Charles Duff

Charles St. Lawrence Duff ( Irish Cathal Ó Dubh ; born April 7, 1894 in Enniskillen , County Fermanagh , † October 15, 1966 ; pseudonym Vladimir Cherznichewski ) was an Irish journalist and writer.

Life and activity

Duff was a son of railroad official John Duff and his wife Annie Maud, b. Ekins.

Duff was educated at the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and La Rochelle before joining the British Merchant Navy in 1910. During this time he discovered an unusually great talent for learning foreign languages, of which he was the last to master seven.

After the outbreak of the First World War, Duff was taken on as a translator in the service of the army, keeping in particular connections with French and Portuguese contacts. During the war he was injured twice by gas and wounded once. For health reasons, he could not return to the merchant navy after the war.

On August 28, 1919 he was hired as a temporary clerk in the British Foreign Office , where he was involved in the Political Intelligence and News Department. In 1920 he moved to the Foreign Office's news department as a press officer, where he worked until 1936. Geographically, he was mainly concerned with matters affecting the countries of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.

In addition to his work in the Foreign Office, Duff began to work as a writer and translator in the 1920s: his best-known work as a writer was the book A Handbook on Hanging , a satirical work on the death penalty that has been translated into numerous languages. The work was first published in German in 1931 under the title Henkerfibel. A family and edification book. A brief outline of the art of hanging has been published. Other satirical writings that were ironically provided with supposedly non-fiction-like titles were This Human Nature and Anthropological Report on a London Suburb . Well-known authors whose works Duff translated include Francisco de Quevedo , Émile Zola , B. Traven, Maxim Gorky, and Arnold Zweig .

In 1936 Duff resigned from the Foreign Office on the grounds that, in his opinion, it was an institution that supported the fascist dictatorships in Europe. In particular, the attitude of the British government in the Spanish Civil War he faced with sharp criticism. For this reason he began to publish the magazine Voice of Spain , in which he stood up for the cause of the Spanish Republicans. After the voice was discontinued , he published the Spanish News Letters as an alternative .

Due to his exposed anti-fascist engagement during the Spanish Civil War at the end of the 1930s, Duff was classified by the National Socialist police as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered special dangerous or important, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, they should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following special SS units with special priority.

From 1936 to 1937 and from 1939 to 1966 Duff worked as a freelance writer. In between he taught from 1937 to 1938 as a lecturer ( lecturer ) for linguistics at the Institute of Education at the University of London and from 1954 to 1955 European languages ​​at Nanyang University in Singapore. The focus of his later work formed textbooks for learning foreign languages ​​for self-taught people. In addition, he continued to write satirical texts and travel guides.

Duff was a member of the Society of Authors.

family

On August 26, 1916, Duff married Ivy Goute, with whom he had four children.

Fonts

• Quevedo. The Choice Humorous and Satricial Works , 1926.
• A handbook on hanging. Being a Short Introduction to the Fine Art of Execution , 1928. (Reprints 1938, 1948, 1953, 1954, 1961, 1974, 1999 and 2001; the latter two editions with a foreword by Christopher Hitchens )
• Handrail and the Wampus; three segments of a polyphonic biogriad , 1931.
• James Joyce and the Plain Reader , 1932.
• The Basis and Essentials of French , 1933.
• Anthropological Report on a London Suburb , 1935.
• French for Home Study , New York 1935.
• The Basis and Essentials of Russian , 1936.
• The Truth about Columbus and the Discovery of America , New York 1936.
• Spain at War , 1938. ( Spain. The stumbling block. An overview of the domestic and foreign policy situation in Spain today , Hamburg 1949)
• A key to victory. Spain , 1940.
• The Basis and Essentials of Spanish , 1942.
• Spain. The Moral Touchstone of Europe , 1944.
• Freedom for Spain! , 1945.
• The Basis and Essentials of Portugese , 1945.
• The Basis and Essentials of French , 1946. (2nd edition 1955)
• The Basis and Essentials of Italian , 1946.
• How to Learn a Language , 1947.
• No Angel's Wing , 1947.
• This Human Nature. A History, a Commentary, an Exposition , 1950.
• All Purpose-French for Adults , 1952. (Reprinted 1969)
• Ireland and the Irish , 1953.
• England and the English , London 1954. (Reprints 1964, 2011)
• French for Beginners , 1955.
• All Purposes English for Adults , 1956.
• German for Beginners , 1957. (Reprinted in 1961 as The Basis and Essentials of German )
• German for Adults. All Purposes , 1957.
• Spanish for Beginners , 1958.
• Italian for Beginners , 1959.
• First year Russian. A Course for Beginners , 1960.
• Second Year Ruissan , 1961.
• Russian for Beginners. Everyday Handbooks , 1962.
• All Purposes Russian for Adults , 1962.
• All Purposes Italian for Adults , 1965.
• Mysterious People: An Introduction to the Gypsies , 1965. (Reprinted as The Gypsies , 1967)
• Six Days to Shake an Empire: Events and Factors Behind the Irish Rebellion of 1916. An Account of that Rebellion and Its Suppression and of the Final Struggle for Self-government, with an Epilogue on the Dissolution of the British Empire Into the British Commonwealth of Nations , 1966.

literature

• Contemporary Authors: A Biobibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields. New revision series , Vol. 95, 2001, p. 136.

Web links

• Literature by and about Charles Duff in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Duff on the special wanted list GB .