Lotte Moos

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Margarete Charlotte Moos , also Maria Lehmann , b. Jacoby , (born December 9, 1909 in Berlin , † January 3, 2008 in London ) was a politically active poet and playwright .

Early years

Margarete Charlotte Jacoby was the daughter of Samuel and Luise Jacoby. At the age of ten she already proved her talent when an essay by her about Eastern European refugees was published in the Berliner Tageblatt and the editor-in-chief Theodor Wolff thanked her personally.

Jacoby spent a short time at the drama school of the Berlin State Theater before working as an assistant to a photographer and at a workers' theater . It was there that she met the economist Siegfried "Siege" Moos , who was on the left, whom she married in 1932.

Emigration and imprisonment

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 left Lotte and victories Moos Germany. First they lived in Paris , then they moved to London . Lotte Moos wanted to study at the London School of Economics , but her German certificates were not recognized. In 1936 the British authorities refused to extend her visa and she travels to the Soviet Union with her friend Brian Goold-Verschoyle , an Irish communist, to “see what it was like” (Eng. To see how it is there .) ). However, she was quickly disillusioned with the Soviet system and managed to return to Britain. Goold-Verschoyle fell victim to the Stalin purges in 1942 . The British authorities were informed by the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky that Lotte Moos could be a spy. She was arrested and interrogated by MI5 in Holloway Prison . She was then interned in a camp on the Isle of Man .

Living in England

After her release from the camp, Lotte Moos moved to Oxford , where her husband worked at the Institute of Statistics under William Beveridge . She worked as a nanny, translator, typist and teacher. Under the pseudonym Maria Lehmann she wrote for the British, German-language newspaper Die Zeitung . Shortly after the end of the war, Siegfried Moos became a lecturer at Durham University . She was now the mother of a daughter, took part in amateur theatrical productions and wrote plays for the theater and television herself, still using her pseudonym. One of the pieces won a prize from the BBC Arts Council . In May 1964 her play Come Back With Diamonds , a comedy about a political prisoner returning to Moscow , was performed at the Lyric Theater in Hammersmith . The play was booed by British communists in the audience.

In 1966 Siegfried Moos became an advisor to the Board of Trade and the family moved to Hackney . It was at this time that Siegfried and Lotte Moos were composing poetry, and three collections of poetry by Lotte Moos were published. Some of her poems appeared in the 1988 anthology The New British Poetry . The couple were among the co-founders of the Hackney Writers Workshop . Siegfried Moos died in 1988, Lotte Moos 20 years later. Her daughter Merilyn (* 1944, Oxford) wrote an autobiography in which she also described how she researched the fate of her Jewish grandparents in Germany.

Publications

  • Lotte Moos: Time to be Bold . Centerprise Trust, London 1981.
  • Lotte Moos: A Heart in Transit . Approach Poets, London 1992.
  • Lotte Moos: Collected Poems . Rockingham Press, Ware 1993.

literature

  • David Perham: Stranger in a borrowed land: Lotte Moos and her writing . Grendel Publishing. London 2012. ISBN 978-0-9566570-1-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Danielle Hope, Len Rockingham: Lotte Moos: Acclaimed poet and playwright . In: The Independent, Thursday 10 January 2008 . Archived from the original on September 11, 2010. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f David Perman: Lotte Moos . In: The Guardian . January 15, 2008. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
  3. ^ Barry McLoughlin: Left to the Wolves: Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror . Irish Academic Press, 2007.
  4. ↑ a b Obituary: Lotte Moos on guardian.co.uk v. January 15, 2008 , accessed July 1, 2013
  5. ↑ Merilyn Moos: The Language of Silence . Cressida Press, 2010.
  6. ^ Charmian Brinson : Hidden lives (review) . Association of Jewish Refugees, February 2011. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Moss, Lotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moos, Margarete Charlotte (full name); Lehmann, Maria (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British poet and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 3, 2008
Place of death London