Heinz Pol

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Heinz Pol (actually: Heinz Pollack; born January 6, 1901 in Berlin ; died October 13, 1972 in New Milford / Connecticut ) was a German journalist , writer and film critic .

Live and act

Heinz Pollack was expelled from the Berlin University after satirical publications. From 1923 to 1931 he was initially a trainee and then an editor at the Vossische Zeitung . From 1922 he also wrote for the magazines Die literäre Welt and Die Weltbühne , also under the pseudonym Jakob Links.

Pol made a name for himself as an independent left-wing critic. He was the “first film critic” of the Vossische Zeitung , which he saw as an opportunity to exert political influence. At the end of the 20s he also emerged as an author of contemporary political novels. From 1924 to 1933 he was married to Charlotte Aron (later Charlotte Beradt).

In September 1931, Pol left the Vossische Zeitung and became editor of the publications New Monthly Newspaper and Die Welt am Abend published by Willi Münzenberg . According to Pols, the Ufa film company had canceled its advertisements because of critical film reviews in the Vossische Zeitung and thus provoked his departure from Ullstein . In the Weltbühne , Pol justified his departure in a multi-page article and quoted himself from a discussion with the editor-in-chief:

"So I can see that in the Ullstein house you can only write 'free' reviews for as long as Ufa likes it. In politics, Mr Hugenberg as a political opponent can be attacked at every opportunity - but for the film part he is the good one Business friend of the house, so taboo. Under these outrageous circumstances, I feel compelled to stop my work immediately (...). "
"Ullstein und Ufa", in: Die Weltbühne , September 29, 1931, pp. 477–482, here p. 482.

Heinz Pol, along with Georg Bernhard , Hugo Simon , Heinrich Mann , Rudolf Olden , Kurt Grossmann , Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt and Harry Graf Kessler, was one of the initiators of the conference Das Freie Wort on February 19, 1933 .

After the National Socialists came to power, he left for Prague in June 1933. There he was from January 1934 to July 1935 editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus and employee of the New World Stage . In June 1934, Pol took a nine percent stake in the Neue Weltbühne publishing house, and he was also said to have ambitions to become the editor-in-chief of the paper. Since the takeover of the magazine failed, he sold his share in November 1935.

Because of the increasing Soviet influence, Pol ended his editorial work in Prague in 1936. He emigrated to Paris, where he wrote for the Mitropress press service and, above all, regularly for the German exile newspaper Pariser Tageblatt .

Interned in 1939, he fled to New York in May 1940. In the USA he wrote articles for various magazines such as The Nation , The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune . Pol also published books in which he strongly criticized National Socialism.

He continued his journalistic activity after the end of the Second World War. Pol wrote for numerous European and German newspapers such as the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Neue Ruhr Zeitung .

Pol's brother Fritz Willy Pollak (1903–1963) emigrated to Palestine.

Works

  • Either ... or. A political novel. Schünemann, Bremen 1929:
  • Patriots. A political novel. Agis Verlag, Berlin 1931
  • Suicide of a Democracy. Translated into English by Heinz and Ruth Norden, Verlag Reynal & Hitchcock, New York 1940. (Heinz and Ruth Norden were descendants of a Jewish family living in England. After the war, Norden became editor-in-chief of the US Occupation Illustrated Today )
  • The Hidden Enemey. The German threat to Post-war Peace. Messner Publishing, New York 1943
  • Foreign organization AO. Facts from file reports of the 5th column . Brückenverlag, Linz / Austria 1945. (From the foreword by Heinz Pol: Written on behalf of the government of the United States of America. Part of an educational program about the unknown facts. )

literature

  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 568f.

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ Walter F. Peterson, The Berlin Liberal Press in Exile: A History of the Pariser Tageblatt - Pariser Tageszeitung, 1933-1940 . 287 S., Tübingen 1987, p. 34
personal data
SURNAME Pol, Heinz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pollack, Heinz (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, writer and film critic
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1972
Place of death New Milford