Dora clapboard

Dora Schindel (born November 16, 1915 in Munich ; died January 11, 2018 in Bonn ) was a German émigré and contemporary witness.

Life

Dora Schindel grew up in a middle-class Jewish family . In 1935 she passed her Abitur at the Girls Reform School. As a Jew, she was unable to enroll at any university in Germany and trained as a chemical-technical assistant from 1935–1937. She danced with Mary Wigman and later stayed in correspondence with her for many years. In 1935 she met Hermann Mathias Görgen , for whom she worked from 1937 in Zurich alongside her studies of art history in the political resistance against National Socialism. In Zurich she was also in contact with Elisabeth Mann and the Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht . In 1939 she went to Geneva with Görgen , from where she supported emigrated intellectuals. With the beginning of the Second World War, Switzerland tightened its legislation; it was now only available as a transit country for emigrants. Görgen and Schindel managed to organize a trip to Brazil for 48 people from the Görgen group . The group included the Romance scholar Susanne Bach, the biologist Alfred Goldschmidt, the musician Georg Wassermann, the writer Ulrich Becher and the publicist Walter Kreiser . Since the Brazilian government did not want to accept Jews and the German-Jewish members of the group had passports marked with a J, it was necessary to obtain Czech passports for them without this addition. The group posed as a team of technicians intending to set up a company in Brazil. We managed to get transit visas for France, Spain and Portugal.

On April 26, 1941, the group left the port of Lisbon en route to Rio de Janeiro . The INTEC company was founded in Juiz de Fora and existed until 1954, and Dora Schindel became commercial director. German immigrants were considered Nazi spies in Brazil , were not allowed to speak German, and house searches were carried out. Dora Schindel quickly learned the Brazilian language and settled in. After the end of the war, Görgen and Schindel initially stayed in the country. In 1955 Schindel received Brazilian citizenship and moved to Switzerland. From 1957 she worked again for Görgen, who had become a member of the CSU Saar in Bonn . In 1960 they both founded the German-Brazilian Society . Schindel also accompanied him on his travels when Görgen became the special representative of the Federal Press Office . In 1986 she got her German passport again. In 2018 Dora Schindel died in Bonn at the age of 102. Your estate is in the holdings of the German Exile Archive of the German National Library .

source

• Sylvia Asmus: Dora Schindel in Memoriam on the website of the German National Library

Web links

• Dora Schindel's estate in the German Exile Archive of the German National Library