Hans Habe

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Hans Habe (born February 12, 1911 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , as János Békessy ; died September 29, 1977 in Locarno ) was an Austrian-American journalist , writer and screenwriter . As a writer, he used the pseudonyms Antonio Corte , Frank Richard , Frederick Gert , Georg Herwegh , John Richler , Peter Stone and Hans Wolfgang .

Life

After the First World War , the Békessy family moved from Budapest to Vienna . Habes father, Imre Békessy , caused several scandals there, which Karl Kraus repeatedly denounced in his works. When Kraus published the polemic “Out of Vienna with the villain” in his magazine Die Fackel , Békessy left Vienna and went back to Budapest.

Habe had already learned German in Hungary through his mother, the teacher Bianca Marton, and his governess Adele Bienert. He stayed in Vienna with his mother and attended the Stubenbastei grammar school from 1921 to 1929 . Around the same time, Hilde Spiel went to school there. The two met in 1927 and fell in love. A year later, Habe broke with Spiel, but they still valued each other later until a political rift broke out in the 1960s. After the Matura (Abitur) tried Have in Heidelberg , Jura and German study. Although he was baptized as a Protestant , he got into trouble because of his Jewish origins, so he returned to Vienna.

Habes's first literary attempts also fall during this period. Probably to distance himself from his father, Habe changed his name. Hans is the German translation of János and Habe is onomatopoeic for the first letters of Hans Békessy .

From 1930 Habe worked as a journalist for the Vienna Sunday and Monday Post . There he published an article about Adolf Hitler's previous career . In 1931, Habe switched to the Österreichische Abendzeitung as editor-in-chief and thus became one of the youngest editors-in-chief in Europe. In 1932 he married his first wife Margit Bloch. The marriage ended in divorce soon after Habe met his second wife. In June 1934 he married Erika Levy, divorced Mosse, daughter of Walter Levy, owner of the Tungsram light bulb factories. Erika's first husband was the doctor and writer Erich Mosse, nephew of the Berlin press czar Rudolf Mosse . Habe divorced Erika in 1941 in the American divorce paradise Reno .

At the beginning of 1934, Habe switched to Wiener Morgen and also worked (even if only for a few weeks) for the press service of Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg 's fascist Home Guard . When Habe realized that Benito Mussolini was one of the Home Guard's greatest financiers , he resigned immediately. From 1935 to 1939 Habe was employed by the Prager Tagblatt . For this newspaper he went to Geneva as a correspondent for the League of Nations . As such, he also took part in the 1938 Conference of Évian , which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had initiated. Incidentally, Habe made his debut as a writer in 1936 with his novel Drei über die Grenz .

One of the first possessions 1938 after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich expatriated, his books were banned. Therefore, Habe went into exile in France with his wife . There he enlisted in the following year as a volunteer and fought with the 21 è Régiment de Marche de Volontaires Etrangers against the Germans. On June 21, 1940, he was captured and taken to Dulag Dieuze near Nancy . With the help of French friends, he was able to escape from there. Together with his wife he escaped through France and Spain to Portugal . His friend Erich Maria Remarque addressed this "adventure" in his book The Night of Lisbon .

There the couple obtained Habe Visa and were able to emigrate to the USA at the end of 1940 . When he was naturalized, Habe met Eleanor Close , a divorced Rand, née Hutton. Her mother was Marjorie Merriweather Post . She was therefore the granddaughter and heiress of Charles W. Post , the founder of General Foods Inc. She married Hans Habe in April 1942. They had a son, Anthony Niklas Habe (born 1944). Habe was also successful as a writer in exile, especially in the USA. His political novels Tödlicher Friede or Zu Spät , first published in Zurich in 1939 and then in English under the title Sixteen Days 1940 in New York , and the novel A Thousand Shall Fall from 1941, in Germany under the title Ob Tausend Fall - A report was published by Rowohlt in 1947, and other books had large editions and were translated into many languages.

Habe volunteered to fight Nazi Germany and was drafted into the US Army in 1942. There he became a member of the military secret service. He was trained in psychological warfare at the Military Intelligence Training Center in Camp Ritchie , Maryland . With the propaganda - unit 1st Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company of the Ritchie Boys was I in March 1943 after North Africa and participated in the invasion of Italy in part. He was u. a. used for landing near Salerno . In 1944 he became an instructor in psychological warfare at Camp Sharpe near Gettysburg , Pennsylvania , most recently he was a major . In his memoirs, Stefan Heym , who also emigrated and belongs to the Ritchie Boys, reported from this time: "... only generals were allowed to wear special uniforms tailored to their own taste - and Lieutenant Habe."

In the fall of 1944, Habe took over a department within the Staff Group for Propaganda and Psychological Warfare (P&PW Detachment) of the 12th Army Group, which was to publish German newspapers. Have looked for his department u. a. following employees from: Stefan Heym (writer), Conny Kellen (ex-secretary of Thomas Mann ), Hanus Burger (director), Joseph Wechsberg (journalist), Otto Brandstätter (lawyer), Max Kraus (student), Walter Kohner (actor) , Benno Frank (former actor from Mainz) and Ernst Cramer , later chairman of the Axel Springer Foundation . As a result, the writer Klaus Mann , Oskar Seidlin and Hans Wallenberg , son of the former BZ am Mittag editor-in-chief, were added.

By November 1945 Habe founded in the American occupation zone 16, according to other information 18 German-language newspapers, first the Kölnischer Kurier , then the Frankfurter Presse , the Münchner Zeitung , the Bavarian Day in Bamberg, the Weser Boten (Bremen), the Ruhr Zeitung ( Essen), the Hessische Post (Kassel), the Stuttgart voice , the Braunschweiger Bote , the Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin. If these sheets of the so-called "Army Group Press" were originally intended as a kind of official sheet for the American occupation authorities, they developed into independent newspapers under the leadership of Hans Habes; Because Habe was not afraid to ignore the instructions of the American authorities or to interpret them in a very idiosyncratic manner, and was therefore called to report repeatedly. Even the titles of the papers were in the tradition of German newspaper names. Some sheets only existed for a short time, from the Stuttgarter Voice, for example, only seven editions appeared in August and September 1945; in some cases the newspapers were absorbed by the new newspaper foundations licensed by the occupation authorities. Habe suggested a separate organ for the German prisoners of war in the American occupation zone, and the weekly Rat und Tat was created.

The establishment of the Neue Zeitung in Munich was seen by the American occupying power as the most important newspaper project . It was deliberately planned as a large, national newspaper. Habe acted as editor-in-chief, the writer Erich Kästner was responsible for the features section , and Stefan Heym was in charge of foreign policy. With a circulation of up to 2.5 million copies (and three million other subscription requests that could not be served due to a lack of paper), Die Neue Zeitung was at times the newspaper with the highest circulation in Europe after the Daily Mirror .

In December 1946, Habe divorced Eleanor and in the same month married the six years older actress Ali Ghito , whom he had met in 1938 , looked for and found again after the war. Almost at the same time he began a relationship with the film actress Eloise Hardt , which led to a marriage war between Ali Ghito and Hans Habe. Habe divorced in Mexico in 1948 and married Eloise Hardt a day later before the divorce became final. Ali Ghito accused him of bigamy and provided the star with spicy material for an article that appeared in early June 1952. The marriage with Ali Ghito was not legally divorced until 1953.

In 1949 Habe became editor-in-chief of Münchner Illustrierte and in 1951 of Echos der Woche . In addition, Habe wrote and edited scripts for various companies in Hollywood from 1946 to 1953 . With Eloise Hardt , Habe had a daughter, Marina Elizabeth (* 1951; murdered on December 30, 1968 in Hollywood). In 1955 the marriage ended in divorce. From 1952 to 1953, Habe wrote the Outside America column every other day for the Los Angeles Daily News .

After leaving the American-funded Echo of the Week in early summer 1952, Habe returned to the United States as a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News , but returned to Europe in September 1953 as the newspaper's chief correspondent. In 1953 he met his sixth and last wife, the Hungarian actress and singer Licci Balla , in Munich ; the wedding took place in 1955 in Salzburg . Subsequently he lived in St. Wolfgang on Lake Wolfgang, among others . He continued to write commentary columns on general politics from a conservative point of view, including a. for the Kölnische Rundschau . In 1960 he settled in Ascona , Switzerland . There he became Robert Neumann's neighbor . At the age of 66, Hans Habe died of a glandular disease.

Habes literary work is linked to the traditional narrative style. He dealt very critically with the post-war literature, but was able to z. B. do nothing with group 47 . His novels often dealt with current topics, including political ones, and were often based on autobiographical experiences. Some of his novels were made into films, so u. a. 1943 The Cross of Lorraine (A Thousand Shall Fall) by Tay Garnett , 1962 In the Name of the Devil by John Paddy Carstairs , 1975 The Net by Manfred Purzer and 1988 Mission to Evian by Erika Szanto.

In 1976, Hans Habe founded the quarterly magazine Epoche .

Awards and memberships

Works (selection)

  • Three over the border. 1936.
  • A time collapses. 1938.
  • Deadly Peace - a romance novel with a political background. Europa-Verlag Emil Oprecht, Zurich, August 31, 1939. (A novel in which the negotiations at the League of Nations in Geneva at the time of the creation of the Munich Agreement in 1938 were discussed.) After a complaint from the German embassy to the Swiss government, the book was published upon request of the Swiss Federal Council withdrawn and under the title
Too late - a romance novel with a political background in 1940 by Europa Verlag supposedly in New York, but in reality still reissued in Zurich. The English edition that appeared at the same time bore the name
16 days . Then the book was translated into 14 languages. In Germany the book was first published by Walter Verlag, Olten 1976, under the title
Dust in September . Numerous other issues.

Hans Habe Foundation

The Hans-Habe-Stiftung was founded on July 25, 1996 at the will of Licci Habe, born in 1995, who died in 1995. Balla, the last wife of the writer and journalist, founded a foundation.

literature

  • André Simon: J'accuse! In: exile. Sonderband 1, 1987, pp. 114-126.
  • David M. McMurray: Conserving individual autonomy in exile: Hans Habe's struggle against totalitarianism. University Press, Nashville, Tenn., 2001, ISBN 0-493-14435-8 .
  • Susanne Swantje Falk: Hans Habe. Journalist and writer (= dissertation, University of Vienna). Vienna 2008.
  • Hermine Adelheid Mayr: Hans Habe as a columnist for the newspapers of Axel Springer Verlag. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna 2009.
  • Jutta Dick: I have, Hans. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 183f.
  • Martin Pfaffenzeller: Letters of a New Era. in: Geo Epoche No. 102 (2020), pp. 112–119.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hermine Adelheid Mayr: Hans Habe as a columnist for the newspapers of Axel Springer Verlag. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna 2009, p. 29.
  2. ↑ Contrary to the often cited number of 18 start-ups, according to Germanist Susanne Falk, who did her doctorate on property, 16 start-ups. See the biography of Hans Habes on the website of the Hans Habe Foundation.
  3. ↑ Martin Pfaffenzeller in Der Spiegel June 8, 2020: How the post-war press came into being. "The Nazis were punished".
  4. ↑ Cf. Rolf R. Bigler, then editor-in-chief of the Zürcher Weltwoche : Instead of an afterword . In: Hans Habe: In the year zero. A contribution to the history of the German press. Verlag Kurt Desch, Munich 1966, pp. 141–144.
  5. ↑ Hans Habe: In the year zero. A contribution to the history of the German press. Verlag Kurt Desch, Munich 1966, here: p. 79; to the Neue Zeitung pp. 79–140.
  6. ↑ Wilfried F. Schoeller (Ed.): This strange time. Life after the hour zero - a text book from the "Neue Zeitung". Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2005, p. 662 f.
  7. ↑ Autopsy Disclos Slain Girl Stabbed. In. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. 3rd January 1969.
  8. ^ According to Frederick Forsyth ( The Odessa File ) the magazine had to close because key advertisers withdrew their orders when Habe published a series about the post-war careers of former SS members.
personal data
SURNAME I have, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Békessy, János; Corte, Antonio; Richard, Frank; Gert, Frederick; Richler, John; Wolfgang, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian journalist, writer and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH 29th September 1977
Place of death Locarno