Eva Siewert

Eva Siewert, autograph card. Photo: Édouard Kutter n.d., Raimund Wolfert Collection

Eva Siewert (born February 11, 1907 in Breslau , died before December 3, 1994 in Berlin ) was a German journalist , writer , radio announcer and opera singer . She lived and worked mostly in Berlin.

Live and act

Eva Siewert was born as the daughter of a musician couple in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). The father Hans Siewert (1872-1941), son of a chemistry professor at the University of Córdoba (Argentina), was a chamber singer. He became a member of the NSDAP in 1932 . The mother Frida Siewert (née Michels, 1880–1953) was an opera and concert singer - and a Jew, which is why her daughter was later given the status of a “ first degree half- breed ”. The parents' marriage was divorced in Hamburg in 1911 .

Eva Siewert lived mostly with her mother in Berlin, but was raised by governesses. She attended the Hohenzollern Lyceum in Berlin-Wilmersdorf until 1923 , from which she graduated with an upper secondary qualification. She only interrupted school attendance around 1915 for about a year and a half. As Siewert later announced, at the age of eight she had fled from her mother to her father, who was employed as the grand ducal Baden chamber singer in Karlsruhe . Only after a court order was she forced to return to Berlin. Apparently the relationship between daughter and mother was not very good from an early age. In 1948 Siewert wrote about her mother: "Apart from music, we have little in common."

Early career

After 1923 Eva Siewert studied music - first with her mother, then at the State University of Music in Berlin. Here she attended the opera class of Franz Ludwig Hörth (1883–1934), director of the State Opera Unter den Linden . She learned music theory from the composer Heinz Tiessen (1887–1971). From 1928 Siewert spent a year on stage as a coloratura soprano at the Landestheater Oldenburg , but had to give up this activity due to illness. Asthmatic complaints made her public appearances as a singer impossible.

As a result, from 1929 onwards, Siewert mainly worked as a journalist. She had become a member of the SPD (local group Berlin-Halensee) in 1928 , but was only involved in party politics until 1930. Apparently she was threatened with acute unemployment during this period and suffered from an insecure job situation. Nothing is known today about Siewert's personal environment in Berlin in the 1920s. Only in a letter to the publicist Kurt Hiller (1885–1972) did she mention once in 1957 that she had been friends with the George Grosz family since childhood .

Siewert moved to Tehran in 1930 , where she worked for a German export and import company. The stay abroad gave her good foreign language skills, and when Siewert returned to Germany a year later, she gave her first radio lectures about her travel experiences. Since she impressed with her voice, she was proposed in 1932 by the International Radio Service Berlin for the post of German-speaking announcer at Radio Luxemburg . From July 1, 1932 to March 31, 1938, she held a well-paid position as editor-in-chief and trilingual chief spokeswoman for the station (German, English, French).

Siewert later wrote about her work for Radio Luxemburg: “During my time there, I exerted influence in almost all departments of the station and was involved with both program compilations and musical rehearsals, [the] establishment of the record archive, the library, card files, as well as with the news services, translations, writing of lectures on all kinds of topics as well as the continuous announcement service in three languages. The station had a strong anti-fascist tendency. ”According to her own statements, Siewert was perceived by the public as the“ voice of Luxembourg radio ”, and in Germany she was suspected of being an“ enemy connection ” because of her activities abroad and supposed“ propaganda ”against National Socialism.

Persecution in the time of National Socialism

Fearing the threat of war, Eva Siewert decided in 1938 to return to Tehran. But she was initially forced to go to Berlin again to get a visa. However, this was denied to her because of her journalistic work, so that from then on she was “trapped” in Germany. Since Siewert was considered half-Jewish in the Nazi diction , she was banned from working in the radio and the press and subsequently had to be content with less well paid positions as typist and translator. She probably met her future friend Alice Carlé (1902–1943) during one of these activities.

In May 1941 Siewert was arrested for the first time and taken into protective custody. The reason was incriminating letters that had been found during a house search at Klare Beier, a friend in Bielefeld . In them Siewert had reproduced anti-fascist jokes that she had heard among friends. A few months later, she was fined for offending against the treachery law . After she took up a new position at Deutscher Rechtsverlag that same year, an incident occurred that not only resulted in her immediate release, but also a prison sentence: Siewert was denounced by two work colleagues that she was engaged in " dismantling military strength ". Again it was about jokes that Siewert had told. At the beginning of September 1942 she was therefore again sentenced under the “Heimtückegesetz” - this time to nine months in prison.

The judgment of September 4, 1942 condescendingly said: “The outward appearance of the accused is predominantly Jewish.” It was also noted here that Siewert's relationship with one of the two work colleagues who incriminated her had “an erotic element”. But since the summer of 1941 there had been a certain alienation in the relationship. The hints about a possible same-sex relationship between the two women did not seem to disadvantage Siewert, rather the witness was classified as not very credible. In general, the court was convinced that the woman had repeatedly made incorrect statements. But the modifications were not enough to relieve Siewert.

Siewert served her prison sentence from March 1 to December 1, 1943 in the Berlin women's prison at Barnimstrasse 10 , not far from Alexanderplatz . After an official medical examination, she was released from work detachments outside Berlin because of her already compromised health, but she was canceled for “lighter” work such as cable testing for AEG and the so-called Aschinger detachment . This involved a work assignment at the Aschinger bread factory on the corner of Prenzlauer Allee and Saarbrücker Straße, where the prisoners were used to clean vegetables, to make canned goods and similar activities. When Siewert was able to leave prison, her health was broken. Until the end of the Second World War, after her own work, she was primarily engaged in illegal work because, because of her political criminal record, she was not “sustainable” for any company for more than three months.

Stumbling blocks for the Carlé family in Berlin, Photo: Raimund Wolfert 2017

Siewert's imprisonment not only had fatal consequences for herself, but also for her friend Alice Carlé. Before 1943, Carlé had stayed in Siewert's apartment several times because she felt safe there. But while Siewert was in prison, in the face of the National Socialist stalking, she was deprived of a central possibility of protection. Alice Carlé was arrested by the Gestapo on August 27, 1943 together with her sister Charlotte Carlé (1901–1943) and shortly afterwards deported to Auschwitz . Both sisters were murdered here in the same year.

post war period

At the latest since her imprisonment in 1943, Siewert suffered from severe circulatory disorders, which in 1949 escalated to a heart attack and required constant medical care. Especially during the nine months that she spent in Barnimstrasse women's prison, her health deteriorated noticeably. In an accident she suffered a concussion and from then on she suffered from recurring attacks of dizziness with nausea. She suffered temporary hearing loss as a result of cysts on her eardrum . Eva Siewert herself gives her health complaints as a “clear receipt for the unbearable life among Germans”.

In general, Germany was an “agonizing country” for her, and she even viewed the so-called economic miracle with skepticism, especially since neighbors stuck her anonymous note on the door with the words “Long live Germany!”. Siewert regarded a number of her compatriots as "unteachable", and in correspondence with Hiller she complained fatalistically: "It no longer makes sense to steer this crazy ship with a hostile crew as an insightful person or to try to be surrounded by the shadows of the expensive dead" or “One should let perish what it didn't deserve otherwise and still doesn't want it any other way today.” She cynically asked why this “people” in particular had the reputation of being made up of poets and thinkers. Siewert described himself humorously as an "all-rounder".

After 1945, Siewert would never be able to build on her professional successes before 1938. She was recognized as a politically persecuted person by the Main Committee on Victims of Fascism and was given a so-called severely disabled ID card because of her health problems . She supplemented her low monthly pension through freelance journalistic activities. She wrote for Die Weltbühne , Der Sozialdemokrat , Der Spiegel , the Telegraf and Die Andere Zeitung, among others . To date, however, only a few dozen Siewert publications have been identified. A comprehensive bibliography on her work is still desiderate. Evidently Eva Siewert's essays, feature articles, reviews and polemics largely got lost in day-to-day business. The author has only left scattered traces in the history of German-language journalism.

Work as a writer

Siewert addressed her relationship with Alice Carlé, her own denunciation and subsequent imprisonment, as well as Carlé's deportation in the haunting autobiographical story The Oracle . She does not speak explicitly of love here, but it becomes clear that the 'friendship' between the first-person narrator and "Alice" (a surname is not mentioned) was very close. The two women had desperately planned to emigrate from Germany together for years, until the narrator was arrested one day. Siewert's touching story Das Boot Pan , on the other hand, is about the feelings of strangeness and loneliness that haunted the (this time) male first-person narrator when he was confronted with the past and the painful loss of two friends in a boat shed near Berlin. "Of whose death one did not know exactly." The girls "had no grave", it says here. Even if National Socialism, Auschwitz and the Shoah are not mentioned, it can be seen that the two friends were modeled on the Carlé sisters.

With her larger fonts Siewert was probably mostly unsuccessful. The book she wrote about her prison stay at 10 Barnimstrasse never appeared. An extensive book manuscript on lesbian love has never been published either. in letters between Eva Siewert and Kurt Hiller around 1950 no working title was given, but here it is repeatedly said that the book deals with the "gynecophilia of women".

The recording of the comedy How does Potiphar behave? , which had its world premiere in December 1949 in Baden-Baden in the presence of the author . Siewert found the performance by the artistic director Hannes Tannert (1900–1976) “excellent in every respect” and “first class”. She was also happy about the “really good” response that the comedy had received despite its philo-Semitic tendencies. The work did not pay off financially for Siewert, and the premiere did not find any post-play theater. Siewert's second comedy On Wednesday at five (1955) was immediately accepted by the S. Fischer publishing house's stage sales, but apparently never performed.

It is also documented that Siewert wrote articles for the radio again after 1945. For example, on March 19, 1957 , the Berlin broadcaster RIAS repeated a radio version of the story Wächter an der Fahrt written by Siewert on the “Day of Brotherhood” . On July 12, 1970, Bayerischer Rundfunk broadcast a Siewert feature entitled Japan, Tatamis and White Waterfalls .

Correspondence with Kurt Hiller

The correspondence between the publicist Kurt Hiller and Eva Siewert was particularly close until the beginning of 1950, and only then did a period of silence for several years set in, which was caused by Hiller having expressed his negative opinion about Siewert's manuscript on female homosexuality. Siewert originally asked Hiller to write a foreword for her planned book. In the spring of 1958, the letter contact between Siewert and Hiller broke off suddenly. Apparently, despite statements to the contrary, the two had become estranged over the years.

Their political attitudes are likely to have had an impact. In the summer of 1947 Siewert enthusiastically joined Hiller's Freedom Association of German Socialists (FDS) and willingly made a room in her spacious apartment available for the Berlin group's meetings. Siewert relied on the organization of the association "as a lively party opposition to the SPD", but soon fell out with individual, communist-minded members of the FDS who did not distance themselves emphatically enough from the SED .

When Hiller tried in 1956 to win Siewert as a member of his New Socialist League, the latter reacted benevolently, but was skeptical about active cooperation due to her own health complaints. Despite all the criticism of the SPD, she now wanted to avoid any weakening of the left wing. In their eyes it was important not to play into the hands of the Adenauer government. Hiller, who always had a tendency to rally "followers" and not equal partners, reacted with reproaches, against which Siewert, however, protested.

In a letter to Hiller, she denied the right to anyone "who did not have their permanent residence in Berlin in the 12 years after the end of the Second World War and who did not work there in public (to a more or less noticeable degree)" to criticize their "reluctance to accept any political parties, groups or manifestations". She cynically asked whether Hiller really thought it sensible to "ram little pennants of the seven upright (there will hardly be much more) into the field against avalanches". Hiller von Siewert was not used to such contradictions.

The last years of life

Little is known about Eva Siewert's living conditions from around the mid-1950s. In the following decades Siewert presumably lived in a secluded and modest way. Several times she dreamed of living abroad. In 1958 she intended to emigrate to Portugal - apparently unsuccessful. She considered France to be her spiritual home , but could not afford to move to the neighboring country. On December 3, 1994, Siewert was found dead in her apartment at Berlin Südwestkorso 33 (Wilmersdorf), where she had lived since 1977. She was buried in the cemetery on Steglitzer Bergstrasse. However, the grave site was abandoned after the statutory rest period had expired in 2016.

reception

Siewert was rediscovered in the course of publications by the historian Raimund Wolfert , who around 2015 increasingly turned to the personal gallery of the second German homosexual movement (1950s) and came across the name of Eva Siewert. The life and work of Siewert employed a four-person project team in Berlin in 2018, based on the Magnus Hirschfeld Society . The cabaret artist Sigrid Grajek , the painter Martina Minette Dreier and the journalist Christine Olderdissen have set up a “digital memorial room” in collaboration with Wolfert, which was completed in January 2019. The site is a so-called scrollytelling project, a multimedia site that contains not only texts but also numerous photos and audio clips. The project was financially supported by the Berlin State Office for Equal Treatment Against Discrimination (LADS) .

Quotes

"There is no longer any point in steering this crazy ship with a hostile crew as an insightful man or trying to do so, surrounded by the shadows of the expensive dead."

"The best works drowned in the bankruptcy of nice publishers."

Works

Plays

• 1949 How does Potiphar behave? Comedy in three acts . Drei Fichten Verlag, 65 pp.
• 1955 Wednesday at five. Comedy in four episodes and a prelude and epilogue . Frankfurt am Main (Fischer), 75 pp.

Books

• before 1946 Barnimstrasse 10 . Unpublished, lost book manuscript.
• before 1950 book project on gynecophilia in women . Unpublished, lost book manuscript.

Articles and stories (selection)

• 1946 Das Oracle , in: The way . Journal for Questions of Judaism (Vol. 1), No. 37 (September 8, 1946), p. 5.
• 1946 From the book “Barnimstrasse 10”. Two November nights that laid Berlin in ruins , in: Die Weltbühne (Vol. 1), No. 10 (November 15, 1946), pp. 315-316.
• 1947 The two faces. In memory of November 10, 1938 , in: Frankfurter Rundschau (Vol. 3), No. 132 (November 11, 1947), p. 2.
• 1948 The Pan boat. One sheet , in: The story. Journal for Friends of Good Literature (Vol. 2), No. 6 (June), pp. 21–22.
• 1957 Plea for the story , in: Die Andere Zeitung (Vol. 3), No. 7 (February 14, 1957), p. 11.

further reading

• Raimund Wolfert: Damned male - Kurt Hiller and Eva Siewert. In: Lütgemeier-Davin, Reinhold (Ed.): Kurt Hiller and the women. Contributions to a conference in the Villa Ichon, Bremen 2016 . Neumünster (from Bockel Verlag) 2017, pp. 109–121. ISBN 978-3-956-75017-5

Web links

• Project page on the life, love and work of Eva Siewert

Individual evidence

1. ^ Raimund Wolfert: Eva Siewert (1907-1994). Kurt Hiller's "sister in spirit" . In: Lambda News . No. 162 , May 1, 2015, p. 48 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Raimund Wolfert (2016): Lesbian History - Biographical Sketches - Eva Siewert. In: lesbengeschichte.net. Retrieved March 2, 2019 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} In memory of Eva Siewert. A search for clues. In: eva-siewert.de. Retrieved March 9, 2019 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Stolpersteine ​​in Berlin. Places & biographies of the stumbling blocks in Berlin - Alice Carlé. In: stolpersteine-berlin.de. Retrieved March 9, 2019 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b} Raimund Wolfert: Blown by the shadows of the dear dead. Address on the occasion of the laying of the Stolperstein for Alice, Charlotte, Margarete and Nathan Moritz Carlé on March 22, 2017 . In: Communications from the Magnus Hirschfeld Society . No. 57 , 2017, p. 11 . Complete lecture as pdf on the website of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society
6. ↑ In memory of Eva Siewert. A search for clues. Retrieved March 9, 2019 . 
7. ↑ ^{a b c d} Wolfert: Damn masculine . 2017, p. 113 .
8. ↑ Raimund Wolfert: Blown by the shadows of the expensive dead. Address on the occasion of the laying of the Stolperstein for Alice, Charlotte, Margarete and Nathan Moritz Carlé on March 22, 2017 . In: Communications from the Magnus Hirschfeld Society . No. 57 , 2017, p. 9 .
9. ↑ In memory of Eva Siewert. A search for clues. Retrieved March 9, 2019 . 
10. ↑ Siewert: Das Boot Pan . 1948, p. 21-22 .
11. ↑ See Siewert: From the book “Barnimstrasse 10” . 1946, p. 315-316 .
12. ↑ Detailed sources and archive documents on Siewert's correspondence with Hiller in Wolfert (2016), see note 2
13. ^ Project description on the website of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society
14. ^ Eva Siewert on her own literary work Eva Siewert: Autorennotiz . In: Story (Ed.): The world tells. The monthly of modern narration . tape 6 , no. 10 , 1951, pp. 78 .