Margret Boveri

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Berlin memorial plaque on the house at Opitzstrasse 8 in Berlin-Steglitz

Margret Antonie Boveri (* 14. August 1900 in Würzburg , † 6. July 1975 in Berlin ) was a German journalist , among others for the prestigious daily newspapers Berliner Tageblatt under Paul Scheffer , the Frankfurter Zeitung and - after their ban - for the Reich wrote . Her life was marked by numerous historical breaks. During the time of National Socialism she first came into contact with the Gestapo . Interned as a hostile foreign correspondent in the USA, she returned to the German Reich during the Second World War and made her mark in part through press articles influenced by the Nazis . After the end of the war, she mainly campaigned for the reunification of Germany. Her circle of friends and acquaintances included such diverse personalities as Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen , Theodor Heuss , Ernst von Weizsäcker , Freya von Moltke , Ernst Jünger , Carl Schmitt , Armin Mohler , Gottfried Benn and Uwe Johnson .

Life

Margret Boveri was born as the daughter of the German biologist Theodor Boveri and the American biologist Marcella Boveri , b. O'Grady, born in Würzburg. She grew up there as a sheltered only child in an academic family belonging to the bourgeois upper class. As a professor of biology, her father was head of the zoological institute of the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg on Pleicherring (today Röntgenring). Her mother was the first woman to take her final exams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and foregoing her academic career while raising children. The family initially lived not far from the university building in a six-room apartment in a block of floors at Pleicherglacisstrasse 8 (called Bismarckstrasse from 1915), a quiet residential street preferred by academics. In her early youth, she moved to an even larger apartment on the first floor of Bismarckstrasse 1. As a toddler, Margret was taken by her parents on several trips abroad. This was the case on several visits to the USA by her mother's relatives in 1902, 1905 and 1909. On the occasion of her father's two stays at the Zoological Institute in Naples , she attended the international school there in 1911 and 1913.

The image conveyed by the parental home and their social environment of the otherness of certain classes of the population and the distance that one had to maintain from these so-called "lower" classes shaped their upbringing in childhood and youth. In addition, there was the atheistic attitude of her parents , which is unusual in Catholic Würzburg . In order not to come into contact with "ordinary" children by attending the local school in the less upscale Pleich district, Margret Boveri received private lessons. In addition to the preparation for attending a secondary school, the obligatory piano lessons were also part of their training.

Her father's death on October 15, 1915 marked a serious turning point in her previously carefree life. In the autobiographical ramifications she referred to this loss as "Amputation I".

Boveri-Schlösschen in Höfen near Bamberg

The family regularly spent the holiday season in Höfen near Bamberg , where their father's grandparents owned a small castle called the lake house . The sale of a large part of the property belonging to the estate on January 1, 1918 represented “Amputation II” for Boveri.

In the absence of a grammar school for girls, she attended the city's Sophienschule from 1917, a higher school for girls that had existed since 1900 and offered four-year high school courses as preparation for the Abitur. In the "German National Youth Association" founded during her time at the Sophia School, Boveri was a leader.

As the previous owner of the residential apartment building by her mother that sold after the war, the new owner announced the used by the Boveri apartment in the main floor . The loss of this apartment, which was connected with all of her childhood and youth memories, meant “Amputation III” for her. The situation was exacerbated by the exhausting search for a new place to stay for her widowed mother in times of a general housing shortage and accommodation in much more modest rental apartments such as in Bohnesmühlgasse, Hofstrasse and finally Crevennastrasse 8.

In 1920 Margret Boveri passed her Abitur as an “external” at the Realgymnasium. Since she still had no clear professional ideas, she first took piano lessons in the master class of Hermann Zilcher , the director of the Würzburg State Music Conservatory. In addition, she enrolled on October 20, 1920 at the University of Würzburg for the subjects English, Italian, history, German and zoology. As a bread-and-butter job, she envisaged teaching, although she felt no particular inclination to do so. She was disappointed with the studies. Nevertheless, she passed the state examination in German, history and English on April 29, 1924 . After the one-year legal traineeship at the Oberrealschule, Boveri completed the study assistant examination for German. However, she could not bring herself to attend school. Motivated by financial support from her mother, she tried to continue her history studies in Munich in autumn 1925 without great ambitions . In the summer of 1927 she interrupted this to go to the zoological institute in Naples as a secretary. In October 1929 she returned to Germany and continued her studies at the Hochschule für Politik in Berlin , where she moved into an attic apartment at Rotdornstrasse 2 in the Friedenau district . In November 1929 she also enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University for Modern History and Philosophy.

In Naples, Boveri met the Afro-American zoologist Ernest Just , who was a visiting professor at the Zoological Institute. A relationship developed between the two after Boveri fell in love with the married scientist 17 years his senior. Despite the rejection of this liaison by her circle of friends, the relationship lasted until their time together in Berlin and only ended when Just, who had worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem since January 1930 , met his future wife in the summer of 1931.

At the end of 1929 Boveri began her dissertation with Hermann Oncken on the subject of personalities and the apparatus of foreign policy management under Sir Edward Gray . At the end of September 1930 she was able to move into a new apartment in Berlin-Lichterfelde at Neuchateller Strasse 19 and devote herself to her work here undisturbed. She completed her doctorate on June 9, 1932 with the overall grade “cum laude”. In it Boveri painted a negative picture of English foreign policy. Edward Gray, too, simply continued the anti-German policies of his predecessors and intensified them through his preference for France.

In March and April 1933, Boveri, accompanied by three friends, went on an automobile trip through Morocco , Algeria and Tunisia . At first, Boveri saw the turning point caused by the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” and the changes in the press landscape that began in 1933. She categorically excluded an existence in exile - even when acquaintances and companions were affected by the cleansing measures of the new rulers and she had to gain experience with the Gestapo herself . She was determined to realize their desired entry into the journalism, and this a good time had met since by using the new editor of the law introduced by October 4, 1933 Aryan certificate Redakteur- or journalists agencies who held until then German Jews to a considerable Dimensions were free. On December 9, 1933, she applied for membership in the Reich Association of German Writers . However, the application for a permanent position at her dream newspaper , the Frankfurter Zeitung , failed, so that on August 27, 1934 she finally joined the foreign policy editorship of the Berliner Tageblatt , whose editor-in-chief Paul Scheffer promoted her and with whom she spent a lifetime close connection remained. On behalf of the Berliner Tageblatt she made trips to Malta, Egypt and Sudan in 1936. In 1938 she went on a long trip to the Orient, financed by Frankfurter Zeitung and Atlantis Verlag , which she took with her Buick and which took her to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. In addition to newspaper reports, the literary fruits of their travels were the books From Minaret to Drilling Rig and A Car, Deserts, Blue Pearls .

From 1939 until the newspaper was banned in 1943, she was the foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ) in Stockholm and New York. At her own request, she returned to Europe ( Lisbon ) in May 1942 - in the middle of the Second World War , after she had been interned in New York as an " enemy foreigner " after the USA entered the war - where she immediately resumed her work for FC . She now also published anti-Semitic articles in FC , such as: Landscape with a double bottom. Influence and camouflage of American Jewry . The sharpness of the contributions was due to editorial interventions, she said after the war. On July 20, 1941, she was awarded the War Merit Medal , the first stage of the five-tier War Merit Cross award donated by Hitler . After the ban on FC by the Nazi regime, Boveri started working as a report writer in the German embassy in General Franco's Madrid . She returned to Berlin in March 1944 and worked as a freelancer for the National Socialist weekly newspaper Das Reich until the end of the war. She lived in the front building of the Charlottenburger Wundtstrasse 62 IV. On Lietzensee, which was badly damaged by a bomb attack on February 3, 1945, so that she moved to Thielallee 13 in Berlin-Dahlem shortly after the end of the war. She lived as a freelance journalist in Berlin until her death.

Boveri made a career as a journalist during the Nazi era without being a member of the NSDAP . Although she kept her distance from the regime in the initial phase, she was a patriotic German and, according to her own statement, “friends” with the diplomat and later resistance fighter Adam von Trott zu Solz . Little did Boveri suspect, however, that Trott belonged to the inner circle of the Kreisau Circle . She experienced the end of the war in Berlin. Her diary-like notes from this period become the basis of Days of Survival in 1968 - Berlin 1945 . Immediately after the war she wrote the anti-American pamphlet America Primer for adult Germans .

After the German surrender, she strongly disapproved of the division of Germany and accused the three western victorious powers of having deliberately brought about this, with the support of Konrad Adenauer . The result was that they rejected the Federal Republic of Germany . It was only after the Wall was built and after John F. Kennedy and Willy Brandt brought about their visions of reconciliation with the East during the Cold War that they reconciled with post-war Germany.

In 1956 published The Betrayal in the twentieth century introduced her to treachery on homeland by Knut Hamsun , William Joyce and Ezra Pound by their propaganda -Tätigkeit for the Nazi regime the "betrayal" by Wilhelm Canaris , Ludwig Beck and Claus von Stauffenberg in Form of her conspiratorial activity in order to study the ambivalent omnipresence of betrayal from her point of view: “Treason”, she writes, “has become an everyday concept in our lives. The content of the betrayal changes as the wheel of history turns. Today those who were hanged as traitors yesterday are celebrated as heroes or martyrs, and vice versa. But the betrayal remains with us as if it were the constantly changing shadow belonging to our epoch. "

In 1968 Boveri was awarded the German Critics' Prize. On January 15, 1971, she received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class "for her journalistic commitment to an understanding between East and West".

From 1968 onwards she had intensive conversations about her life with the writer Uwe Johnson , which were recorded on tape. Johnson had previously received "lessons in politics and current affairs " from Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher in New York , as Boveri biographer Heike B. Görtemaker puts it . Johnson then wanted to find out why Boveri, although she had the opportunity to emigrate, stayed in National Socialist Germany and made a career as a journalist from 1933. According to Görtemaker, he criticized Boveri for having “participated” and not said “No” to the situation in Germany. In doing so, as Görtemaker explains, he mainly referred to the main political work of Arendt's Elements and Origins of Total Rule , in which she accuses the generation that grew up before the First World War that “they misused themselves from the ' leader of the mob ' to let. The intellectual and cultural elite of this 'front generation' [...], with their 'anti-human, anti-liberal, anti-individual and anti-civilization instincts', could not escape the attraction of the ' totalitarian movements', and it still cannot. Nevertheless, she [the intellectual and cultural elite] had no influence on the 'total ruling apparatus'. ”Despite this background, the sometimes almost friendly encounters were not always without tension, and Boveri broke off contact in September 1968 because Johnson had said she was been a "Nazi German". The interviews, in which Elisabeth Johnson was now also involved, were continued later, but "Boveri never got over the incompatibility of the points of view between her and Uwe Johnson," said Görtemaker.

Margret Boveri died on July 6, 1975 in Berlin. She was buried in the burial place of the Boveris in the Bamberg main cemetery. In her will, she bequeathed her notes to Uwe Johnson. Shortly after her death, he published an obituary in Die Zeit . Two years after Margret Boveri's death, he and his wife published Boveri's autobiography, Branching .

The conservative Margret Boveri Foundation for Democracy Research in Würzburg awarded a Margret Boveri Prize for scientific journalism (including to Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann 1997).

Quotes

  • “England no longer needs a Secret Service in Germany; the Germans themselves come to us in droves and tell us everything, ”stated Robert Vansittart in 1939.
(Margret Boveri: The betrayal in the 20th century, vol. II, p. 98).
  • Double Bottom Landscape: Influence and Camouflage of American Judaism . B.'s headline in the Frankfurter Zeitung , about Jews in the USA
  • "I am almost ready to join the party."
  • “Well, I would say with the traitors I have dealt with, the great difficulty was that they had to choose between different types of loyalty. One of the simple examples is Laval , the man who was prepared to remain Prime Minister under the German occupation, and for whom loyalty to the so-called fatherland was stronger than loyalty to an ideology of freedom. "
  • “The USA thinks it is something better, more democratic, more progressive and more free; but they are not. Those who do not consider them to be the best of all nations are called to bring the blessings of progress to others, they will crush them. "

Works

  • Personal information about toilet x-ray. In: Otto Glasser: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and the history of X-rays. Berlin / Göttingen / Heidelberg 1931; 2nd edition, ibid. 1959.
  • World events in the Mediterranean. Zurich 1936.
  • From the minaret to the derrick. A political biography of the Middle East . Zurich / Leipzig 1939.
  • A car, deserts, blue pearls. Report on a trip through the Middle East. Leipzig 1939.
  • America primer for adult Germans . Berlin 1946.
  • The diplomat in court. Minerva, Berlin 1948.
  • Duino. Heroic breaking point of Europe. In Merkur , vol. 5, # 8, 1951.
  • 16 windows and 8 doors. Berlin 1953.
  • The treason in the 20th century. 4 vols. Hamburg 1956-1960.
  • We all lie. A capital newspaper under Hitler. Walter, Olten 1965.
  • Days of survival. Berlin 1945. Piper, Munich 1968.
  • Remembered guesswork. In: Neue Deutsche Hefte, 16, 1969, pp. 205–208.
  • The Germans and the status quo. Munich 1974.
  • Branches. An autobiography , Ed. Uwe Johnson . Piper, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-492-02309-6 .

literature

  • Ingrid Belke: to emigrate or stay? The publicist Margret Boveri (1900–1975) in the Third Reich. In: ZfG , 53, 2005, pp. 118-137.
  • Heike B. Görtemaker : A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52873-2 .
  • David Dambitsch: "A Lady of the World". The political journalist Margret Boveri (1900–1975). CD, booklet. AirPlay-Entertainment, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-935168-43-8 .
  • Ralf Breslau (Ed.): “I want to write and write.” Margret Boveri, a German journalist. Exhibition catalog, Berlin State Library & Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation . Reichert, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-933641-41-1 .
  • Werner Dettelbacher: Dr. Margret A. Boveri on her 100th birthday on August 14, 2000. A handout for the exhibition “Ms. Boveri knew too much”, University Library Würzburg , 5. – 31. August 2000.
  • Elke Fein: The discussion about resistance and betrayal after the Second World War, among other things using the example of Margret Boveri's investigation into “betrayal in the 20th century”. Free University of Berlin, 1995.
  • Günther Gillessen: At a losing position. The Frankfurter Zeitung in the Third Reich. Berlin 1986.
  • Klaus Niester: Margret Boveri. Survival strategies of a publicist in the Third Reich. Master's thesis, University of Münster 1987.
  • Christian Tilitzki : Margret Boveri and Carl Schmitt. A casual correspondence. In: Schmittiana, Volume VII, Berlin 2001.
  • Ernst Klee : Margret Boveri. Entry in: Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? Fischer, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5
  • Roland Berbig et al. (Ed.): Margret Boveri, Ernst Jünger : Correspondence from the years 1946–1973. Landt, Berlin 2008.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Community of Stegaurach ( memento of December 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) accessed on November 24, 2014
  2. ↑ FZ , No. 268 and 269, May 1943.
  3. ^ Günther Gillessen: In a lost position. The Frankfurter Zeitung in the Third Reich. Berlin 1986, p. 479 f.
  4. ↑ Klee 2007, p. 71.
  5. ↑ On May 12, 1945 she received an unexpected visit from Elvira Zitzewitz in destroyed Berlin, who describes her as follows: “This is a cousin of Jakob and a friend of Teddy Goetz, of whom I have never written [for reasons of censorship]: You is the cousin of Adam von Trott, one of the men of July 20, with whom I was friends, and we got really close last year on this sad basis. ”(Boveri: Days of Survival. p. 139 f. ).
  6. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Munich 2005, p. 202.
  7. ↑ Treason as a commodity. In: Der Spiegel from September 12, 1956.
  8. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Munich 2005, p. 313.
  9. ↑ Information from the Office of the Federal President
  10. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Munich 2005, p. 298.
  11. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Munich 2005, p. 301.
  12. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Munich 2005, p. 305.
  13. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: A German Life. The story of Margret Boveri. Munich 2005, p. 308.
  14. ↑ s. Visit to the hospital. Die Zeit , August 15, 1975, No. 34.
  15. ↑ Source At this point, undated .; about "Jewish World Conspiracy" .
  16. ↑ Ibid .: Letter to Paul Scheffer.
  17. ↑ Source from MB, betrayal in the 20th century.
  18. ^ From Margret Boveri: Amerikafibel. Quoted from Rutschky; see web links.
  19. ↑ From this version are noteworthy: 1. “Even after the war she (MB) was of the opinion that it was right to make compromises with the Nazis. For Boveri, the Hitler regime was simply bad government; unlike her contemporary Hannah Arendt, she did not recognize what was fundamentally new in totalitarian rule. ”and: 2.“ Unfortunately, Görtemaker only mentions this relationship (sc. MBs to the mother) in passing. She writes absolutely nothing about Boveri's friend Gertrud Reiss, who emigrated to Zurich with her Jewish husband in 1933. Görtemaker evaluates the 500 letters that Boveri exchanged with her mother and the 2,200 letters of correspondence with Reiss, but the reader does not learn anything about the nature of these relationships and their influence on Boveri. "
  20. ↑ Based on Görtemaker only.
  21. ↑ Online free of charge for all users of around 100 city libraries. Otherwise as a print.
personal data
SURNAME Boveri, Margret
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boveri, Margret Antonie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Wurzburg
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1975
Place of death Berlin