Hedwig Brenner

Hedwig Brenner (born September 27, 1918 in Czernowitz ; died January 23, 2017 in Haifa ) was a German-speaking Israeli lexicographer and writer .

Life

Hedwig Brenner was born in 1918 as the daughter of the teacher Fridl Feuerstein and the lawyer Dr. Adolph Langhaus was born in the multicultural Chernivtsi, when it still belonged to the Austrian Empire , in the year in which Bukowina fell to Romania after the First World War .

At the age of ten she lost her father, was raised by her mother and grandmother and was able to attend school until she graduated from high school. She began studying art history at the University of Vienna , but as a Jew had to quit in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by the National Socialists and returned to Czernowitz. In 1939 Hedwig Brenner married the engineer Gottfried Brenner in Czernowitz, who had studied in Prague. Together they went to the petrol area near Bucharest .

As a young woman, she experienced the political and armed conflicts in the border area between National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union . She witnessed the Second World War from deportation to the death camps . Northern Bukovina was recaptured by Romania as early as 1941. There were mass murders of Jews , and a ghetto was set up in Czernowitz . Tens of thousands of people were deported and murdered.

In 1944 the Red Army liberated Chernivtsi, while northern Bukovina remained with the Soviet Union . Relatives "disappeared" in Siberia , others left the country and went to England and the USA to save themselves. Hedwig Brenner and her husband, who had survived the Chernivtsi Ghetto, emigrated to Romania in 1945. They went to the petroleum area in Ploiesti , where Gottfried Brenner worked until his retirement. The Brenners also witnessed the Communist takeover of power in 1946/47 and the People's Republic of Romania, which was accompanied by renewed anti-Semitic campaigns in their early days.

After 1945 Hedwig Brenner became the mother of two sons, attended a nursing school of the Romanian Red Cross and took courses at an anatomical-pathological institute in Bucharest. As a result, she worked as a physiotherapist for many years until reaching retirement age .

The couple had submitted 130 exit applications to the Romanian state, all of which were rejected. It was not until the advanced retirement age, in 1982, that they were given permission to emigrate to Israel with their adult sons and mothers. In 1982 she emigrated to Haifa with her family . It was only very late that she became a writer and lexicographer. In Israel, Hedwig Brenner began to research, collect and document the life data and life stories of numerous Jewish visual artists around the world. She wanted to "give back their name and biography to many forgotten artists". Over 1500 life stories of Jewish artists are available so far.

In her work Mein oldes Czernowitz , published in 2010, Brenner explains her unbroken love for the city of her childhood, Czernowitz , which gets stronger and stronger with age. Brenner describes a city of cultural diversity little known in Western Europe during the times of the Danube Monarchy, later Romanian administration, then brief Soviet occupation or the Ukrainian government: “The domestic perspective pervades all of Hedwig Brenner's almost ninety-two years of life today. The myth of 'Chernivtsi' will remain ”, according to a book review.

In addition to this documentary work, Hedwig Brenner published feuilletons , essays and poetry in German and Romanian in Switzerland , Austria , Romania , Israel and the USA .

She died in Haifa in January 2017 at the age of 98.

Awards

• March 1, 2012: Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany
• March 16, 2012: Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art

Works (selection)

• with Erhard Roy Wiehn (ed.): Jewish women in the visual arts. A biographical directory. 5 volumes. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1998/2004/2007/2011/2013
• with Erhard Roy Wiehn (ed.): Jewish women in music and dance VI. A biographical directory . Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2016
• Lea's curse. A family history - a contemporary document from 1840–2003. Munda, Brugg 2005
• My twentieth century. Munda, Brugg 2006 (continuation of the family history)
• My old Chernivtsi. Memories from more than nine decades 1918–2010. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2010
• Hedwig and Gottfried Brenner: For memory and reflection. Short stories, poetry and painting from Chernivtsi and Israel. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2011
• Encounters with people and cities 1919-2014 . Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2015

literature

• Christel Wollmann-Fiedler: "Czernowitz is my home." A conversation with the contemporary witness Hedwig Brenner. Munda, Brugg 2009 ISBN 978-3-9523161-5-3 (with approx. 100 photos of locations)
  • Review: Rahel E. Feilchenfeld, "Everything is coincidence in life ...", in: Zs. Zwischenwelt. Literature, resistance, exile. Ed. Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft vol. 26, issue 3/4, December 2009 ISSN  1606-4321 , pp. 61f.
• Christel Wollmann-Fiedler: HB's visit to Berlin and Dessau in October 2011. In ibid., Vol. 28, issue 1/2, May 2012 p. 69
• Eva Brenner : In memoriam Hedwig Brenner. The great lady from the "world factory on Silver Street" is dead in Zs. "Between world. Literature, resistance, exile." Ed. Theodor Kramer Society. 34, 1–2, June 2017, pp. 39–41
  • Short essay by Wollmann-Fiedler: My thoughts are with Hedy , ibid. P. 38 (with portrait photo from 2006)

Web links

• Literature by and about Hedwig Brenner in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ My memory of Hedwig Brenner by Christel Wollmann Fiedler, January 2018
2. ↑ Book review by Christel Wollmann-Fiedler
3. ↑ My thoughts are with Hedy: On the death of Hedwig Brenner from Czernowitz , accessed on January 26, 2017
4. ↑ Hermannstädter Zeitung . March 9, 2012, pp. 1 and 5.
5. ↑ Austrian Embassy Tel-Aviv ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 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. , Website of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, accessed on May 30, 2012. 
6. ↑ identical to the essay with the same title from January 2017, see individual references