Georg Bernhard

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Georg Bernhard (1928)
Paris daily newspaper (1937)

Georg Bernhard (born October 20, 1875 in Berlin ; † February 10, 1944 in New York ) was a democratic German publicist of Jewish descent who was early involved against National Socialism . He had to emigrate in 1933 and was the founder of an important newspaper in exile .

Life

Bernhard's father Hermann worked as a businessman, his mother Helene was born Soberski. Georg Bernhard had completed a banking apprenticeship and had become a business journalist. In 1899, Bernhard married Fritze, the daughter of Louis Mühsam and his wife Bertha. In 1901 their daughter Stefanie Ruth was born and she became an actress. In 1912 the daughter Eva Marie was born. In 1939 Bernhard married the painter Gertrud Landsberger, daughter of the Berlin pharmacist Hans Sachs, while in exile in Paris. Landsberger painted under the pseudonym Gert Sax.

From 1898 to 1903 Bernhard had a job as city editor in to Ullstein belonging Berliner Zeitung . At the same time he studied law and political science. From 1904 to 1925 Bernhard published the business newspaper Plutus , of which he was the founder and owner. From 1908 he was employed in the publishing house management at Ullstein. When Ullstein-Verlag bought the Vossische Zeitung in 1914 , Bernhard was appointed second editor-in-chief alongside Hermann Bachmann , who was previously the sole editor-in-chief, until 1920 . From 1916 he also gave lectures as a lecturer at the Handelshochschule Berlin . From 1920 to 1930, Bernhard was the sole editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung. Bernhard shaped the newspaper into a left-wing liberal paper. He advocated the expansion of democracy and - despite the Treaty of Versailles  - resolutely for an understanding with France. He worked in Jewish associations. His style of discussion was very decisive and he did not hold back with his opinion. This also made Bernhard a preferred target for anti-Semitic agitation.

Bernhard had become a member of the SPD around 1900. He belonged to the revisionist wing of the Social Democratic Party and therefore got into disputes with the party executive in 1903. In 1906 he was expelled. In 1918 he was one of the left-liberal co-founders of the German Democratic Party and was a member of the board. Bernhard was an important defender of democracy and resolutely fought against the National Socialists. From 1928 to 1930 he was a member of the Reichstag . In February 1933 Bernhard was still a co-organizer of the congress Das Freie Wort in Berlin . After the National Socialists came to power , he fled to Paris in 1933. Bernhard's name was already on the first expatriation list of the German Reich in 1933 . On April 16, 1933, Bernhard met Harry Count Kessler in Paris , who noted in his diary: "Bernhard, who told of his rather adventurous escape [...], said he 'never wanted to go back to this country (Germany). He do not consider yourself a German any more. "He spoke with the utmost bitterness."

Berlin memorial plaque on Kleiststrasse 21, in Berlin-Schöneberg

In December 1933, Georg Bernhard and friends founded the “ Pariser Tageblatt ” as the daily newspaper of the German opposition. The publisher and presumably financier was the emigrated Russian Wladimir Poliakov, the father of Léon Poliakov . Bernhard became the editor-in-chief. The newspaper was an important platform for the approximately 35,000 refugees in France, but was also distributed in the other countries of exile. The Pariser Tageblatt also tried to inform the host country in an objective manner about the criminal character of the Hitler government. That was of course not unknown to Goebbels. The entry about Georg Bernhard in the Meyers Lexicon from 1936 reads: “Bernhard, Georg, Jewish. Emigrant, ..., as editor-in-chief of the 'Vossische Zeitung' exercised a strong, disruptive pol. Influence, expatriated in 1933 because of his anti-German agitation as editor of the 'Pariser Tageblatt' ”.

In early June 1936, Bernhard took part in the editorial team's putsch against their own publisher, Poliakov. For economic reasons, Poliakov had to restrict the scope of the newspaper and the freedom of the newspaper. In the course of the argument, the rumor suddenly surfaced that Poliakov was doing common cause with the Nazis. Almost all editors believed this rumor, left the Pariser Tageblatt and founded their own newspaper, the Pariser Tageszeitung, headed by the editor-in-chief Bernhard. The first issue appeared on June 12, 1936.

A committee of inquiry founded in exile circles, which came into being at the instigation of the journal Das Neue Tage-Buch by Leopold Schwarzschild and which also included Georg Bernhard and Berthold Jacob , found a little later that the allegations against Poliakov were unfounded and wrongly made were. After the coup, Poliakov tried to keep the Pariser Tageblatt going. But the daily newspaper had lost many readers because of the gullibility of most of the emigrants and was also badly hit by the criminal activities of the editors and their supporters and had to cease operations. For example, the new editor-in-chief Richard Lewinsohn had been beaten to hospital during a robbery, the newspaper's subscriber file had been stolen and the edition of the daily newspaper with the report on the coup was destroyed. The Paris daily newspaper, however, could appear in Paris until February 17, 1940. In 1938 Bernhard gave up the post at the Paris daily newspaper. Bernhard was still politically active. He had belonged to the committee for the preparation of a German popular front and in 1938 he took part in the Refugee Conference of the League of Nations in Evian as a representative of the Association of German Emigrants in France . After the German invasion in 1940, Bernhard, like many other emigrants, was interned by the French in the unoccupied southern France. Varian Fry's escape assistance organization helped him escape to New York in 1941. He died there in 1944.

Works

  • Georg Bernhard: noise - crisis and working class. 48 p., Expedition d. Buchh. Forward, Berlin 1902
  • Georg Bernhard: How do we finance the war? 40 p., Hobbing, Berlin 1918
  • Georg Bernhard: Democratic Politics. Basic lines to a party program. In: Vossische Zeitung. Ullstein, Berlin 1919
  • Georg Bernhard: Economic Parliaments. From the Revolutionary Councils to the Reich Economic Council. 141 pp., Rikola Verlag, Leipzig 1923
  • Hugo F. Simon, Georg Bernhard, Harry Graf Kessler: In Memoriam Walther Rathenau, June 24, 1922. 24 p., Cranach-Presse, Weimar 1925
  • Georg Bernhard: The German tragedy. The suicide of a republic. 343 pp., Orbis Verlag, Prague 1933.
  • Georg Bernhard: Masters and amateurs of capitalism in the empire of the Hohenzollern. 393 pp., Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1936.
  • Georg Bernhard: Slave Labor in Europe. In: Congress Weekly , Vol. 9.1942, No. 14, 1938
  • Georg Bernhard under the pseudonym Gracchus: Your MP Gollancz, London 1944, 110 pp.

literature

Web links

Commons : Georg Bernhard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Georg Bernhard  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).
  2. ^ Harry Graf Kessler, Diaries 1918–1937, Frankfurt a. M. (Insel Verlag) 1961, p. 715.
  3. ^ Walter F. Peterson: The dilemma of left-wing liberal German journalists in exile - The case of the Pariser Tageblatt. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 1984, Volume II, p. 269.
  4. ^ Meyers Lexikon , eighth edition, Leipzig 1936 - The so-called Nazi Meyer.
  5. ^ Walter F. Peterson: The dilemma of left-wing liberal German journalists in exile - The case of the Pariser Tageblatt. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 1984, Volume II, p. 281.
  6. ↑ See also the digitized editions of the Pariser Tageblatt here No. 911 ff and the first edition of the Pariser Zeitung in Deutsche Exilpresse Online. ( Memento of the original from May 28, 2010 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. German National Library. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / deposit.ddb.de
  7. ↑ Lieselotte Maas: Kurfürstendamm on the Champs-Elysées? The loss of reality and morality in trying a daily newspaper in exile. In: Exile Research. An international yearbook. Volume 3: Thoughts on Germany in Exile and other topics , published by Gesellschaft für Exilforschung, Munich 1985, p. 112 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Bernhard, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gracchus (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, politician (DDP), MdR and Nazi opponent
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1944
Place of death new York