Babette Gross
Babette Gross (born as Lisette Babette Thüring, July 16, 1898 in Potsdam ; died February 8, 1990 in Berlin ) was a German publicist . Before World War II she was the managing director of the New German Publishing House and after the war she was co-founder of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Gross was Margarete Buber-Neumann's older sister and partner of the influential Communist publisher and film producer Willi Munzenberg , whose biography she later wrote.
Life
Babette Thuringia was born as the daughter of the brewery director ( Berliner Kindl ) Heinrich Thüring (1866–1942) and Else Merten (1871–1960), she had two sisters. After graduating from the Oberlyzeum Potsdam, she took up a position as governess of an imperial grandson at a castle in Silesia in 1915 . In 1919 she passed her examination to become a teacher and soon afterwards went to Berlin.
In 1920 she joined the Communist Party of Germany there . His marriage to the writer Fritz Gross in the same year was short-lived . In 1923, their son Peter Gross (1923–2016) was born, who grew up with his grandparents in Potsdam and who took a children's transport to England. From 1922 on, she worked in the office of International Workers' Aid , where she met Willi Munzenberg and became his partner before becoming the manager of Munzenberg's most important publishing house, the "New German Publishing House".
After the takeover of the Nazis had to leave with Münzenberg Germany and went to Paris into exile. In their absence, both were sentenced to death by a Nazi court. Meanwhile, Münzenberg continued to work as a publisher in exile, and Babette Gross took over the management of his new publishing house, the "Éditions du Carrefour". By founding the “Universum Library” cooperative in September 1933, she tried to ensure that the “ Universum Library for All ” would continue to exist in Switzerland . In 1937, Babette Gross resigned from the KPD when her partner Munzenberg increasingly got into ideological disputes with the Comintern .
She was interned in Camp de Gurs in 1940 and was able to flee to Mexico via Portugal. In 1947 she returned to Germany, where she was temporarily managing director of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
Works
- Babette Gross: Willi Munzenberg. A political biography . 352 S. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1967. Series of the quarterly books for contemporary history, number 14/15. With a foreword by Arthur Koestler .
- Babette Gross: France's Path to Communism . 112 p. Neptun-Verlag, Kreuzlingen 1971
translation
- Isaac Don Levine: The Murderer's Psyche. The man who killed Trotsky . Europa Verlag, Vienna 1970.
literature
- Gross, Babette , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (eds.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 243
- About Babette Gross in Diethart Kerbs : Lifelines: German biographies from the 20th century. With an afterword by Arno Klönne , Klartext, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-799-4 .
Web links
- Short biography of Babette Gross published by Unrast-Verlag
- Short biography of Babette Gross on the website "Berlin Lexikon"
- Carola Stern : The singer from the red paradise. Propagandagenie Willi Munzenberg . Die Zeit, September 29, 1967 No. 39
Individual evidence
- ^ Gross, Fritz: unpublished writings . Archives in London and the M25 area. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Big, Babette |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Thuringia, Lisette Babette (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German publicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 16, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Potsdam |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 1990 |
| Place of death | Berlin |