Eva Maria Borer

Eva Maria Borer (born July 8, 1905 in Strasbourg ; died January 25, 1987 in Rüschlikon ) was a German-Swiss journalist and writer .

Life

Eva Maria Rosenberg was the daughter of upper-class parents from the Berlin area, but grew up as the oldest of five siblings in Göttingen from 1912 , in Tübingen from 1914 and later in Kiel . Her parents were Hans Rosenberg (1879–1940), an astronomer at the Strasbourg University Observatory, and Verena "Vera" née Borchardt (1882–1954). Her grandfather Hermann Rosenberg (1847–1917) was one of the most successful bankers of the time. At a young age, however, she was mainly influenced by her great-grandmother Hedwig Dohm , writer, feminist and socialist. A second aunt was Katia Mann, Wife of the writer Thomas Mann .

She attended high school in Tübingen. During the First World War and the first post-war years she joined the youth movement Wandervogel . Her parents made it possible for her to stay in Switzerland for several months, with the writer Meinrad Lienert .

Back in Germany, she completed an apprenticeship in publishing in Berlin. She met with left-wing intellectuals and, in the face of skyrocketing unemployment and rising right-wing radicalism, eventually joined the Communist Party. As a communist, also of Jewish origin, she was arrested by the National Socialists in 1933 and sentenced for preparation for high treason. She spent 30 months in political imprisonment and was released on January 29, 1936 from the Bruchsal state penal institution in Baden . In 1936 she emigrated to Switzerland and from 1937 lived in Zurich , where she found a job at Emil Oprecht's publishing house as editorial secretary for the literary magazine Maß und Wert, published by Thomas Mann , and as Emil Oprecht's secretary. The liberal atmosphere in the publishing house moved them to turn away from communism. After a first casual marriage for the purpose of naturalization, she married Oskar Stock, an architect from Graubünden, in 1938, but separated from him a short time later. She now began to write herself and first took over the letterbox "Gwunderchratte" and then became editor-in-chief of the magazine Heim und Leben of C. J. Bucher Verlag . Journalistic help in life remained an important part of Borer's work throughout her career. She also wrote freelance reports and fashion and gastronomy reports for various other magazines.

In 1947 she married the 12 years younger painter and former set designer, actor and film technician Robert Borer. In 1953 she became the first editor-in-chief of the German-language edition of Elle , which was edited and printed in Paris. When editorial and printing were relocated to Zurich in 1955, Borer left the editorial team and became a freelance journalist, worked for advertising, wrote a column in the magazine Sie + Er and was responsible for the advice section from woman to woman for annabelle .

In May 1960 she became editor-in-chief of annabelle and ensured an expansion of the staff and a restructuring; In terms of content, she was particularly active in the areas of life counseling , from 1961 now also with a column in the mirror of life and kitchen . She pleaded for dual leadership in the editorial team and was supported by Hans Gmür as editor-in-chief from April 1966 to September 1966 . She then retired to the position of editor-in-chief for human relations , and Gmür took over the actual editor-in-chief alone. In April 1973 Walter Bosch took over the editor-in-chief. Borer continued to oversee the advisory sections for annabelle , although from 1974 Spiegel des Lebens was no longer applicable, and was listed in the legal notice as editor-in-chief for human relations until December 1973. The team existed until 1975, the successor took over Suzanne Speich with a largely new editorial office without Borer. After the merger of Annabelle and Elle in 1978, Borer was in charge of the life counseling section under the editor-in-chief Charlotte Peter / Werner Wollenberger and editor-in-chief René Bortolani until 1982, now again and only under the title Spiegel des Lebens . Borer recently wrote for the Züri Leu and its 1982 successor, Züri-Woche .

In addition to her journalistic activities, Borer wrote cookbooks , some of which she also translated herself; she spoke four languages. In 1980 she wrote her autobiography Being Human Begins with an Apple .

In 1984 she published the Adam and Eve Report, a speculative work on the historical background of the Christian - Jewish creation story . The basic idea for this came to her while studying the Bible during her Nazi captivity. In the report , Borer compared various translations of the Torah as well as various Jewish and Islamic sagas with the current results of archeology and took the view that the core of the biblical account of creation and also of the Jewish faith in Yahweh is a testimony to a verbal relationship of the faithful orally handed down for thousands of years hypothetical “Adam's people” to the Sumerians , who are misunderstood today: creation of the “earth” is to be understood as the fertile alluvial land that was first made usable by Sumerian conquerors; "Heaven" was the name of the Ziggurat and other buildings (the Tower of Babel was an imitation that later failed); Adam as the "first man" was a privileged native servant or his entire tribe who were employed in the Garden of Eden; as “Lord” (God) the Adam's people worshiped the office of the Priest-King enthroned in heaven, according to the Sumerian view that the incumbent should not be addressed by his nickname. The book was not received scientifically.

Borer died in 1987 after a long and serious illness in Rüschlikon on Lake Zurich .

Works

• L'homme sans ombre. Paris 1962.
• Enjoyable etiquette. Benteli, Bern 1967.
• Old and new cuisine in Switzerland. Swiss publishing house, Zurich 1971.
• Italy invites you to table. Sanssouci, Zurich 1973.
• Being human begins with an apple. Benteli, Bern 1980 (autobiography, as dtv paperback ISBN 978-3-423-10684-9 ).
• The Adam and Eve Report. Benziger, Zurich 1984, ISBN 978-3-545-34041-1 (as dtv paperback ISBN 3-423-10684-0 ).
• The real Swiss cuisine. Hahn Mary Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 978-3-87287-010-0 .

See also

• Eva Maria Borer died. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . January 27, 1987, p. 50.
• From day to day. Eva Maria Borer at the age of 70. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. July 8, 1975, p. 29.
• Mariana Christen, Johanna Gisler and Martin Heller : Visions - Interview with editors-in-chief. In: All of Annabelle. A magazine as a friend. Chronos, Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-905311-00-3 , pp. 21-23 (fictional conversation based on the autobiography being human begins with an apple ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} René Bortolani: "My life began when I was 40." In: Annabelle . No. 21, October 16, 1980, p. 8 ff.
2. ↑ Melanie Hediger: The image of the Swiss woman in Swiss magazines (= Urs Altermatt (Ed.): Religion - Politics - Society in Switzerland. Vol. 35). Paulus-Verlag, Freiburg 2004, ISBN 3-7278-1505-1 , pp. 60–64 (plus licentiate dissertation at the University of Freiburg , limited preview in the Google book search)
3. ↑ Successful recipes. Eva Maria Borer: “Being human begins with an apple”. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . March 18, 1981, p. 38 (review).