Grete Bloch

Margarete Bloch (born March 21, 1892 in Berlin ; died 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a friend of Felice Bauer and correspondent to Franz Kafka .

Life

Grete Bloch was the daughter of sales representative Louis Bloch and his wife Jenny, b. Meyerowitz († 1922). She attended a secondary school for girls, then the Lette school and then the Salomon Commercial Academy in Berlin. She took up a job in the emerging office machine industry and contributed her part to the family income, which also had to support her brother Hans (1891-1944), who was studying medicine. Hans Bloch was a Zionist cartel student , his first literary attempts were later presented to Kafka. From 1908 to 1915 she worked for trading companies in Berlin and Vienna that sold the products of the American office machine factory Elliot-Fisher and trained office workers for the "Elliot-Fisher description and invoicing machine with automatic addition". In 1913 she worked for Union Zeiss and possibly met Felice Bauer , who was also from Berlin and was four years older and worked for Carl Lindström AG in Berlin, at the office machinery fair in Frankfurt am Main . The two formed a long-lasting friendship. Bauer had been friends with Kafka since August 1912, who advertised her in an exchange of letters.

Bloch was on a professional trip from Berlin to Vienna to take up a job at the company "Joe Lesti Nachf." When she first met Franz Kafka on October 30, 1913 in the Hotel Schwarzes Roß in Prague , in order to get into the troubled relationship between Bauer and Kafka to persuade him to take a trip to Berlin. Kafka began an intensive correspondence with her, which went beyond the occasion of the meeting and in which Kafka used her as a "wailing wall" and in which Grete Bloch's private problems were also discussed. On April 7, 1914, he sent her a package as a sign of his marriage capped doubt Franz Grillparzer loner narrative Poor Spielmann . On June 24th, Kafka tried to motivate Bloch for a training activity in Prague.

After Kafka's engagement to Felice Bauer on Whitsun in 1914, Bloch revealed Kafka's compromising correspondence to her - she cut the all too intimate passages out of the letterhead - whereupon Bauer and her sister Erna and Grete Bloch met the unwary Kafka in his Berlin hotel in Askanischen Hof cross-examined, as a result of which Bauer broke off the engagement. Kafka noted in the diary: 23. VII 14. The court in the hotel ... Apparent guilt of Miss Bloch . Kafka turned to Bloch again in 1914 and asked her for a verdict on the novel of a love triangle Franziska von Ernst Weiß . Then the regular correspondence between Grete Bloch and Kafka ended, from which almost only Kafka's letters have survived. In October 1914, "FranzK" wrote to "Fräulein Grete": It was not she who sat as a judge over him in the Askanischer Hof, but he sat there as a judge over himself, with which Kafka gave her the decision not to recognize an external court from now on not even they (anymore). Kafka had now established himself in the private myth of an internal judicial office.

At the beginning of 1915 Bloch arranged for another meeting between Bauer and Kafka: on the days of Pentecost in 1915, Bauer, Bloch, their friend Erna Steinitz and Kafka met in Bohemian Switzerland . Bloch and Kafka may have met again in Prague in 1922.

In 1914 Bloch gave birth to a boy whom she placed with a foster family. The child died in Munich in 1921, the father remained unknown. According to the musician Wolfgang Alexander Schocken, who had known Bloch since childhood in Berlin, Kafka was the father. In her last letter to Schocken in Haifa, dated April 21, 1940, Bloch indicated something that the child's father had died in 1924 and was buried in Prague. Even Max Brod that this letter had been given in 1948 by Schocken, not at the paternity Kafka. However, this assumption is rejected in the more recent biographical literature. Nicholas Murray even asked in 2004 whether there had been a child at all.

Blochs Pension Jennings Riccioli in Florence: A room with a view . (Photo from 2013)

From December 1915 Bloch worked for the Berlin mechanical engineering company Adrema-Maschinenbaugesellschaft GmbH , which manufactured addressing machines. She was initially the secretary of the managing director Julius Goldschmidt and later received the power of attorney and, according to the memory of Wolfgang Alexander Schocken , in whose parental home Bloch stayed, was one of the highest paid female employees in the Weimar Republic . After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, the company was Aryanized in September 1935 and Goldschmidt was forced into exile in Switzerland, where Bloch helped him set up a new company until he died in early 1936 and the Swiss company was also dissolved. Bloch stayed with Felice Bauer-Marasse in Geneva for a while and traveled to Palestine to see her brother Hans , who had emigrated with his family in 1933. She could not gain a foothold there and returned to Europe in June and stayed in Fascist Italy and lived on paperwork in Florence. When she was about to recover professionally, an ordinance on the Italian Racial Law of September 7, 1938, as a foreign Jew, asked her to leave the country by March 12, 1939. She was able to avert this immediate threat and tried to emigrate to England with an affidavit from Goldschmidt's widow. When she sent her entry application to the “Central office for refugees” in London in 1939, she had confidently closed her apartment in Florence and gave the Jennings Riccioli Pensione in Florence as the address . The departure to Great Britain was no longer possible because of the outbreak of war.

After the German occupation of Italy in 1943, she fled to the mountain village of San Donato Val di Comino . In May 1944 she was arrested by German occupiers, deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered there. Before she was deported, she had given Kafka's 28 letters to her Italian teacher, from whose estate they were loaned to the German Literature Archive in Marbach , along with the letters and snippets that Bloch had passed on to Bauer in 1914 as “incriminating material for the trial ”.

literature

• Hans-Gerd Koch: Shared mail: 28 letters to Grete Bloch. For the exhibition "Divided Post, Franz Kafka to Grete Bloch" (fluxus 20), Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, October 5, 2011 to January 29, 2012 . German Schillerges., Marbach am Neckar 2011.
• Nicholas Murray: Kafka and the women. Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská, Dora Diamant, biography . Translated from the English by Angelika Beck. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 978-3-538-07242-8 .
• Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". Franz Kafka and the Berliners Felice Bauer and Grete Bloch. In: Language in the Technical Age . 2002, pp. 379-391.
• Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: the eternal son: a biography , Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-57535-8 .
• Reiner Stach : Kafka: the years of decisions . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-10-075114-0 .
• Wolfgang Alexander Schocken: Who was Grete Bloch? In: Exile Research. An international yearbook. Volume 4: The Jewish Exile and Other Topics . Text and criticism, München 1986, ISBN 3-88377-244-5 , pp. 83–97.

Web links

• Literature by and about Grete Bloch in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Grete Bloch , at franzkafka.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: the eternal son , 2005, pp. 299–303.
2. ^ Carl Flemming, publishing house, book and art print shop A.-G, Berlin, see Schmidt: German booksellers. German book printer. 1902, at Zeno.org
3. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". 2002, p. 385.
4. ^ Heinrich Zeiss - Union Zeiss, Berlin and Frankfurt
5. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: "Teuflisch in aller Innschuld" , 2002, p. 386.
6. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka: the years of decisions , 2002, p. 430 ff.
7. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". 2002, p. 386.
8. ^ ^{A b} Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: the eternal son. 2005, pp. 375-384.
9. ^ Marianna Lieder: The other July crisis. In: The literary world , July 12, 2014, p. 1.
10. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka: the years of decisions. 2002, pp. 500-504.
11. ↑ The Kafka biographers disagree as to whether Ernst Weiß, who acted as Kafka's defense counsel, was also present at the court in the hotel (Kafka, diary).
12. ^ Franz Kafka: Diaries. Text tape . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 658 f.
13. ^ Margarita Pazi : Ernst White. Fate and Work of a Jewish Central European Author in the First Half of the 20th Century . Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 12.
14. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: Divided Post , 2011, p. 53 f.
15. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka: the years of decisions , 2002, pp. 577-578.
16. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka: the years of decisions. 2002, p. 579.
17. ↑ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: the eternal son. 2005, p. 421f.
18. ↑ Wolfgang Alexander Schocken: Who was Grete Bloch? 1986, p. 92 ff.
19. ↑ Wolfgang Alexander Schocken: Who was Grete Bloch? 1986, pp. 95f.
20. ^ Max Brod: Franz Kafka. A biography , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1954, p. 294 ff.
21. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka: the years of decisions , 2002, pp. 495–498.
22. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". 2002, p. 390.
23. ↑ Nicholas Murray: Kafka and the women. 2007, p. 162.
24. ↑ Wolfgang Alexander Schocken: Who was Grete Bloch? 1986, p. 86.
25. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". 2002, p. 390.
26. ↑ Telegram from Hans Bloch to his wife Erna ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2014 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. , at the Jewish Museum Berlin 
27. ↑ Wolfgang Alexander Schocken: Who was Grete Bloch? 1986, p. 92 f.
28. ↑ Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". 2002, p. 391.
29. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka: the years of decisions. 2002, pp. 501-506.