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Ernst Feder (born March 18, 1881 in Berlin , † March 29, 1964 in Berlin) was a German writer and journalist .

In the Weimar Republic

In the Weimar Republic, Feder belonged to a group of left-wing journalists and between 1919 and 1931 he was head of the domestic affairs department at the Berliner Tageblatt ("Spectator"). He was also a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP), one of those democratic parties that had sunk into insignificance as a result of political radicalization by 1930 at the latest.

Exile in France

When Feders threatened to be arrested, he fled via Switzerland to Paris , which became the center of left-wing journalism and exile politics immediately after the National Socialists came to power . Feder played a key role in the creation of the most famous newspaper in exile, the Pariser Tageblatt .

When the German troops invaded France, Feder, who was of Jewish descent, tried to get a visa for the United States. When the application was rejected, citing the enormous number of German journalists in the USA, Feder contacted the representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille, Varian Fry , who in turn put him in contact with the Brazilian embassy in Vichy . Despite the ban on the immigration of Jews, Ambassador Souza Dantas forwarded Feder's visa application to Brazil. In a letter dated February 7, 1941, the embassy informed him that he and his wife would receive permanent visas for Brazil. The ambassador also gave him a letter of recommendation for the A Noite newspaper in Rio de Janeiro .

Exile in Brazil

Feder arrived in Brazil in July 1941 and soon became a well-known journalist. After his wife, Erna Feder, he learned the Portuguese language within a year. The Diário de Notícias newspaper published a daily column by him, again under the pseudonym Spectator . At the end of the 1940s, Feder gave up his profession as a journalist and took a managerial position at the Brazilian representation of the US Jewish aid organization Joint Distribution Committee .

In Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis , Feder was one of Stefan Zweig's intimate circle and was the last to see him. In his book Diálogos dos grandes do mundo. Estudos históricos e literários , which in Rio de Janeiro and Esslingen under the German title Encounters. The greats of the world appeared in dialogue , he tells, in the style of Zweig, of encounters that have decisively influenced the fate of important people or countries. He also devoted himself in various essays to the figure of Goethe , who for many exiles in Brazil functioned as a symbol of intellectual resistance.

Return to Germany

In 1957 Feder returned to Berlin. When he died in 1964, he was practically forgotten.

Honors

Works

literature

  • The Diaries of Ernst Feder. In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute XIII, 1968
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 168
  • Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler : The exile literature and the exile of the German-speaking writers and publicists in Brazil Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-631-45160-1 .
  • Pen, Ernst. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 505-513.
  • Julia Franke: Paris - a new home? Jewish emigrants from Germany 1933–1939 Berlin (Duncker and Humblot) 2000 (Research on contemporary history, vol. 5)
  • Marlen Eckl: “The flower of exile”: Ernst Feder and his Brazilian diary ; in: Rainer Domschke et al. (Ed.): Martius-Staden-Jahrbuch No. 54 (2007); Pp. 103-124.
  • Sylk Schneider: "Ernst Feder and Goethe's love for Brazil". In: Sylk Schneider: Goethes Reise nach Brasilien , Weimar 2008, ISBN 978-3-937939-69-8 , pp. 17-20.

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Pen, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1964
Place of death Berlin