Clare Jung

Cläre Jung , née Otto (born February 23, 1892 in Berlin ; † March 25, 1981 in East Berlin ), was a German writer and journalist .

Life

Clare Otto came from a middle-class family. The father was a " forage merchant ", ie a feed dealer . After attending secondary school and secondary school for girls , Cläre Otto made contact with the Berlin circle of expressionist poets around Georg Heym , Else Lasker-Schüler and, above all, with Franz Pfemfert and the staff of the magazine Die Aktion , where she met the anarchist poet Franz Jung in 1911 , her future partner and husband. But first she married another employee of the action , the activist and writer Richard Oehring , but the marriage failed and was divorced in 1917. During the war, she worked as a medical assistant in the Moabit Hospital from 1915 and as a secretary for a press service from 1916 . She made contributions to the "Russian Correspondence" and worked as a secretary in the central office of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) founded by Franz Jung , whose partner she had since become.

In August 1921 the couple moved to the Soviet Union . She initially worked there as a secretary in the Moscow office of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI). Afterwards she did development work within the framework of the International Workers Aid , founded children's homes in the Urals in Perm and Yekaterinburg and worked on the reconstruction of the metalworking plant "Ressora" in Petrograd .

After returning to Germany in 1923, together with Franz Jung, whom she had married in 1924, from 1927 she published the Deutsche Feuilleton Dienst , a press service for cultural news that she was able to continue to operate until 1944 after the Nazis came to power. At the same time she was illegally active in the fight against the Nazi dictatorship from 1933. Working with the Schulze-Boysen / Harnack group , she helped Jewish and politically persecuted people and wrote press releases for illegal intelligence services (so-called green reports ). In 1937 the marriage with Franz Jung was divorced.

After the end of the Second World War , she joined the KPD in 1945 and the SED in 1946. She became an editor for literature, cultural policy and popular education at the Berliner Rundfunk , from 1952 she worked as a functionary and boarding school director at the State Ballet School in Berlin and from 1955 as a freelance writer, whose articles appeared in newspapers and magazines in the GDR. She was a member of the Berlin district management of the Kulturbund and later a member of the Veterans Commission of the Association of German Journalists (VDJ).

In 1946 I call out of the depths , a short novel that deals with the fate of Jewish people in Berlin from 1938 to 1943, who, vacillating between resignation and hope, ultimately face their annihilation. Her memory book Birds of Paradise was published posthumously in 1987.

Her estate is in the Märkisches Museum Berlin .

Appreciations

• 1979 Patriotic Order of Merit
• Golden pen of the Association of Journalists of the GDR
• Badge of honor of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship

Works

• I call from below. Novel. Structure, Berlin 1946. New edition in a series of search for traces. Forgotten female authors rediscovered, Vol. 4. Ed. By Monika Melchert. Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89626-432-X .
• Unfinished love. Sequence of scenes. First performance in 1965.
• Birds of paradise. Memories. Hamburg 1987.

literature

• Hartmut Vollmer (ed.): The sun dances its way to death in red shoes. Poetry by expressionist female poets. Arche, Zurich 1993, ISBN 3-7160-2164-4 .
• Elfriede Brüning : Companions: Portraits of forgotten women . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2004. ISBN 978-3320022426
• Peter Erler:  Jung, Clare (Clara) . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Clare Jung in the catalog of the German National Library