Günther Ballhausen

Günther Ballhausen (born January 21, 1912 in Berlin ; † September 27, 1992 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German journalist and theater director .

Life

Ballhausen studied law, but then turned to journalism. He was an employee at Ullstein Verlag and an intern at the Deutsche Zeitung. Ballhausen was imprisoned in 1933 as a member of the German League for Human Rights . From 1936 he was secretary of the editorial office of the German news office .

Flight and Exile

In 1937 Ballhausen used a vacation trip to flee to Brazil.

“I really wanted to get out of Germany. I also knew the war was coming. I had to write to the military command and ask for permission to leave the country. I came to them with a Nazi paper under my arm and told them that I wanted to go on a study trip to Brazil, an eight-week trip. I finally got permission. "

In the beginning, Ballhausen worked in Rio de Janeiro for a German newspaper that had already switched to the Nazi line, the Deutsche Rio-Zeitung. In 1941 this newspaper was discontinued due to the nationalization laws. After that, he did all sorts of things, mostly selling books and advertisements in downtown offices. Sometimes he wrote articles for the Brazilian newspaper O Globo . Like many others, he had great difficulty getting his tourist visa converted into a permanent one.

Services

After the war, in 1949, Ballhausen took over the editing of the Rio de Janeiro supplement of the newly founded Deutsche Nachrichten von São Paulo, known as the "Rio-Seite". A year later the break with the German news took place, probably for political reasons. Ballhausen then registered the supplement as a “Rio page”. In August 1952, due to the lack of rotary paper, the newspaper was converted into a monthly magazine after it had previously appeared every six months and with irregularities. Among the employees were Frank Arnau , Richard Katz and Ernst Feder . The newspaper was given an attractive appearance with illustrations, photos and cartoons. According to Günter Ballhausen, the entire inventory of the newspaper is in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro. Ballhausen had to stop publishing the newspaper because of the high costs. In 1960 he returned to Germany, where he worked as an international correspondent for the newspaper O Globo and the Deutsche Zeitung of São Paulo and also for the Frankfurter Rundschau .

literature

• Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler : The exile literature and the exile of the German-speaking writers and publicists in Brazil. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-631-45160-1 .

Web links

• Günther Ballhausen's estate in the German Exile Archive of the German National Library