Berta Lask

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Berta Lask (pseudonym "Gerhard Wieland") (born November 17, 1878 in Wadowice , Austria-Hungary , † March 28, 1967 in East Berlin ) was a German poet, playwright and journalist.

Life

Berta Lask was born as the third of four children of Leopold Lask, a Jewish paper manufacturer, and his wife Cerline, an educator, in Wadowice, Galicia . The philosopher Emil Lask (1875–1915), a friend of Georg Lukács ', was her older brother. In 1885 the Lask family moved to Germany, where Berta Lask was trained at the grammar school in Bad Freienwalde (Oder) . During this time she began her first literary attempts. In 1894/95 she was taught by Helene Lange at the Lyceum in Berlin . Her wish to study failed because of her mother's resistance.

In 1901 Berta Lask and Louis Jacobsohn (1863-1940), neurologist , histologist and lecturer at the Berlin Friedrich Wilhelms University, married . The couple had a daughter and three sons.

In 1912 she wrote her first, unpublished, play under the title Auf dem Hinterhof, four stairs left . After the First World War , Berta Lask published the volumes of poetry Voices and Calls from Darkness , closely related to Kurt Hiller's expressionist activism . Both brothers fell in World War I.

Berta Lask was initially involved in the bourgeois women's movement, under the impression of the misery in Berlin, which she got to know through her husband's medical practice and later the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the November Revolution in 1918 in Berlin, she radicalized herself. In December 1918 she led a controversy with the editor Siegfried Jacobsohn in the magazine Die Weltbühne about the question of the extent to which women should be politically active as women, which Jacobsohn had denied. She later published in the Rote Fahne and other communist newspapers and joined the KPD in 1923 . Propagandist literature emerged such as the choir Die Totenruf - speaking choir in memory of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg , the theater plays Leuna 1921 or Thomas Müntzer , children's books such as Auf dem Flügelpferde durch die Zeit and How Franz and Grete traveled to Russia . Lask first visited the Soviet Union in 1925.

Lask was repeatedly accused of high treason by the Weimar Republic judiciary, her printed plays were confiscated and performances were banned. In lawsuits against communist booksellers, reference was also made to their works. However, the charges against her were put down in 1927. Along with Johannes R. Becher , Frida Rubiner , FC Weiskopf and others, she was one of the members of the preparatory committee and one of the founding members of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers (BPRS). When the federal government was founded on October 19, 1928, she became the second secretary of the board. Berta Lask was also a member of the Association of German Writers . As a result, she mainly worked as a journalist.

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Berta Lask was temporarily arrested; in June 1933 she fled to Moscow via Prague . One of her sons was murdered by the National Socialists in the Dachau concentration camp in the same year . Her sister Helene Lask also died in a concentration camp after 1933 .

Lask first worked as a journalist in Moscow, she published in part under the pseudonym Gerhard Wieland. At the beginning of 1936, her husband followed to the Soviet Union at the age of 73, accompanied by his daughter-in-law Dora Diamant and the two-year-old granddaughter Franziska Marianne Lask. Berta Lask went with her husband to Sevastopol in the Crimea , where he got a job as a doctor. In 1938 the Lasks were expatriated by the German authorities. The son Lutz Lask , a graduate economist and employee at Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute , was arrested in 1938 and imprisoned in a camp on the Kolyma in the Far East. After her husband's death in 1940, Berta Lask lived with her son Hermann Lask in Arkhangelsk from summer 1941 to autumn 1944 , then back in Moscow until 1953. After her son Lutz was released, she returned to Germany in August 1953. In the GDR were Anna Seghers , Franz Carl and Grete Weiskopf to their acquaintances.

In 1963 she was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.

tomb

Berta Lask's urn grave is located in the Pergolenweg grave complex in the Socialist Memorial at the Central Cemetery in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The Central Committee of the SED paid tribute to them in New Germany with an obituary.

Works (selection)

  • Be right. Poems. Steegemann, Hanover 1919 (digitized version)
  • Shouts from the dark. Selection 1915–1921 . (Social anti-militarist seals, 1). Workers Art Exhibition, Berlin 1921
  • Our task to humanity. Essays . Publishing house "Der Syndikalist", Berlin 1923.
  • On the wing horse through the ages. Images of the class struggle of the millennia. Story for young proletarians . With 8 pictures by Rudolf Schlichter. Association Internat. Publishing houses, Berlin 1925.
  • How Franz and Grete came to Russia. Story for the working youth and working class parents . Association Internat. Publishing houses, Berlin 1926.
  • The Liberation. Sixteen pictures from the lives of German and Russian women, 1914–1920 . Association of International Publishing Houses, Berlin 1926.
  • Poison gas mist over Soviet Russia. Revue drama in 35 scenes . Friedrich, Berlin 1927.
  • Leuna 1921. Drama in five acts . (Rote Dietz series 19). JHW Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1927.
  • Collective village and Soviet property. A travel journal. Internationaler Arbeiter-Verlag, Berlin 1931.
  • A village stands up. Johann the servant. Stories from Hitler Germany . State extension the nat. Minorities of the USSR, Kiev 1935.
  • January 1933 in Berlin . State extension the nat. Minorities of the USSR, Kiev 1935.
  • Silence and Storm (Volumes I and II). Novel. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 1955.
  • Mira Lask (Ed.): With all my heart . With a foreword by Johannes Schellenberger. German military publisher, Berlin 1961.
  • Otto and Else. A story about the struggle of the German working class youth . Publishing house culture and progress, Berlin 1962.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Siegfried Jacobsohn: Answers (with a detailed quotation from Lask's letter). Die Weltbühne II. Half year 1918, p. 613f
  2. ↑ Neues Deutschland , October 6, 1963, p. 1
  3. ^ New Germany of March 29, 1967, p. 1.
personal data
SURNAME Lask, Berta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gerhard Wieland (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Wadowice
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 1967
Place of death Berlin