Jiří Kosta
Jiří Kosta , actually Heinrich Georg Kohn , (born October 2, 1921 in Prague , Czechoslovakia ; died February 15, 2015 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe ) was a German - Czechoslovak economist and university professor .
Life
Kosta was born Heinrich Georg Kohn and continued to use his two German first names in addition to the Czech ones. From autumn 1931 he attended the German Stephansgymnasium in Prague, and in autumn 1938, because of the increasingly anti-Jewish mood in the German population of Czechoslovakia, he switched to the Czech Athenaeum Gymnasium, where he passed the Abitur in June 1939, i.e. after the break-up of Czechoslovakia . An intended study of economics failed because the Nazi authorities ordered all Czech universities to be closed in November 1939. Because of his Jewish descent, he was assigned to a “construction command ” in the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1941/42 , and in 1942/43 he worked as a prisoner in Dubí in the Kladno coalfield . Ordered back to Theresienstadt in 1943, Kosta came to the Auschwitz concentration camp on October 28, 1944 on the last "Osttransport" . After hunger marches, he was liberated by Soviet troops on January 20, 1945.
After graduating from the Prague Business School in the summer of 1947, Kosta was given a post in the management of the ČSA airline company at the end of the year , and in 1948 he became head of the Czechoslovak-Soviet trade relations department. After his father and mother were arrested, he was fired in the spring of 1950. He met Helena Kohoutová, and they married on June 9, 1951. Kosta had to “prove himself in production” as a trained lathe operator in an aircraft factory. From September 1956 he taught business and economics at an engineering school . In December 1962 he joined Ota Šik's team at the Academy of Sciences , which dealt with the concept and content of reforming the traditional planning system. He acquired in 1966 in Prague doctoral degrees CSc (= PhD) and later at the University of Bremen in 1973. Dr. rer. pole. PhD.
After the violent end of the Prague Spring due to the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, Kosta and his family emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany via Vienna in September 1968. He initially worked at the Institute for Social Science Research in Munich , before he was appointed professor for socialist economic systems at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 1970 . After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, while still living in Frankfurt, he was also committed to building market economy structures in Czechoslovakia. In addition, he campaigned for reconciliation between Germans and Czechs and the memory of the Holocaust .
Kosta lived with his wife near Frankfurt until his death. He was the father of the Slavist Peter Kosta and Ivana Palek, who studied pedagogy and bohemianism at the Charles University in Prague .
Works (selection)
- Outline of the socio-economic development of Czechoslovakia 1945–1977 . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-518-10974-X .
- Economies of real socialism. Problems and alternatives . Bund, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7663-0894-7 .
- Never given up. A life between fear and hope. Philo, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-8257-0242-1 , new edition 2004: ISBN 978-3-86572-242-3 .
- The Czech / Czechoslovak economy in multiple changes . Lit, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-8739-1 .
- Czech and Slovak Jews in the Resistance 1938-1945 , as editor, translated by Marcela Euler, Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-940938-15-2 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Jiří Kosta in the catalog of the German National Library
- Jiří Kosta , website
- www.stiftung-sozialgeschichte.de
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kosta, Jiří |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kohn, Heinrich Georg (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-Czechoslovak economist and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 2, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Prague |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 15, 2015 |
| Place of death | Bad Homburg vor der Höhe |