Gottfried Lessing

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Gottfried Anton Nicolai Lessing (born December 14, 1914 in Petrograd , Russian Empire ; † April 11, 1979 in Kampala , Uganda ) was a German lawyer and diplomat of the GDR .

Life

He came to Berlin as the grandson of the industrialist Anton Lessing and son of the German metallurgical engineer Gottfried Lessing and his wife Tatjana, née von Schwanebach, because the family was expelled to Germany because of the outbreak of the First World War . There he attended a grammar school from 1928 to 1933. He then studied law and economics at the University of Berlin. He went to Hamburg and worked there as a lawyer. In 1937 he was with the theme The essence of stolen goods in comparative legal representation for Dr. jur. PhD .

In early 1938 he left Germany because of his Jewish origins and went to Great Britain. There he initially worked as a volunteer at The London Assurance . In 1939 he traveled to Rhodesia , where he found a job again at the foreign branch of the London insurance company in what was then Salisbury . He then took on various jobs as a casual worker, driving instructor and in tobacco processing. Then in 1941 he found work in a law firm where he could work as a lawyer again. When he co-founded the Rhodesian Communist Party in October 1942 and also served as its chairman, there he met Doris May Wisdom, née Tayler, with whom he married in 1945. She received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature under her later name Doris Lessing .

From 1947 to 1949 he was a director of a lawyer’s office in Salisbury. He returned to Great Britain in 1949 and became a Communist Party official in London. He was unemployed for a few months before joining the British-Soviet Friendship Society. When he decided to go to the GDR at the end of 1950, his first wife separated from him. He returned to the GDR with his second wife, Ilse Lessing, who was a young German communist in exile in South Africa and had her first marriage there to the ANC activist (vice chairman of the ANC Revolutionary Council) Yusuf Dadoo . His sister Irene Gysi, the mother of Gabriele and Gregor Gysi , became head of department in the GDR Ministry of Culture in 1957. Until the end of 1951 he was employed by Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin . In the same year he joined the SED . Afterwards he was appointed head of a group at the Ministry for Foreign Trade and Internal German Trade (MAI). He served as President of the Chamber for Foreign Trade (KfA) from 1952 to 1957. He was delegated to the Karl Marx party college from 1957 to 1958, and then returned to the MAI in 1958.

Since he spoke English at the level of the British elite, had an international legal training and had excellent manners due to his origins, he was excellently suited for the GDR as an employee in the foreign service. At the beginning of 1959 he traveled to Indonesia to work there as a trade councilor for the GDR trade agency until the end of 1959. Then he returned to the GDR and took a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MfAA). There he headed a department for African affairs until 1965. One of his spectacular successes for the GDR was that he managed to invite the President of Ghana , Kwame Nkrumah , to East Berlin, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Humboldt University on August 1, 1961 .

The depth and sustainability of his contacts in Africa can only be understood through the high personal esteem that Gottfried and Ilse Lessing enjoyed throughout their lives in political leadership circles on the continent during their time as emigrants in southern Africa.

On March 23, 1965, he arrived in Dar es Salaam as the first consul general of the GDR in the Republic of Tanzania . When the GDR mission there distributed the Brown Book in 1965 , West German State Secretary Rolf Otto Lahr protested to the Tanzanian ambassador in Bonn. Lessing should be declared persona non grata and expelled immediately . But Lessing stayed and the Bonn Foreign Office only demanded punishment of those responsible in a verbal note dated January 12, 1966 to the Ambassador Clement George Kahama of Tanzania. 1969 ended his activity in Tanzania and he attended a course for executives in the GDR at the Institute for International Relations at the Academy for State and Law in Potsdam-Babelsberg .

He then worked as a consultant at the MfAA, where he worked in the department for analyzes and planning for foreign affairs. At meetings of the UN General Assembly he represented the GDR as a delegate from 1973 to 1975. In April 1977 he was accredited as ambassador to Rwanda . At the end of 1977 he was appointed ambassador to Uganda . When fighting with the troops of Idi Amin , troops from Tanzania and the National Liberation Front broke out in Kampala on April 10, 1979 , Lessing escaped in a car with his third wife, an employee and his wife. In the vicinity of the sports field, soldiers of the Liberation Front fired grenades at the car, which exploded, killing the occupants immediately. The tragic death is due to the fact that they wanted to meet the British ambassador. Gottfried Lessing, who could seem like a member of the British upper class, was apparently the victim of a mistake.

In 1965 Lessing was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze.

Fonts

  • The essence of receiving stolen goods in a comparative legal representation , Berlin 1937
  • Background to the imperialist intrigues against the Republic of the Congo , in: Einheit, 1963, issue 2, p. 93

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jens König: The mother: Gregors Russian roots. In: Berliner Kurier . August 1, 2005, accessed August 14, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Werner Kilian: The Hallstein Doctrine . Berlin 2001, p. 210
  3. ↑ Dr. Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo . on www.sahistory.org.za
  4. ^ Jürgen Radde: The Diplomatic Service of the GDR . Cologne 1977, p. 97
  5. ↑ August 1, 1961 ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2008 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.landesarchiv-berlin-chronik.de
  6. ↑ Germany Archive, 1999, p. 417
  7. ↑ Werner Kilian, ibid, p. 220
  8. ↑ Bernd-Rainer Barth , Andreas Herbst:  Lessing, Gottfried . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  9. ↑ Manfred Bols, End of the confidentiality, Berlin 2002, p. 194
personal data
SURNAME Lessing, Gottfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lessing, Gottfried Anton Nicolai
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and diplomat (GDR)
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Petrograd , Russia
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1979
Place of death Kampala , Uganda