Eugeni Xammar

Eugeni Xammar. Berlin, 1934

Eugeni Xammar (born in Barcelona in 1888 ; died December 5, 1973 in L'Ametlla del Vallès ; spoken: [ euˈdʒɛni tʃa'maɾ ]) was a Catalan journalist. As a foreign correspondent for various Spanish and Catalan-language newspapers, he reported initially from London , during the First World War from the French front and from 1922 to 1937 from Berlin .

Life

The journalist Xammar started his career with daily newspapers in his hometown Barcelona. Even before the First World War , he went to London as a foreign correspondent ( alias at Vanguardia : Harry Doggerell). According to his own statement, this stay has shaped him more than his native Spain. During the war he reported from the Western Front for two Madrid daily newspapers. Towards the end of the war he let himself be used directly for British propaganda . He worked as a permanent correspondent for the Information Service for the Neutral Countries at the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in France. The articles were sent by telegram to the Spanish news agency Agencia Fabra . In addition to his fees from working for Spanish newspapers, he received 500 pesetas a month from the British (an editor at that time earned around 250 pesetas a month). He also translated English leaflets into Catalan . Half a year later he also wrote leaflets in Catalan for the German intelligence service in Barcelona - which distributed German propaganda in Spain.

After the end of the war, he moved to the press department of the newly founded League of Nations in Geneva for two years , but he quickly got bored there. In autumn 1922 he succeeded in being sent to Berlin by the Catalan daily newspaper La Veu de Catalunya ; However, because of a passage from an interview with Hitler about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (cf. Alhambra Edict ), he soon had to look for a new employer, the newspaper La Publicitat . Xammar stayed in Berlin with interruptions until 1937.

In 1929 he began to write for the liberal, Spanish-speaking Heraldo de Madrid . When editor-in-chief Chaves Nogales founded the daily Ahora in 1930 , he took the Berlin correspondent with him. Ahora , in which outstanding liberal authors such as Miguel de Unamuno or Pío Baroja published, supported the Second Spanish Republic from 1931 to 1936 .

In the early 1930s, Eugeni Xammar was elected Vice President of the Association of Foreign Press and also worked as a press attaché for the Spanish Embassy. Although he was one of the first foreign correspondents to deal intensively with Hitler - as early as 1923 he characterized him as “the stupidest person we have ever had the pleasure to meet. A fool full of zest for action, vitality and energy, an immoderate, unstoppable fool. ”- he did not take his radical program seriously enough.

When General Franco staged a coup in Spain in 1936 and the civil war broke out afterwards, the Spanish ambassador and most of the embassy staff in Berlin declared their solidarity with the rebels. A staunch Republican, Xammar went to Paris, where he worked as a press attaché in the Republican embassy during the Civil War. After the end of the civil war, there was no newspaper in Spain to print his articles. Xammar went into exile in 1939, where, after various stations, he finally found accommodation as a translator at the United Nations in New York; later he worked in the same position in Geneva. He only occasionally included articles in South American newspapers. He returned to Catalonia towards the end of his life.

Services

German banknotes from the era of hyperinflation, 1923

Xammar gave his Spanish readers a detailed picture of the Weimar Republic and the early days of National Socialism . He focused on reparations from the Peace Treaty of Versailles and hyperinflation that the world had never seen before. He converted the German state budget of 1923 over 3.5 trillion marks into 140 million dollars, less than the Spanish state budget. He analyzed how the German state managed to pay off its war debts through this inflation, and clearly described at whose cost this happened: “These profits are based on the misery of numerous rentiers and a large part of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie. A difficult-to-estimate number of families has been slowly but relentlessly expropriated over the past four years. ”The resulting radicalization of the German electorate was another focus of his reports.

Many articles contain allusions to the Spanish conditions under the dictator Primo de Rivera , but only occasionally were a few lines deleted by the Spanish censors . As a Catalan, he was interested in separatism, as it spread at that time, especially in Bavaria and the occupied Rhineland. Xammar is characterized by the fact that he not only observed Germany from Berlin, but also traveled the country under the very difficult traffic conditions at the time. So he delivered a series of reports from the Ruhr area under French occupation.

In November 1923 he witnessed Hitler's attempted coup in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller , which he had interviewed a few hours earlier. On this occasion, Hitler openly propagated the extermination of all Jews: "If we want Germany to live, we must destroy the Jews." At that time, however, he declared this goal to be impracticable and therefore called for the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 as a model a mass displacement.

In the mid-1920s, Xammar also traveled to the Soviet Union with his friend Josep Pla . After that he was "absolutely convinced that the human utopia that had come to power in Russia is a stupidity of unfathomable dimensions that runs counter to people's need for freedom."

Xammar wrote his memoirs in Catalan. In 2005 two volumes with reports from the Weimar Republic and the early days of National Socialism were published in Spanish; in German a small selection from the period of the inflationary years 1922–1924. Xammar also has the Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann translated into Spanish.

Works

• Eugeni Xammar: Seixanta anys d'anar pel món. Memories d'Eugeni Xammar. Pòrtic, Barcelona 1974 and 1975 and Quaderns Crema, Barcelona 1991, reprinted 2007, ISBN 84-7306-054-7 . (in Catalan)
• Charo González Prada (Ed.): Crónicas desde Berlin. (1930-1936). Acantilado, Barcelona 2005, ISBN 84-96489-17-5 . (in Spanish)
• Eugeni Xammar: The snake egg . Reports from Germany in the inflationary years 1922–1924. Translated by Kirsten Brandt. Berenberg, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-937834-23-8 . (Original edition in Catalan: L'ou de la serp. Quaderns Crema, Barcelona 1998.)
• Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus: vida del compositor alemán Adrian Leverkühn narrada por un amigo. From the German by Eugeni Xammar. Edhasa, Barcelona 2004, ISBN 84-350-0937-8 . (in Spanish)

literature

• Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871 - 1945. 5. T - Z, supplements. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 5: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , p. 345 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugeni Xammar in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jens Albes: Words like weapons. German propaganda in Spain during the First World War . Klartext, Essen 1996, p. 254.
2. ^ Enrique Montero: Luis Araquistain y la propaganda aliada durante la Primera Guerra Mundial . In: Estudios de historia social . 1983, pp. 245-265, here p. 253.
3. ↑ Jens Albes: Words like weapons. German propaganda in Spain during the First World War . Klartext, Essen 1996, p. 254.
4. ↑ Xammar, Das Schlangenei ..., p. 145.
5. ↑ Xammar, Das Schlangenei ..., p. 31.
6. ↑ Xammar, Das Schlangenei ..., p. 146.
7. ↑ Xammar, Das Schlangenei ..., p. 10.