Edmond Kaiser

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Edmond Kaiser (Photo: Erling Mandelmann )

Edmond Kaiser (born January 2, 1914 in Paris , † March 4, 2000 in Coimbatore , India ), Swiss citizen since 1960 , was a journalist , poet and writer , agnostic of Jewish descent, who was committed to helping disadvantaged children and women in the world .

Life

Edmond Kaiser was born in 1914 in the Parisian Quartier des Batignolles as the son of the representative Maure Kaiser and his wife Louise Chostmann. His father died in 1918, so that Kaiser was raised by his mother, who married her brother-in-law Armand Kaiser, a businessman in Lausanne, in 1931, and by his grandmother, the widow Edmond Chostmann. He learned to play the piano at an early age and throughout his life adored the great German composers Bach , Mozart and Schubert , but above all Beethoven . As a teenager he read Zola , Flaubert and Lamartine and at the age of 15 wrote numerous poems, which he read to a small group of like-minded people on the Square des Batignolles; a little later he joined the "Association des Poètes français" at the Place du Châtelet. After attending school from 1919 to 1928, Kaiser worked as a casual worker in Paris for two years and in 1931 joined the radical pacifist organization “International League of Fighters for Peace”, which was founded in Paris in the same year . After visiting a befriended family in Radolfzell on Lake Constance several times during his school days , he went to Germany for a year at the insistence of his stepfather in 1932/33 to learn the German language.

In October 1933 he arrived in Lausanne , where he initially lived with his mother in his stepfather's villa "Le Kaiser" (Chemin du Languedoc 10) built in 1927. In July 1936 he married 19-year-old Elisabeth Burnod from Villeneuve . Just two months after the wedding, the young couple moved to Paris, where they wrote and wrote. a. 1937/38 with articles in the magazine La Phalange . Kaiser accepted the position of secretary at Philips . His daughter Myriam was born in 1937 and his son Jean-David in 1939, who died in a tragic accident in 1941.

In 1940 he volunteered for the army “to comfort the dying” and received the Croix de guerre award for the courageous rescue of a wounded man in the Battle of Dreux . In 1943/44 he was active in the resistance networks “ Liberation Nord ” and “Brutus” with the code names Matthieu and Yves. In September 1943 there was a meeting in his Paris apartment (Rue des Chaufourniers 13) with two German Abwehr agents from Lille who pretended to be part of the British secret service. Kaiser, who described himself as the head of the "Liberation" in his Parisian arrondissement , asked the two agents to take his wife, who had to leave Paris, with them to Lille, which they did. In the following months there were several contacts between German secret agents and Kaiser in Paris and Lille, but according to the current state of research it can be assumed that Kaiser was only informed about the true identity of these agents by his wife in mid-1944. He went into hiding, was sentenced to death in absentia after a denunciation by a German military court and joined the French army under General de Lattre . After the French occupation of Konstanz , he was responsible for investigating war crimes , but was also involved in investigations into other Nazi crimes.

After he was accused of high treason in early 1947, he had to leave Konstanz and was taken by the French security service Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) via Baden-Baden and Paris to Lille , where he spent a month in June 1947 in Loos prison -lez-Lille was imprisoned. The case against him was dropped, but 50 years later Kaiser suffered from anxiety because of this prison stay.

Kaiser left France and settled in Mathod , where he later (November 30, 1960) acquired Swiss citizenship . His marriage to Élisabeth Burnod , to whom he had dedicated his book about the death of her son in 1951, was divorced in early 1952. A year later he moved from Mathod to Lausanne at 50 avenue du Léman and worked until 1961 as an employee at the André Pache decoration company. From his relationship with the singer Lucienne Marguerite Reymond (1929-1969) a daughter Geneviève Béatrice emerged in February 1954, who was legitimized by the marriage of the parents in April 1956. In 1961 Kaiser moved to another apartment in Lausanne (Chemin de Grand-Vennes 7), in 1967 finally to the villa of his mother, widowed in 1957, at Chemin du Languedoc 10. In May 1974 Kaiser legitimized Amadou Tidiane, who was born in Senegal on April 4, 1956 as early as 1973, in the obituary notice of Kaiser's mother, he was named as his child alongside Geneviève.

Commitment to the needy

1992 special stamp for the 25th anniversary of Terre des Hommes Germany

After the atrocities of the Algerian civil war that began in 1954 became known in Europe , Kaiser campaigned emphatically to take in needy children from Algeria in Switzerland . On June 15, 1958, Kaiser became a member of the Central Committee of this new organization in Geneva. He devoted himself to this new task "with body and soul, almost day and night" and became secretary of the Lausanne Foundation of the Emmaus Friends. Because of "human and financial difficulties" within the Lausanne Foundation, he left the Emmaus friends in mid-1959 .

In November 1959 he founded the Terre des Hommes children's aid organization , which he headed until 1980 and which had a global budget of over 100 million euros in 2010. Georg Stefan Troller impressively portrayed Kaiser’s radical commitment to children in need in India in his 1980 television program “Drops in the ocean” . Through his negotiations with heads of state in Africa (including in connection with the Biafra war) to save children, he was also successful known for his hunger strike, with which he forced in 1971 that children at risk of starvation were flown out of Bangladesh .

In 1976, Kaiser became aware of the genital mutilation and sexual exploitation of girls and young women worldwide through the book “Ainsi soit-elle” by Benoîte Groult, and in 1980 he founded the organization “Sentinelles - Au secours de l'innocence meutrie” (Sentinels to protect the injured innocence).

Worldview and character

It is questionable whether Kaiser was raised in the Jewish faith in his parental home in Paris. In his later interviews in 1980/1998, Kaiser reported nothing of a Jewish community life in Paris or Lausanne; rather, as an agnostic, he sharply distinguished himself from any kind of belief in a god. For him, the word “Jew” has nothing to do with “Israelite” or “Israeli”; For him it was nothing more than a label like any other, like a dog is a dog, a piano keyboard is a piano keyboard and an Arab is an Arab. According to information from his family, Kaiser was always very close to the Catholic Church and, as a young man, allegedly intended to become a Catholic priest , but the rule of celibacy prevented him from doing so. He was never the Catholic Church converted .

Kaiser's worldview is therefore in no way based on a religion, nor on a socially critical analysis of social structures. For him, the focus is on the suffering innocent person who must be helped unconditionally. In his opinion, starving, sick and deformed children fully meet this requirement of innocence in their suffering, but so do sexually exploited women. Almost all adults worldwide are guilty of this misery because they do not act with all severity against those who cause the suffering such as the arms trade, food speculators and religious fanatics. In this sense, Kaiser feels himself to be guilty, who is obliged to help the victims with great tenderness (tendresse) , even to kneel down before them and to ask their forgiveness. It is a shame that the rich western world has to have pictures of starving children in front of them in order to expect some help through pity. He hoped for a worldwide revolution that would produce a fundamentally different society.

The character traits of the 65-year-old Edmond Kaiser are very well expressed in the film by Georg Stefan Troller and are aptly described in Marcel Farine's portrayal of the Kaiser’s time in the Central Committee of the Swiss Emmaus Friends in 1957/59: “I can still see him in front of me when he took part in the various sessions: his emaciated face, the penetrating look over his glasses; sometimes a finger pointed at us as if he wanted to convince us or urge us to act. And I hear his deep, occasionally gruff, then again gentle voice, depending on what it is about, but always in search of justice and unconditionally defending the poor. He has often impressed me with his love of neighbor, his cutting words against egoists and those who are greedy for profit, with his flowery, gentle language for those who suffer, his dynamism and his tireless commitment. On the other hand, he sometimes irritated me with his innate self-confidence, including his desire to act completely independently. "

Relationship with France and Germany

Thanks to his native French and his childhood in Paris, Kaiser certainly felt that he belonged to the French cultural area, which he did not leave after emigrating to the Swiss canton of Vaud in 1948 . On the other hand, as a child, the anti-Semitism that was widespread in France at the time was clearly shown to him, so that at an early age he felt like a lonely outsider. For the war, according to Kaiser, in 1939 he did not register “for the fatherland”, but - as later also to the Resistance - to defend freedom, which one has to keep like a sick child in one's arms. He sees himself as a vagabond and has absolutely nothing to do with the term “fatherland”.

His religiously neutral attitude and probably the fact that none of his family fell victim to the Holocaust did not lead to any noticeable resentment towards the Germans after the Second World War . Through his multiple stays as a youth at Lake Constance and his one-year language studies in 1932/33, Kaiser had a very good command of the German language, which he still understood in 1980 and also used fragmentarily. He showed Beethoven a very special admiration in which he saw an imaginary substitute for father: “I always had the impression that Beethoven was at my side. behind my left shoulder because Beethoven was roughly the stature of my father, who died when I was four years old. For a long time I had this idea of ​​a replacement for my father, Beethoven, whom I love very much, especially because of his hearing loss. ”In 1980 he sang the Ode To Joy in front of a group of Indian children , accompanying himself instrumentally. The attack by the German Wehrmacht on France in 1940 was not attributed to "the Germans" by Kaiser, but to "Hitler and his gang", and activity in the Resistance was directed against the Gestapo , not against "the Germans". This became clear in Konstanz in 1945/47 as well, when on the one hand he remained "ice cold" while an SS man and former concentration camp overseer who he had to interrogate was crying , but on the other hand he showed himself to be extraordinarily helpful towards the starving population. Known as "Capitaine Sémoule" (captain semolina), he gave half of his pay and his food ration to people in need from the start of the occupation .

Works

  • Posts in La Phalange. Paris 1937/38.
  • Le Mémorial d'une poupée. Renens 1951 (from 1941 conceived poem on the death of his son Jean-David; further editions Lausanne 1967 and 1985 under the title Mémorial d'une poupée ).
  • Motets de l'ombre et du dimanche. Lausanne 1959.
  • Contes (translation of the fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen ). Bern 1965.
  • La Marche aux enfants. Lausanne 1979 (2nd edition Lausanne 1989).
  • Non plus que pleure (unpublished).
  • Bel Éventaire à l'enfant sage (unpublished).

literature

  • Christophe Gallaz: Entretiens avec Edmond Kaiser, Fondateur de Terre des Hommes, Confondateur de Sentinelles. Éditions Favre SA, Lausanne 1998, ISBN 2-8289-0549-7 .

Movies

Web links

Commons : Edmond Kaiser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In 1960 he acquired Swiss citizenship in Mathod .
  2. ↑ Gallaz, p. 20 and 143.
  3. ↑ Gallaz, pp. 89-92.
  4. ^ Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix , based in Paris; 1935 about 10,000 members.
  5. ↑ Georges Ferber: Serious and cheerful from an uncomfortable time in 1945. How it looked from the other side. In: Helmut Maurer (ed.): The border town of Konstanz 1945 . Konstanz 1988, ISBN 3-87799-074-6 , pp. 22-40, here p. 27.
  6. ^ Resident register Fiche II (Kaiser-Burnod), Archives communales Lausanne.
  7. ^ Elisabeth Burnod in Elisabeth Burnod in Bibliomedia Switzerland. The promise of marriage was announced on June 16, 1936 in the Feuille d'Avis de Lausanne , the newspaper 24 Heures , p. 16, the marriage took place on July 10; Registration Fiche I (Kaiser-Burnod), Archives communales Lausanne.
  8. ↑ La Phalange was published 1935-1939 as a monthly magazine.
  9. ↑ Myriam Kaiser lived from 1941 (with a one-year break in 1946/47) until she married the editor René Belakovsky (1930-2000) with her grandmother in the Villa Kaiser, Lausanne, Chemin du Languedoc 10.
  10. ↑ Gallaz, pp. 143-144.
  11. ↑ So Stefan Troller 1980 in his film about Kaiser.
  12. ↑ Farine: Edmond Kaiser.
  13. ↑ Thus, Kaiser u. a. about an identity card (Carte d'Identité) allegedly issued in Lyon on August 9, 1944 for the secretary Louis Eugène Matthieu, residing in Lyon, Cours Vitton 15, b. Paris, 19th arrondissement, Aug 3, 1910; Fig. In Gallaz, p. 66.
  14. ^ Erwin Streif (* Luxembourg 1914) alias Marcel Stael and Ernest Boussac (* Tourcoing 1887, retired police commissioner) alias Le Touquet; TNA, Kew, KV 2/2850 ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  15. ↑ Details on this were reported by the German secret agent Streif, who defected to the Allies, at the end of 1944; TNA, Kew, KV 2/2850 ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  16. ↑ Gallaz, p. 27. Ferber, p. 29.
  17. ↑ Arnulf Moser: "Gypsies" and "negroide bastards". Forced sterilization for racial reasons at the Konstanz Health Office 1933–1945. In: Website of the Stolpersteine ​​Konstanz.
  18. ↑ In 1998 Kaiser expressed: “Avoir fait un mois de prison pour y avoir jeté par ereur, au printemps 1946, ça m'a plongé dans une terreur de la police et de la justice qui dure encore. Comment est-ce possible? Cinquante ans plus tard! Vous avez été libéré, évidemment, puisque l'accusation ne tenait pas debout, mais ça ne vous enlève pas une seconde le peur d'être arrêté une deuxième fois »; Gallaz, p. 29, text p. 136.
  19. ↑ registers Fiche III (Kaiser-Reymind), Archives communales Lausanne. The couple had probably been separated since 1948; see. Gallaz, p. 144.
  20. ↑ divorced Dégallier, daughter of Samuel R.
  21. ^ Resident register Fiche III (Kaiser-Burnod), Archives communales Lausanne. According to Gallaz, p. 144, Kaiser stayed in Senegal in 1957.
  22. ↑ Gallaz, p. 142, names a Miguelito from Colombia as another child.
  23. ↑ See the film about Kaiser on SRF from April 11, 1991.
  24. ↑ In September 1957, Kaiser and Abbé Pierre took part in a “study day for those responsible for the Swiss communities and Emmaus friends” in Bern . In Lausanne he asked for support for the Emmaus friends in his twice-monthly magazine La Trompette ; Farine: Edmond Kaiser.
  25. ↑ At the beginning of 1967 Kaiser was present at the founding meeting of Terre des Hommes Germany ( memento of January 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) in Stuttgart.
  26. ↑ Jack Rollan (1916–2007), a well-known chansonnier and presenter at Radio suisse romande at the time, went on a hunger strike to support Kaiser ; in detail the file "Affaire Kaiser", Archives cantonales vaudoises, PP 881/335. See also Kaiser's numerous comments in Gallaz and the above-mentioned film contributions in the SFR and Biafra ( RTS ).
  27. ^ History ( Memento from June 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.8 MB) of the Sentinelles organization. Interview ( memento of October 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) with Edmond Kaiser about Sentinelles.
  28. ↑ His grandmother, who ran a small business, even avoided giving the Jewish-sounding name of her deceased husband; Gallaz, p. 20.
  29. ^ "Je ne crois pas" (1980). At another point in the conversation with Troller during the filming in India in connection with Schiller's Ode to Joy , Kaiser asks us to “leave the gods up there”.
  30. ↑ For the World Jewish Congress , which claimed the sole right of representation of Judaism from the beginning of time to all eternity, he had only one derogatory remark; Gallaz, pp. 19-20.
  31. ↑ In the residents' registration office of the city of Lausanne (Archives communales de la Ville de Lausanne, Fiche 148656), Kaiser was registered there in 1952 with the religion "cath", which is probably an error.
  32. ↑ Interview with Georg Stefan Troller 1980 and numerous text passages in Gallaz.
  33. ↑ Gallaz, pp. 20-22.
  34. ↑ Gallaz, p. 23
  35. ↑ Unlike his first wife Élisabeth Burnod , Kaiser had little command of the English language; Message from the family environment.
  36. ↑ Interview with Georg Stefan Troller .
  37. ↑ Gallaz, p. 29.
  38. ^ Film " Description of the person: Edmond Kaiser".
  39. ↑ Gallaz, pp. 27-28 and 143.
  40. ↑ Ferber, p. 28.
  41. ↑ See Gallaz, p. 146.
personal data
SURNAME Kaiser, Edmond
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer and human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 2000
Place of death Coimbatore , India