Gretel Beer

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Gretel Beer , née Margaret Weidenfeld (born July 11, 1921 in Vienna , † August 11, 2010 in Deal , England) was an Austrian-English author. She spent her youth in Austria and became a well-known author of cookbooks and travelogues after emigrating to England, which was forced by the Nazi regime . She served as the women's page editor for The Daily Telegraph, London .

Life

Childhood and youth in Austria

Beer was born into the Jewish Weidenfeld family in Vienna. She was raised above all by her aunt Olga Springer ( Bechin , Bohemia 1879–1942, Maly Trostinez extermination camp ). The widow of a doctor, who lived in 1937 in the 9th district of Vienna, Porzellangasse 45, stepped in because Gretel's mother Regina ("Gina") Weidenfeld, nee. Pisk died in 1927 in Gänserndorf , Lower Austria , when Margaret was only six years old, and because her father, Dionys ("Duny") Weidenfeld, whose ancestors came from Wiznitz , Bukowina ( Austrian until 1918 ), did not run a household. ( Eric Pleskow and Ari Rath spent their childhoods on Porzellangasse until 1938 , as they announced in an ORF television program in 2011/2012.)

After attending primary school in Marchegg, Lower Austria, on the eastern border of the country, she attended the Bundesrealschule Vereinsgasse , a higher education institution in Vienna's 2nd district where many Jewish Viennese lived. In the spring of 1938 she had to leave school and elsewhere in Vienna with 48 other students because of their Jewish origins Jews class visit. In the entrance hall of today's Bundesrealgymnasium Vereinsgasse, a memorial plaque has been commemorating the expulsion of these students since 1989.

Escape and a new beginning in England

Gretel's father, who had made it to London, managed to get her to leave the Third Reich in 1939 on a Kindertransport organized by British non-governmental organizations . In March 1939 she arrived in Harwich and initially worked in various professions.

In 1943 she married the later lawyer Dr. Johann Beer (born May 4, 1916 in Vienna), whose father Oskar Beer had his office in 1937 in the 6th district, Gumpendorfer Strasse 77, and lived with Hans in the 13th district, Hietzinger Hauptstrasse 38c, until 1938. Hans Beer had been able to study at the University of Vienna up to the eighth semester , completed his studies in London and was later able to work as a British lawyer; the couple then lived in an apartment in Gray's Inn , the quarters of an English bar association in London, and in a country house in Deal, Kent on the British Channel coast.

Successful author

Gretel Beer worked in advertising and public relations. After the Second World War, she became successful with cookbooks and through her journalistic work, especially for the Daily Telegraph and the English edition of the fashion magazine Vogue . She now traveled to Austria at least once a year and kept the typical Viennese German.

family

Hans Beer died in 1981 in the country house in Deal when, sitting in a wheelchair, he could no longer escape a fire that broke out.

Gretel's cousin was George Weidenfeld (1919–2016), who also grew up in Vienna and was ennobled as a publicist and publisher.

Works

  • Ice Cream Dishes , 1952
  • Sandwiches for Parties and Picnics , 1953
  • Classic Austrian Cooking , 1954
  • The Diabetic Gourmet , 1974 (German: Feinscheckerküche for the diabetic )
  • Austrian Cooking and Baking , 1975
  • Exploring Rural Austria , 1990
  • Eating Out in Austria , 1992
  • A Little Hungarian Cookbook , 1993
  • The QE2 Cookbook , 1999
  • Austria
  • Austrian Cooking
  • The Sunday Express Cookbook
  • Wieden (= Vienna in Polish), by Fred Mawer, Gretel Beer, Deirdre Coffey, Rosemary Bircz, Caroline Bugler; Hachette Polska, Warsaw 2009

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary, The Telegraph , September 1, 2010
  2. ^ Website A Letter to the Stars , List of Victims ( Memento of April 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Lehmann's Allgemeine Wohnungsanzeiger , Vienna 1937, Volume 1, p. 1255 (= p. 1283), on the website of the Vienna Library in the City Hall
  4. ↑ Time.History. The porcelain street boys. Ari Rath and Eric Pleskow in conversation , ORF III , produced 2011, broadcast on May 5, 2012
  5. ↑ Lehmann's Allgemeine Wohnungsanzeiger , Vienna 1937, Volume 1, p. 60 (= p. 88), on the website of the Vienna Library in the City Hall
  6. ↑ Memorial book for the victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna
  7. ↑ Own observations when meeting Ms. Beer in the 1970s and 1980s. Wolfgang J. Kraus
personal data
SURNAME Beer, Gretel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weidenfeld, Margaret (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-English author
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 2010
Place of death Deal , England