Françoise Frenkel

Françoise Frenkel (born July 14, 1889 in Piotrków , Russian Empire , † January 18, 1975 in Nice ) was a bookseller and author who fled the National Socialists as a Jew and left her experiences in a book.

Live and act

Frymeta Idesa Frenkel, who later chose the first name Françoise, comes from a Polish Jewish family. After studying music with the composer Xaver Scharwenka in Leipzig , she studied literature in Paris . After completing her doctorate at the Sorbonne , she and her husband Simon Raichenstein opened “La Maison du Livre français” in 1921, the first French bookshop in Berlin on Passauer Strasse , which has always been a place of Jewish life in Berlin .

Frenkel “also organized lectures and receptions by contemporary French authors in Berlin. Claude Anet , Henri Barbusse , André Gide , Colette , Julien Benda , Aristide Briand and others were guests in their bookstore on Passauer Straße. "

Raichenstein, a Jew of Russian origin, went into exile in Paris after the National Socialists came to power in 1933 . Frenkel initially stayed in Berlin, which she left on August 27, 1939 a few days before the start of the Second World War . She spent nine months in Paris and then fled to Nice via Avignon .

After Simon Raichenstein was raided in Paris, he was deported to Auschwitz , where he was murdered in August 1942. Frenkel was arrested by the French gendarmerie in 1942 while trying to cross the border from France to Switzerland and imprisoned in Annecy . After her release, she finally managed to escape to Geneva in 1943 .

In 1943 she began to write the manuscript Nothing to Bed His Head. It was published for the first time in Switzerland in 1945 by the Je hoper publishing house. The French new edition came out in 2015 with a foreword by Patrick Modiano . In her book, Françoise Frenkel describes how she witnessed raids in 1942, lived permanently under threat and moved from hiding place to hiding place. She alternately experiences aid, denunciation, prison and release. She clearly sees responsibility for the anti-Jewish persecution apparatus, which French “collaborators” actively supported, with the German occupiers.

The Romanist Margarete Zimmermann described the book as “an exciting journey of discovery into the Berlin of the interwar period, with insights into hitherto largely unknown spaces, agents, processes and media of cultural transfer, and: a report from a female perspective of flight and persecution in the occupied France of the années noires. ”In 2019 the work (in its English translation) was awarded the Wingate Literary Prize .

plant

• Rien ou poser sa tête , JH Jeheber, Genève 1945.
  • Rien ou poser sa tête, préface Patrick Modiano , dossier par Frédéric Maria, Paris: Gallimard, 2015, ISBN 978-2-07-010839-8 .

Translations

• Nothing to lay one's head on , foreword by Patrick Modiano, translation by Elisabeth Edl , Hanser, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-446-25271-4 .
• No place to lay one's head , preface by Patrick Modiano, translated by Stephanie Smee, Pushkin Press, London 2018, ISBN 978-1-78227-399-8 .

literature

• Corine Defrance : The 'Maison du livre français' in Berlin (1923-1933) and French book politics in Germany , in: Hans Manfred Bock (ed.), French culture in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Cultural exchange and diplomatic relations, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 2005, pp. 157–171.
• Corine Defrance : Françoise Frenkel, Simon Raichinstein et la Maison du Livre Français de Berlin (1921-1939). Histoire d'une quête , in: Synergies. Pays germanophones, Revue du GERFLINT, N ° 10, 2017, pp. 101–114 ( [1] )
• Martin Doerry : An unknown heroine . In: Literatur-Spiegel, August 2016, p. 10f.
• Florence Bouchy: Contre l'oubli de Françoise Frenkel . Le Monde des livres, October 29, 2015
• Claire Devarrieux: "Rien où poser sa tête": la fuite française de Françoise Frenkel . Liberation, October 14, 2015
• Jérôme Garcin: Sur les traces de Françoise Frenkel . L'Obs, October 11, 2015 ( bibliobs.nouvelobs.com )

Web links

• Martin Oehlen: Françoise Frenkel “It was grotesque and at the same time pathetic.” In: Frankfurter Rundschau from July 29, 2016
• Robert Fisk : Françoise Frenkel's escape from the Nazis and Vichy France: A bitter, beautiful and important book . In: The Independent , December 29, 2015
• Florence Bouchy: Contre l'oubli de Françoise Frenkel. In: Le Monde of October 29, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Carsten Hueck: An existence on a thin thread at Deutschlandradio Kultur
2. ↑ Tilman Krause: It is a scandal that this woman is forgotten , in: welt.de, September 4, 2016.
3. ↑ Cornelia Frenkel-Le Chuiton: From the Arctic Ocean of History. Reports of emigrants and refugees in the Second World War. ( Memento of the original from August 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Documents / Documents, Journal for the Franco-German Dialogue 2/2016, pp. 53–55 
4. ^ Margarete Zimmermann : The first French bookshop in Berlin: Françoise Frenkel, Rien où poser sa tête.
5. ↑ Jessica Weinstein: Memoir of late refugee from Nazi Germany wins JQ Wingate literary prize for 2019 , thejc.com, February 25, 2019, accessed on July 26, 2020.