Lore Kruger

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Lore Ottilie Krüger , née Heinemann (born March 11, 1914 in Magdeburg , † March 3, 2009 in Berlin ) was a German-Jewish resistance fighter against National Socialism , a translator and photographer .

Life

Lore Heinemann was born the daughter of an engineer and attended high school in Magdeburg . She emigrated to Great Britain in April 1933 , and one year later moved on to her parents in Spain . In Barcelona and continued in Paris with Florence Henri , she trained as a portrait photographer . She was involved in actions in support of Republican Spain .

She later went to Paris , where she studied Marxism at the Free German University and wrote her thesis with László Radvanyi , Anna Seghers' husband . In Paris she lived next door to Walter Benjamin and Arthur Koestler . In 1942 she married Ernst Krüger , a leading German trade union official in the metalworkers' union and a communist .

In May 1940 Lore Krüger was interned in the Gurs concentration camp in the Pyrenees. After her release, she obtained an entry visa for Mexico from the Mexican consul in Marseille . At that time it was the only country that accepted all Spanish fighters and their families. After half a year of semi-legal stay in Toulouse, they found a ship in exile in 1941 , which took them to New York City in the USA via an involuntary stopover in Trinidad . The exiled lawyer Kurt Rosenfeld , with whose daughter Hilde she was still friends from their days together in Paris, managed to get her husband to leave Ellis Island and get a US residence permit.

Krüger secured the family's economic existence through her photo studio. She co-founded the exile magazine The German American . When a German prisoner of war wrote to them that the military in the US prisoner of war camps locked the Nazis together with the anti-fascists, where the Nazis then held veek courts, i.e. murdered people, The German American turned to the American newspapers and managed to get them in all camps were separated. She was also a member of the Free Germany Movement in the USA.

At the beginning of December 1946 Lore Krüger returned to Germany. After the birth of her second child, she graduated from photography for health reasons.

Until the 1980s, she worked as a freelance literary translator for the Berlin publishing house, among others, and as a freelance interpreter . She translated Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's letters from the house of the dead and works by Doris Lessing , Mark Twain , Robert Louis Stevenson , Daniel Defoe , Nathaniel Hawthorne , Joseph Conrad and Henry James into German.

Krüger was a member of the Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime - Association of Antifascists (VVN-BdA), in the Association of Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic and as a member of the Honorary Presidium of the Fédération Internationale des Résistants and spoke to school classes well into old age about the time of National Socialism .

Her autobiography My Life in My Time was only published posthumously and in a shortened version under the title Quer durch die Welt .

Photographic work

Only 150 black and white photographs by Lore Krüger have survived, no negatives, no further prints or sketches.

Lore Krüger had planned an exhibition of her photos on the occasion of her 95th birthday. She passed away shortly before. The curator of the photo art exhibition house C / O Berlin Foundation was ready to implement the concept that had already been developed: In January 2015, the photographs were honored there for the first time in a separate exhibition. From June to August 2015 the exhibition will be shown in the art museum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg .

"The versatility of her work, the brilliance of the photographic experiments, but above all the courage and persuasiveness of her documentary recordings suggest that she would have belonged to the front row of photographers today if she had stuck to her art."

- Catrin Lorch

Autobiography

  • Across the world. The life picture of a persecuted Jewish woman. Schkeuditzer Buchverlag, Schkeuditz 2012, ISBN 978-3-935530-96-5 .

literature

  • C / O Berlin Foundation (Ed.): Lore Krüger. A suitcase full of pictures: photographs from 1933 to 1945. Catalog for the exhibition from January 23 to April 10, 2015. Edition Braus, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86228104-6 .
  • Heike Ponitka: Krüger, Lore Ottilie, b. Heinemann . In: Eva Labouvie (Ed.): Women in Saxony-Anhalt, Vol. 2: A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the 19th century to 1945. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2019, ISBN 978-3-412-51145-6 , p. 256-259.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.magdeburg-tourist.de/media/custom/698_11587_1.PDF
  2. ↑ a b Lore Krüger and her newly discovered photos, ( Memento from January 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) MDR from January 20, 2015, accessed January 22, 2015.
  3. ↑ Death in the Island Garden. In: Friday , July 7, 2006.
  4. ↑ Christian Buckard : We called him Waldgeist In: Jüdische Allgemeine , November 16, 2006.
  5. ↑ "An Office on Broadway" . Conversation with Lore Krüger about emigration to the USA and the anti-fascist magazine The German American , in Junge Welt , July 2, 2005
  6. ↑ Lore Krüger on the website of DRAFD e. V.
  7. ↑ a b c Catrin Lorch: The find. Perhaps Lore Krüger would have become a great photographer. But all that remained was a suitcase full of pictures that could tell about it. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 19, 24./25. January 2015, ISSN  0174-4917 , p. 16.
  8. ↑ Cristina Fischer: Great and modest ( memento from February 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) for her 90th birthday on www.wirfrauen.de
  9. ↑ On the run around half the world (PDF; 1.5 MB) in our sheet of the Berlin VVN-BdA, p. 13.
  10. ↑ Exhibitions 01/24/15 to 04/10/15 Lore Krüger. A suitcase full of pictures - photographs from 1934 to 1944.
  11. ↑ A suitcase full of pictures: Photographs 1934–1944 - Jan 24 - Apr 10, 2015. Photography Now , accessed January 22, 2015
  12. ^ Exhibitions on the website of the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg, accessed on June 13, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Kruger, Lore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Krüger, Lore Ottilie; Heinemann, Lore Ottilie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter against National Socialism, translator and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 2009
Place of death Berlin