extradition and deportation, he went into hiding in a Catholic old people's home in Bellac.From 1941 he stayed illegally in Limoges , Toulouse and Marseille for a short time and stayed under the most adverse conditions near Grenoble and in Le Touvet near Grenoble hidden on a remote farm until he was finally able to flee to Switzerland with his wife Ilse and their three children in 1943.

During his time in Grenoble he led a. a. Kindertransporte from France to Switzerland. In doing so, he supported Regina Kägi-Fuchsmann in the Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross , an aid campaign by the Swiss Red Cross that lasted from January 1942 to 1955 , which also helped him and his family to go to Switzerland in 1943. There he was interned as an illegal refugee in various reception camps until he was able to move into an apartment with his family in Winterthur in November 1944 as a so-called private internee . He now wrote u. a. for the “Thurgauer Arbeiter-Zeitung”, the “Berner Tagwacht”, “Die Andere Zeitung”, the “Freethinker” and again for “Die Weltbühne”. As a refugee, the Swiss Federal Police strictly forbade him to make any public political and critical statements. Against this background, he was shadowed by the Swiss secret service, his mail read and repeatedly threatened with expulsion - "deportation" - if he did not stop publishing. Following this was not only unacceptable for him for economic reasons. Despite repeated requests to stop his journalistic activities, he continued to publish. His poems and articles, written under the pseudonym Peter Rot, were identified. As a result, he was expelled again in 1951 because of his political opinion and his work in a country - the liberal Switzerland that was not involved in World War II - and had to completely reorientate himself with the entire family. The ban on entry into Switzerland was not (permanently) lifted until his death.

He went to Israel near Haifa with his second wife and their youngest son Michael. The eldest daughter Lore stayed behind, his son Sascha followed later to Israel together with his wife. In the meantime, Arthur Seehof had been closely connected to his third wife Anna Kunz, born in the late 1940s. September 14, 1929 lived in Winterthur, whom he had met there at political meetings and divorced his wife Ilse in Israel in 1952. Anna Kunz, however, did not receive a permit after her subsequent application or entry into Israel, so that in 1953 he was forced to return to Germany. In March 1952 he received the certificate of naturalization in the Federal Republic of Germany at the British consulate in Haifa. The period of statelessness ended after almost 17 years. In Germany he lived in Höllstein , Herten and Wyhlen in the district of Lörrach, was involved in the "Socialist Community" and in the "IGSS - International Society for Socialist Studies" section Germany. He continued his journalistic and writing activities as far as his increasingly poor health allowed. At the same time, he and the German authorities waged a shameful struggle for his rehabilitation and recognition as a persecuted person and adequate compensation. With his third wife Anna Kunz, whom he married in 1955, he had another daughter - Renée Eve Seehof, b. January 22nd, 1954. And up to his last days he worked on some extensive works that had not yet been published.

Publications

• The story of a Christian working woman
• July Revolution 1830
• Armaments against the Soviet Union
• Andree's daring polar flight
• with Willi Munzenberg , John Heartfield : The brown net. How Hitler's agents work abroad and prepare for war ; 1935
• Countless newspaper articles and essays

literature

• The action. Volume 1, 1961, p. 99.
• Reinhard Andress: The island garden - the exile of German-speaking writers on Mallorca, 1931-1936 (= Amsterdam publications on language and literature. Volume 144). Radopi, Amsterdam 2001, Chapter 7, p. 124.
• Dieter Schiller: The dream of Hitler's fall. Studies on German exile literature 1933–1945. P. 21 ( books.google.de ).

Web links

• Part of Arthur Seehof's estate in the German Exile Archive of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DY 30 / J IV 2/3/285 argus.bstu.bundesarchiv.de “Entry of Arthur Seehof-Singer, born April 9, 1892 in Kassel, z. Currently residing in Israel "
2. ↑ Obituary In: Freethinker. Volume 49, Issue 12, 1966, p. 102 ( e-periodica.ch PDF).
3. ↑ Seehof-Verlag; gave u. a. Issues for socialist literature .
4. ↑ billiongraves.com
5. ↑ Elise Remmer, daughter of a helmsman, became a bookseller after attending the girls' trading school. During the war a member of the USPD, she was a member of the KPD since it was founded. After the divorce from Seehof, she worked in various bookshops and publishing houses for the party from 1922. Li Seehof emigrated to France, Switzerland and then to Moscow in 1933. There she worked as a proofreader for the "Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung". In 1941 she was deported to Kazakhstan: Hermann Weber: Fear of Ulbricht and subversive Trotsky writings . In: New Germany . ( neue-deutschland.de ). The daughter Tanja (1921–1957) moved to Leningrad after their marriage in 1950: wiki.drafd.org .
   
6. ↑ rosalux.de (PDF).
7. ↑ Spanish Civil War II - Death in the Island Garden . In: Friday . ( freitag.de ).