Hermann Pirich

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Hermann Pirich on a painting by Angelina Hieronymi (1930)

Hermann Paul Pirich (born April 26, 1906 in Pettau , Austria-Hungary , † 1980 in Leonberg ) was an Austrian journalist , editor and writer .

Life

Hermann Pirich grew up in Pettau. He emigrated when southern Styria became part of Yugoslavia after the First World War . He passed his matriculation examination in Austria at the Klagenfurt grammar school in 1924 . He then studied law at the University of Graz and obtained his doctorate in law in 1928.

In 1929 he began studying philosophy , German and Slavic studies in Munich and worked as a journalist. In the same year he met his future wife Margarete Diederichs in Munich. First he worked for the Munich-Augsburger Abendzeitung . From 1932 to 1933 he worked for the satirical magazine Simplicissimus ; at the same time he wrote the stinging nettle for the anti-Semitic propaganda paper . At Knorr & Hirth Verlag he worked under Anton Betz in the advertising department and in the archive and finally became editor of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse , from which he was dismissed without notice on April 25, 1933 by order of the state police. There followed four years without a permanent position, three years he wrote under the pseudonym Franzjoseph Friedl, in the fourth year he published again under his own name. In 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP and from April 1, 1937, he was responsible for the features editor of the Berlin National Socialist daily newspaper The Attack, responsible for short stories and novels. He stayed there until he was drafted in early March 1940. He brought his wife and sons from Berlin to his native Pettau.

Pirich, who spoke fluent Slovene and Serbo-Croatian , had been a member of the SS since 1933 . In 1940 he came to the war as a war reporter for the SS standard Kurt Egger . Three years later he was transferred to a tank regiment and seriously wounded as a commander near Belgorod in Russia in July 1943 . After his recovery, Pirich worked from January 1944 to April 1945 in the Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone as editor-in-chief of the Deutsche Adriazeitung in Trieste .

After the war ended, Pirich was recruited by the American secret service as a war correspondent . In the Soviet zone of occupation , his writings Die verrufene Insel (Die Heimbücherei, Berlin 1942) and Wir sind hier vor (Verl. Die Heimbücherei, Berlin 1944) were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out. Pirich remigrated to Germany in 1947/48, where he initially worked as a political editor in Aachen . Later he built up the magazine "Lies mit nach 5", which was published by Holtzbrinck-Verlag . From 1956 he was editor of the “Tagesspiegel” in Berlin . During this time he also wrote theater texts. He interrupted his position at Tagesspiegel once, but returned as a political editor in the mid-1960s.

Pirich was a keen observer of current affairs, which he described and commented on before and during the Third Reich in reports and novels and after 1945 in editorials, dramas and short stories. The Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin documented in detail numerous experiences and details of his life, in particular the descriptions and assessments of his own tightrope walk between adapting to the National Socialist system and his rebellion against this system, which he wrote down in a letter and in a diary . Pirich's granddaughter, Carolin Pirich, refers to an extensive archive of her grandfather that she has analyzed. Among other things, she quotes a letter that Hermann Pirich wrote on January 17, 1941 to the Hauptsturmführer of his SS war reporter company:

"Over time, as is well known, even the most stubborn tends to believe what one tells him stubbornly and without getting tired. (...) Everything is so pathetic."

In the portrait of her grandfather published in the SZ-Magazin, Carolin Pirich included the SS members' personal files collected in the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichtenfelde and concluded:

“He wasn't the outsider in the realm of criminals. (...) He wasn't a hero. But he wasn't one of the executioners either. He managed so by. Until the end of his life he struggled with the fact that he did not dare to open his mouth. "

After the death of his wife Margarete Pirich-Diederichs, who also worked as a journalist and writer, he went into professional retirement in 1971 and died in hospital in 1980 at the age of 74 after a stroke.

Works

  • The infamous island. A story from the German border region . The home library, Berlin 1938
  • South Styrian border region , novel (1939)
  • We are doing it right now. Experiences and marginal notes of a war reporter between Gibraltar and Leningrad . The home library, Berlin 1944
  • Turntable Trieste - The Adriatic region in time-lapse from the Deutsche Adria-Zeitung . Trieste, 1945

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franzjoseph Friedl: Der Gretchentragödie, second part , in: Die Brennessel , 6.1936, pp. 54–55.
  2. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-p.html
  3. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1947-nslit-p.html
  4. ↑ Carolin Pirich: Family history: The red box. Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Ste. 14, April 20, 2017, accessed on April 23, 2017 . Carolin Pirich quotes from Hermann Pirich's letter, but does not explain how the letter got to the sender.
  5. ↑ Carolin Pirich: Family history: The red box. Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Ste15, April 20, 2017, accessed on April 23, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Pirich, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pirich, Hermann Paul (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Ptuj
DATE OF DEATH 1980
Place of death Leonberg