Eve priest

Eva Priester (born July 15, 1910 in Saint Petersburg , † August 15, 1982 in Moscow ) was an Austrian journalist and historian.

Life

Eva Priester was born Eva Beatrice Feinstein in Saint Petersburg on July 15, 1910 and grew up in Vilnius , Warsaw and Königsberg . Her father Salomon Feinstein was an electrical engineer, her mother Ljuba nee. Wolpe had graduated from Paris . Her family, who wanted to escape the turmoil of the civil war , emigrated to Berlin in 1921 .

Eva Feinstein initially received private lessons in Berlin. Then she attended a high school (the Cecilien Lyceum ). Before graduating from high school , she left school at the age of eighteen and became a trainee in the local editorial office of the Berliner Tageblatt as well as a court reporter. Here she met the business editor and lawyer Hans Erich Priester, with whom she was married for six years.

She became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), from which she left in 1931, and joined the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP), a left-wing split from the SPD. In March 1933 she became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), then accused of high treason and from March to December 1933 put into pre-trial and “ protective custody ”. In 1935/36 she managed to escape via Prague to Vienna , where she worked for an illegal newspaper and became a member of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ). Via the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia , which an English newspaper had founded as an aid fund in response to the “ Munich Agreement ”, Eva Priester was given the opportunity to travel to Great Britain in 1939 . She also received financial support from this committee .

The events of March 1938 had strengthened the KPÖ in its relationship to the Austrian nation and made the struggle for a free and independent Austria its main concern. The communists in English exile initiated the Austrian Center (AC) in 1939 . Immediately afterwards, the AC founded its Austrian youth group “ Young Austria in Great Britain ”. Eva Priester joined the youth group and the AC. As a journalist, she devoted her work to the organ of the AC, the Zeitspiegel , in line with the KPÖ's demand for the restoration of a free, independent Austria. In 1941 she became interim editor-in-chief of Zeitspiegel and wrote poetry and plays for the London exile theater.

In 1946 Eva Priester left Great Britain and went to Vienna to work as a journalist in the communist press. She became editor-in-chief of the week , a weekly newspaper that had been founded by the KPÖ in autumn 1945. In 1949 she switched from the week that had to be discontinued due to strong competition from German tabloid magazines to the Austrian Volksstimme , where she worked full-time until her retirement in 1975 and then freelance until her death.

Eva Priester fell ill in 1982. After recovery, Eva Priester began a spa stay in the Soviet Union in the summer of the same year . She died in Moscow on August 15, 1982.

Publications

Eva Priester began work on her Brief History of Austria in the British Museum in London in 1943 , which provided evidence of Austria's relative independence. She writes: “It is an attempt to broadly outline the strange and contradicting history of our country, and it is a basis for discussion. I am firmly convinced that Austrian history, as it is taught today in schools and was taught before the occupation, is so overgrown by the undergrowth of Greater German representation that it has to be written all over again. It is also my conviction that such a gigantic work can only be done by a large number of people - from a commission of historians, a special committee, a scientific body - albeit after denazification has been completed. "

The first volume of the Brief History of Austria was published by Globus-Verlag in 1946 and deals with the development of Austria from the Great Migration to the 17th century. She revised the second volume, with the subtitle “Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Empire”, in Austria, so that in 1949 a book of over 600 pages could be published. In doing so, she presented the first historical-materialistic treatise in Austrian history.

• Austria - gateway to Germany. Free Austrian Books, London 1943.
• with Albert Fuchs , Jaro Klüger, Hilde Mareiner, Franz West , among others: Small magazine. Free Austrian Books, London 1943.
• with Ernst Sommer and others: May magazine. Free Austrian Books, London 1943.
• with Ernst Karl Winter among others: Austrians who made history. Free Austrian Movement, London 1944.

Awards

• 1971 professional title Professor from the Ministry of Education and Art - with particular reference to her brief history of Austria .

literature

• Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Eds.): Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan 2010.
• Sonja Frank (Ed.): “Young Austria” Austrians in British exile 1938–1947. ÖGB Verlag 2012.
• Claudia Trost: Eva Priest. A biographical summary, in: Hans Hautmann (Ed.): The Alfred Klahr Society and its archive. Sources & Studies 2000, pp. 347-370.

Web links

• Eva Priester , Austrian Media Library: A Canon of Austrian Journalism, Part 20