Yevgenia Semyonovna Ginsburg

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Yevgenia Ginzburg ( Russian Евгения Семёновна Гинзбург ; born December 7 . Jul / 20th December  1904 greg. In Moscow ; † 25. May 1977 ibid) was a Soviet journalist and publicist .

Life

Yevgenia ("Schenja") Ginsburg was born into a Jewish family of pharmacists in Moscow. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Kazan . In 1920 she studied at the University of Kazan, first social sciences , then pedagogy .

She worked as a teacher, then as an assistant professor. She soon married Pavel Aksyonov, then mayor of Kazan and a member of the Communist Party. After joining the Communist Party, she continued her career as a teacher and journalist . She gave birth to two sons, Alexei Aksjonow (1926–1944) and Vasili Aksjonow (1932–2009), who became a well-known author .

She was expelled from the party in February 1937 and was soon arrested for alleged links with the Trotskyists . Her parents were also arrested, but released after two months. Her husband was arrested in July and sentenced to 15 years of forced labor and surrender of all his property. In August, she was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and five more years of civil rights loss.

Ginsburg served her imprisonment in Yaroslavl prison until 1939 and then in labor camps in Kolyma . On several occasions she narrowly escaped death through exhaustion and malnutrition. In the 1940s she was increasingly assigned "lighter" jobs as a nurse, worker in a poultry farm and as a kindergarten teacher. At this time she met the Russian-German internist and homeopath Anton Walter. Walter had been interned because of his German origins. In addition to his work as a camp doctor, he treated many of the "superiors" of the Gulag society. They later married and adopted an orphan named Tonja.

In February 1947, Ginsburg was officially released from prison, but she had to remain in the Magadan Zone for another five years . She was able to work in a kindergarten again and secretly wrote her memoirs. In October 1950 she was arrested again and exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Territory , after which her destination was changed to Kolyma . After Stalin's death in 1953, Ginsburg was allowed to travel to Moscow. In 1955 she was completely rehabilitated. Millions of people who were just as wrongly convicted shared their fate.

Back in Moscow, she worked as a journalist and published autobiographical writings that describe the 1920s in the Soviet Union. She died in 1977.

Works

The part of the memories, which is dedicated to life in the Gulag , Krutoj maršrut (literally: hard march route; in German in two parts under the titles march route of a life and tightrope walk ) was published in the Soviet Union only in 1988. It was circulating there in samizdat . Without Ginsburg's knowledge, the first part of her memoir was recorded on audio tape and smuggled into the GDR . They were published in 1967 in Tamizdat - in this case by the Possev publishing house in Frankfurt am Main and the Mondadori publishing house in Milan - in Russian. Another Russian-language edition was published in New York in 1985. In 1969, a few thousand copies of her memories, Marching Route of a Life, were dropped by balloon over the GDR. The Rowohlt balloon affair takes its course.

Works in Russian
  • Kak načinalos'… report. Kazan 1963.
  • Edinaja trudovaja… memories. In Junost ' magazine . 1965, no.11.
  • Studenty dvadcatych godov. Memories. In: Junost '. 1966, no.8.
  • Junoša. Documentary short novel. In: Junost '. 1967, No. 9.
  • Krutoj maršrut. Memories. Possev, Frankfurt, and Mondadori, Milan 1967.
Works that are available in German translation
  • Route of a Life. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1967 (original: Krutoj maršrut I).
  • Tightrope walk. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-492-10293-X (original: Krutoj maršrut II).

Her autobiographical works were filmed in 2009 by Marleen Gorris . Jewgenija Ginsburg is played in the film adaptation by Emily Watson , her future husband, the camp doctor Anton Walter, by Ulrich Tukur . The biopic was released in German cinemas on May 5, 2011 under the title Mitten im Sturm . The film title is based on the title of the English version of the biography, the first volume of which is called Journey into the Whirlwind and the second is called Within the Whirlwind .

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ginsburg, Yevgenia Semyonovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Гинзбург, Евгения Семёновна (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet historian and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1977
Place of death Moscow