Edith Tudor-Hart

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edith Tudor-Hart (as Edith Suschitzky born August 28, 1908 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died May 12, 1973 in Brighton ) was an Austro-British photographer and agent for the Soviet intelligence service KGB .

Life

Edith Suschitzky was the daughter of Adele Bauer (1878-1980) and the socialist bookseller Wilhelm Suschitzky, who ran a bookstore with his brother Philipp at 57 Favoritenstrasse in Vienna . Her parents lived at Petzvalgasse 4 in the Wieden district and were secularized Jews , which she stubbornly ignored all her life. Her brother was the cameraman Wolfgang Suschitzky .

Edith Suschitzky had her first stay abroad when, after the end of the war in 1918, she was allowed to participate in a Kinderland deportation to Sweden for health reasons . At the age of 16 she trained with the Montessori teacher Lili Roubiczek and in 1925 went to England for an internship . Suschitzky met and fell in love with the communist agent Arnold Deutsch in Vienna in 1926 . In 1928 she began studying at the Bauhaus with the preliminary course with Walter Peterhans , she was still enrolled there in 1930, and in 1931 she published an article on the Bauhaus in the English magazine Commercial Art . A stay in England from October 1930 ended with her expulsion in January 1931 , the special branch of the London police had registered her connection to the Communist Party of Great Britain (KPGB), as a result her letters were sent to her fiancé, the English medical student and communist Alexander Tudor-Hart, controlled and sometimes not even delivered. Back in Vienna, the Comintern gave her a job as a photographer for the Soviet news agency TASS . In 1931 Suschitzky published a photo essay on Montessori pedagogy What does the new kindergarten want? in the magazine Der Kuckuck . Her photographs also appeared in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) and in Die Bühne , and she had brought a photo reportage with her from London about the “misery on Caledonian Market”. In England an edition of John Reed's novel Ten Days that Shook the World was published with its photomontage as a cover picture.

After the KPÖ was banned by the Dollfuss regime on May 26, 1933, she was arrested as an agent, and her photographic material, which was later lost among evidence , was also confiscated . In August 1933 she married Tudor-Hart and was able to emigrate from Austria in October 1933. Her brother, who was also a communist, fled to the Netherlands and met her again in England in 1935. He then started working as a cameraman for Paul Rotha . Her father committed suicide in 1934 after the banning of the SPÖ in Vienna suicide , the publishing house Anzengruber led the nephew Joseph Suschitzky to the annexation of Austria in 1938 on.

Alexander Tudor-Hart found a job as a doctor in the Welsh Rhondda Valley in South Wales , where she photographed the life of the miners. Tudor-Hart found support in London from Jack Pritchard and Ernő Goldfinger . Richard S. Lambert published her photographs in the BBC's popular magazine The Listener . The Tudor-Hart couple, on the other hand, supported those who had fled Germany, according to Lotte Moos , but they were unable to find work. She published her reportage photographs in support of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War , in which Alexander fought on the Republican side as a doctor, and on the condition of workers in England's northeast in The Social Scene and Design Today . She provided the photos for Margery Spring Rice's book Working-Class Wives , published in 1939 .

The Tudor-Hart couple separated after their son Tommy was born in 1936. Due to Tommy's serious illness (autism) she was tied to the house in the 1940s, which also influenced her photography.

Tudor-Hart was friends with Lizzy Friedmann, who was married to Kim Philby , and arranged for a meeting of KGB agent Arnold Deutsch with Philby in 1934 , at which Philby was recruited for espionage services for the Soviet Union. Even Anthony Blunt was recruited by her. This laid the foundation for the Cambridge Five , a successful spy group for the Soviet Union in England during World War II. She worked as a courier for the Soviet secret service, her role temporarily became more important when Arnold Deutsch was ordered back to the USSR in 1937 because of the Moscow trials .

Tudor-Hart brought her mother to England in 1938 and also supported her cousins ​​Josef and Wilhelm Suschitzky, who were also exiled. She was still integrated into a circle of left-wing intellectuals who met in her house, and visitors were meticulously registered by the British secret service, including Lucia Moholy-Nagy . During the war she did work for war propaganda and after the war only received sporadic commissions, for example from the Ministry of Education in 1952 for the publication Moving and Growing .

Tudor-Hart had a relationship with the atomic scientist Engelbert Broda and was therefore, like him, suspected of espionage. Concerned about a house search shortly after the escape of the spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in 1951, she destroyed most of the prints, some of the negatives and the documentary records. She moved to Brighton , where she ran a small antiquarian bookshop in poverty, and she had to put her son in a home. She continued her agent work, although under the observation of MI5 since 1931 , ultimately undetected until the 1960s.

Tudor-Hart's recurring photographic themes were children, unemployment, and homelessness. She photographed in medium format with a Rolleiflex , which allowed her to communicate openly with people while taking photos, as she did not hide her face behind the camera. The Scottish National Gallery used the bequest to reconstruct the photographic work that was exhibited in a retrospective in 2012. Peter Stephan Jungk , son of Edith's cousin Ruth Suschitzky (1913–1995), published the biopic On Edith's Footsteps in 2016 .

Exhibitions

  • Edith Tudor Hart. A Retrospective (1930-1952) . Liverpool 1987
  • Edith Tudor Hart. The Eye of Conscience . Text by Wolf Suschitzky. London: Nishen, 1987 ISBN 1-85378-401-X
  • Duncan Forbes (Ed.): Edith Tudor-Hart, In the Shadow of the Dictatorships  : [This publication appears on the occasion of the exhibition Edith Tudor Hart: In the shadow of the dictatorships. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, March 2 - May 26, 2013; Wien Museum, Vienna September 26, 2013 - January 12, 2014; Das Verborgene Museum , Berlin, March 13 - June 29, 2014]. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013, ISBN 3-7757-3566-6 .
  • FOTOHOF archiv , Salzburg 2020 - mainly works from the "Moving and Growing" series

Movies

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Suschitzky , at ÖBL
  2. ^ Philipp Suschitzky , at ÖBL
  3. ↑ a b Adolph Lehmann 's general housing indicator, year 1920, volume 2 list of names 7. Evidence. Residents of Vienna, with the exclusion of industrial assistants, day laborers, servants and the non-self-employed. P. 1354 Suřal - Svatik ( 1st column from the left ) , accessed on April 6, 2017.
  4. ↑ a b c d Duncan Forbes: Edith Tudor-Hart. In the shadow of dictatorships , in: Duncan Forbes, 2013, pp. 11–18
  5. ↑ a b c Peter Stephan Jungk : The dark rooms of Edith Tudor-Hart , in: Die Literäre Welt , May 16, 2015, p. 4 f.
  6. ↑ Eric Hobsbawm , Everybody behaved perfectly , in: London Review of Books , 33 (16), August 2011
  7. ↑ a b Duncan Forbes: Edith Tudor-Hart in London , in: Duncan Forbes, 2013, pp. 65–74
  8. ↑ a b Roberta McGrath: Pass number 656336 , in: Duncan Forbes, 2013, pp. 119–125
  9. ^ A b John Simkin: Edith Tudor Hart , at Spartacus Educational
  10. ↑ http://www.fotohof.net/content.php?id=133&newsdetail=580&bg=
  11. ↑ In Edith's footsteps , website
  12. ↑ Arts In Exile In Britain 1933–1945: Politics And Cultural Identity ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (= The Yearbook Of The Research Center For German And Austrian Exile Studies 6) ... Center For German & Austrian Exile Studies )] @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.openisbn.com
  13. ↑ Review in the FASZ of May 31, 2015, p. 46 ( online )
personal data
SURNAME Tudor-Hart, Edith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Suschitzky, Edith (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-British photographer and Soviet agent
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1973
Place of death Brighton