Fritz Beer

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Fritz Beer (1991)

Fritz Beer (born August 25, 1911 in Brno , Austria-Hungary ; died September 2, 2006 in London ) was a German-speaking journalist and writer.

Life

Fritz Beer worked as a journalist in Prague from 1930 to 1939, including for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung . After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Wehrmacht , Beer emigrated to England via Poland. From 1940 to 1944 he was a war volunteer in a tank regiment of the Czechoslovak Army in Exile . He completed combat missions in France in 1940 and 1944/45.

After the war, he worked as a script writer and political commentator in the German-language service of the BBC until 1975 , after which he received airtime for his own radio broadcasts twice a month. From 1954 Fritz Beer was also the London correspondent of the Neue Ruhr Zeitung . From 1977 to 1979 he was the head of the London Foreign Press Association .

From 1988 he was President of the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad . During the time of his presidency the efforts of the two German PEN centers to reunite, which led to numerous withdrawals from the German PEN , including Jürgen Fuchs and Ralph Giordano , who subsequently joined the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad.

Beer himself criticized the intended reunification in a Focus interview with the words: "I cannot come to terms with the fact that the goals of democracy and freedom can be compromised just to agree to a symbolic unification of the two German PEN centers."

From 2000 onwards, Fritz Beer ran the liquidation of the PEN center for German-speaking authors abroad because the members had become too “lethargic”, as he emphasized in an interview with Deutsche Welle : “[...] we kept it wrong to represent a force that no longer existed. "

Beer died after a long illness at the age of 95.

Works

  • Gunfire at dawn , 1933
  • Black suitcase , short stories, 1934
  • The house on the bridge , novellas, 1934
  • The future doesn't work yet. A portrait of Czechoslovakia 1948–1968 , 1969
  • Did you shoot Germans, Grandpa? Fragments of a life story , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin, 1992, ISBN 3351021615
  • Kaddish for my father. Essays, stories, memories , Arco Verlag, Wuppertal, 2002, ISBN 3980841006
  • with Klaus Kamberger (ed.): The CSSR case, punitive action against a brother state . Fischer Verlag 1968, ISBN 3436009555

Awards

literature

  • Christoph Haacker: A heretical "grandpa". For the 90th birthday of the writer and journalist Fritz Beer . Between world. Journal of Culture of Exile and Resistance; 18th vol., No. 4; Vienna: February 2002; Pp. 25-28, ISSN  1606-4321
  • Wilhelm Sternfeld , Eva Tiedemann: German Exile Literature 1933-1945. A bio bibliography . Foreword by Hanns Wilhelm Eppelsheimer , Schneider, Heidelberg / Darmstadt, 1962
  • Beer, Fritz. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 1: A-Benc. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22681-0 , pp. 441-442.
  • Christoph Haacker: Beer, Fritz. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , p. 36f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Glossary, Volume 2: "Farewell to the PEN Center of the Federal Republic" ( Memento of the original from December 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dickinson.edu
  2. ↑ Theodor Siepert: "freedom of speech violated" , Focus , No. 18 of 29 April 1996th
  3. ↑ Petra Tabeling: We have encouraged each other (Deutsche Welle, September 26, 2002)
  4. ↑ Information from the Office of the Federal President
personal data
SURNAME Beer, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Jewish writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno
DATE OF DEATH September 2, 2006
Place of death London