Helga Hirsch

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Helga Hirsch (* 23. March 1948 in Estorf / Weser ) is a German free publicist (u a.. The world , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and was) Poland - correspondent of the weekly Time .

Life

Helga Hirsch was born in 1948 and grew up in Lower Saxony . Her father came from Breslau . In 1967 she moved to West Berlin , where she studied German and political science at the Free University to become a teacher after breaking off her studies in theology . She was politically active and joined the Maoist K group KPD / AO, founded in 1970 . There she worked under a pseudonym, but was exposed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and was not hired as a teacher due to the radical decree.

During her first visit to Poland in 1978, she met opposition members from the Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR) and the Free Trade Union in Gdansk and, under this impression, finally turned away from communism, disaffected. She received her doctorate on the anti-communist Polish opposition movement and in 1985 published an anthology with essays by the Polish dissident Adam Michnik . (In this respect, her political biography is similar to that of the publicist Gerd Koenen , who was also active in a K group and distanced himself from it through contact with Polish dissidents.)

From 1985 she worked as a journalist and from 1989 as Warsaw correspondent for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . Her first article was an interview with the poet Zbigniew Herbert . She openly sided with the concerns of the Polish resistance movement Solidarność , which was viewed rather critically by the left-liberal German opinion leaders , as they believed that Solidarność's activities could endanger “ change through rapprochement ” within the framework of the détente policy .

After the fall of 1989/90, her very emotional bond with Poland began to loosen. She was disappointed that there was no consistent “coming to terms with the past ” in the Polish public , but that a “thick line” was drawn under communism. She also criticized the unwillingness to z. E.g. to deal with Polish crimes against Germans or Polish anti-Semitism : "Poland hardly confronts the past [...] [...] in the public consciousness the national history exists selectively as a tradition of heroic myths", so Hirsch 1996.

Since 1996 she has been working as a freelance writer, mainly for the daily newspaper Die Welt , and has published several books: Die Rache der Victims (1998) about the imprisonment and forced labor of German civilians in Poland after the Second World War (Polish: Zemsta ofiar , Warsaw 1999), I don't have shoes not (2002) about the life stories of Poles, Jews and Germans as “ethnic cross-border commuters” (Polish: Nie mam keine buty , Warsaw 2003), in 2004 heavy luggage appeared about German displaced persons of the “second generation”, in 2007 they described it in Uprooted the loss of homeland of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and Germans in World War II. In 2008 she edited together with the Polish Holocaust researcher Barbara Engelking Uncomfortable Truths , an anthology with the most important Polish texts from 1987–2008 on Polish anti-Semitism. To go or stay? (2011) describes how almost half of Polish Jews lived in Lower Silesia and Pomerania for a short time after the Second World War. Hirsch also wrote documentaries for radio and television stations ( WDR , Deutschlandfunk and ARTE ).

From 2012 to 2014 Hirsch was a member of the jury for the German-Polish Journalist Award .

In Poland in particular, Hirsch's commitment to the center against expulsions in Berlin planned by the Association of Expellees is controversial . Due to the intense irritation caused by this project by Erika Steinbach and the well-known private “ Prussian Treuhand ” in Poland, Hirsch initiated an open letter in September 2004 in which celebrities from the former German eastern regions expressly denied compensation claims distance from Poland. On March 10, 2010, in a letter to Minister of State for Culture Neumann, she announced her resignation from the scientific advisory board of the state foundation “Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation” because she saw no basis for further cooperation.

Hirsch worked with Joachim Gauck on his autobiography, which was published in 2009, and in 2010 was a member of Gauck's staff for the application for federal president . From 1991 to 1998 she was in a relationship with Gauck.

Awards

In 2001 Hirsch received the German-Polish Journalism Prize .

For the documentary Coffee Beans for a Life about a Polish Jew she was awarded the Prize of the Latücht Cinema in Neubrandenburg in 2005 and in 2006 at the festival in Lagow / Poland (best German film).

On September 3, 2010, she received the medal of thanks from the European Solidarność Center in the Berlin Reichstag building, presented by the Polish President Bronisław Komorowski .

Quote

“Under the new democratic conditions, Polish society is no longer proving to be so courageous, energetic, closed and active; she is rather apathetic, grouchy, indecisive, incapable of self-criticism ... The Poles tend to suppress their weaknesses, deviate from the path of self-reflection and reject objective criticism as anti-Polish prejudices. Someone who only reads the Polish press can easily come to the conclusion that this peace-loving, hospitable, but also resourceful and struggling for survival nation is surrounded by greedy, arrogant, and sometimes malevolent powers, but definitely humorless neighbors. But did the Hungarians, Czechs, Austrians or Germans really all suddenly become anti-Polish when they closed the borders to Polish traders last year, fearing that they would be inundated by a flood of illegal business? Do foreign observers really only have to point out Polish anti-Semitism in order to divert attention from xenophobia in their own countries. "

- Source: Polityka , 1991, cited from Gazeta Wyborcza online original version

Publications (selection)

Books

Essays

  • 1994: For reporting on Germany in the Polish press. In: Transodra 4/5, Winter 1993/94, pp. 28-33. [1]
  • 1998: Coping or Repressing? The German and Polish way of dealing with recent history. In: Ewa Kobylińska / Andreas Lawaty (ed.): Remember, forget, suppress. Polish and German experiences . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (= publications of the German Poland Institute Darmstadt, vol. 11). Pp. 78-86. ISBN 3447040807
  • 2003: Flight and expulsion. Collective memory in transition. In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte , B40–41 / 2003, pp. 14–26 [2] .

Documentaries

  • 1999: Late victims - Germans in Polish camps 1945-1950 ( WDR / MDR )
  • 2001: "The Erbfeind" - Prussia / Germany from a Polish perspective ( ARTE )
  • 2005: Coffee Beans for a Life - My Survival in Kolbuszowa

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helga Hirsch and Thomas Rautenberg say goodbye to medientage.org
  2. ↑ Radio Prague interview with Hirsch "No more offsetting - German initiative as a signal for the neighbors"
  3. ^ Invisible sign, FAZ article accessed on September 9, 2010
  4. ↑ Helga Hirsch deserves an excellent press release from the Association of Displaced Persons, September 3, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Hirsch, Helga
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Estorf , Weser