Gerty Spies

Gerty Spies (born January 13, 1897 as Gertrud Gumprich in Trier , † October 10, 1997 in Munich ) was a German writer .

life and work

Spies was the daughter of the Jewish merchant and dialect poet Sigmund Gumprich . She trained as a kindergarten teacher in Frankfurt am Main , but returned to her parents when her brother fell in France in September 1918 . In 1920 she married a chemist and moved with him to Freiburg im Breisgau . The marriage, which was divorced in 1927, had two children.

In 1929 Spies moved to Munich-Schwabing . There she began to write, especially poetry and humor. After the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933, she lived in increasing social isolation. In 1939 she was obliged to work for a Munich publishing house and was finally deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in July 1942 . Despite the difficult conditions, she managed, encouraged by the writer Elsa Bernstein , who was also interned there, to intensify her literary work.

In 1945 she returned to Munich - as one of only 200 survivors of the city's formerly 12,000 Jewish residents. She got involved with the Bavarian Relief Organization for those affected by the Nuremberg Laws . In 1947 her volume of poetry Theresienstadt was published by a small Munich publisher. For her autobiographical notes Drei Jahre Theresienstadt and her novel Bittere Jugend, however, no publisher could be found in the 1950s.

It was not until 1984 that Drei Jahre Theresienstadt was published , in 1987 the volume of poems found in the dust , in 1992 the story The Black Dress and, shortly before her death in 1997, Bittere Jugend . In addition, Gerty Spies wrote fairy tales and poems for children, satirical and politically active poetry.

The poet died shortly before her 101st birthday in Munich. She wrote her grave inscription herself: "I loved, laughed and suffered (...)"

Awards

• 1984 Appointment as honorary chairman of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Munich
• 1986 Schwabing Art Prize for Literature
• 1987: Cross of Merit on ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Since 1996: Award of the Gerty Spies Literature Prize by the State Center for Civic Education in Rhineland-Palatinate

Publications

• Theresienstadt . Poems. Munich: Freitag-Verlag, 1947.
• How I survived One document . In: Hochland , Vol. 50, No. 4, 1958. pp. 350-360.
• Three years in Theresienstadt . [Memoirs.] Munich: Kaiser, 1984.
• Found in the dust . Poems. Munich: Kaiser, 1987.
• The black dress . Narrative. Munich: Kaiser, 1992.
• Poems from the concentration camp and from the following years . Deggendorf: Weiss, 1993.
• Bitter youth. A novel about persecution and survival under National Socialism . Edited by Hans-Georg Meyer. With an afterword by Sigfrid Gauch and autobiographical notes by Gerty Spies. Frankfurt a. M .: Brandes and Apsel, 1997. ISBN 3-86099-456-5 .
• The innocent's guilt. A selection from the work on the occasion of the first award of the Gerty Spies Literature Prize by the State Center for Civic Education Rhineland-Palatinate . Compiled by Dieter Lamping and Hans-Georg Meyer. Mainz: State Center for Political Education, 1997.

literature

• Sigfrid Gauch: Visiting Gerty Spies . In: On the way. Rhineland-Palatinate Yearbook for Literature , No. 4. Frankfurt am Main 1997. pp. 177–181.
• Sigfrid Gauch: Gerty Spies - a century of life . In: Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch , ed. from the Trier City Library and the Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch eV, Trier 1998.
• Sigfrid Gauch: The writer Gerty Spies. From the publication series Blätter zum Land of the State Center for Civic Education Rhineland-Palatinate, No. 1/2000. ( online, PDF file )
• Sigfrid Gauch:  Spies, Gerty, née Gumprich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 692 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Hans-Georg Meyer: Life in Germany. The Gerty Spies Prize, a socio-political literary prize . In: On the way. Rhineland-Palatinate Yearbook for Literature , No. 4. Frankfurt am Main 1997. pp. 182–190.
• Renate Wall: Lexicon of German-speaking women writers in exile 1933–1945 . Giessen 2004. p. 417 ff.
• Josef Zierden: Literature Lexicon Rhineland-Palatinate . Frankfurt am May 1998. p. 305 ff.
• Paul Pinchas Maurer: Gerty Spies: Life and writing of a German-Jewish writer . Jerusalem 2019. ISBN 978-9-655-72456-1
• Gunter Franz: Spies, Gerty (Gertrud) . In: Heinz Monz (Ed.): Trier biographical lexicon , Trier Wissenschaftlicher Verlag 2000, ISBN 3-88476-400-4 , p. 441 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerty Spies in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry for Gerty Spies in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database
• Leaves on the country 1'2000, The writer Gerty Spies, In: Politik-Bildung.rlp.de (PDF)
• Gerty Spies, by Rachel Salamander, In: gcjz-m.de
• The Innocent Land, Gerty Spies Literature Prize, State Center for Political Education Rhineland-Palatinate (PDF)
• “I loved, laughed and suffered”, the Holocaust survivor Gerty Spies reminded as a witness of what people are capable of. Now a street reminds of them, by Berthold Neff, In: Süddeutsche October 28, 2016