Maria east

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Maria Osten (actually Greßhöner , born March 20, 1908 in Muckum , † August 8, 1942 in Moscow ) was a German writer .

Life

Osten / Greßhöner grew up in Neugolz (Golce) in West Prussia . At the age of fifteen she dropped out of high school , separated from her German national family and went to Berlin. There she initially worked in a lung sanatorium. She took private lessons from the expressionist painters Ludwig Meidner and Willy Jäckel , came into contact with left-wing artistic circles and joined the KPD in 1926 or 1927 .

From 1928–1932 she was an employee, at times editor and author supervisor, at the communist-oriented, but non-party Malik publishing house owned by Wieland Herzfelde . Greßhöner made her literary debut with the story Mehlgast in the anthology 24 new German narrators , which was published by the Kiepenheuer publishing house in Leipzig. In 1932 the story Zigelski was lucky was published . In the same year she met the Pravda editor and head of the publishing house Jourgaz Michail Kolzow in Erwin Piscator's apartment and became friends with him. She accompanied Kolzow on a reportage trip through the Ruhr area and followed him to Moscow in September 1932 , where she worked as a journalist. The couple shared an apartment in the Dom Prawitelstwa residential complex built for officials . Kolzow stayed married to his wife Elizaveta. On a joint trip to France and the French-managed Saarland in 1933, Kolzow and Osten took ten-year-old Hubert L'Hoste with them to Moscow, whom they had met at his parents' home, for only one year as a foster son. L'Hoste was a model member of the youth organization of the KPD Young Pioneers . He stayed with the couple in Moscow and became the protagonist of her book Hubert im Wunderland (1935), in which she euphorically described the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union.

II Congreso Internacional de Escritores para la Defensa de la Cultura

Since 1933 she has been involved in traveling and writing under the pseudonym “M. East “for the anti-fascist popular front , so in 1934 during the voting campaign for the Saar referendum and from 1935 in the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture ( ISVK ) in Paris . In 1936, in Moscow, Osten played a key role in planning the literary exile magazine Das Wort , which appeared in Moscow. In the same year she occasionally traveled with Lion Feuchtwanger as an official companion on his trip through the Soviet Union. She attended with him at least one of the Trotskyist trials, political show trials that Stalin had carried out at the time of Feuchtwang's visit. As a special correspondent of the German Central Newspaper (DZZ) took on the side of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) part. In 1937 she was in a letter from the French used in Spain Comintern -Funktionärs André Marty denounced Stalin as a German spy. After her return to Paris in 1938 she took over the editing of Das Wort .

When Koltsov was arrested by the NKVD secret police on December 12, 1938 as part of the Stalinist purges , she thought this was a misunderstanding and traveled with her Spanish adoptive child José from Paris to Moscow to assist Koltsov, although he himself had warned her about it. Other friends and acquaintances, including Lion Feuchtwanger , Arthur Koestler and André Malraux , had advised her not to travel to Moscow. In Moscow the mood had turned not only against Koltsov but also against herself. Her adoptive son Hubert L'Hoste, now living with a partner, had occupied her and Kolzow's apartment. When Osten arrived in Moscow, her adoptive son, as "the wife of an enemy of the people " , refused entry into her own apartment and she had to move into a hotel. She could no longer achieve anything for Kolzow. He was shot dead in Butowo on February 2, 1940. Since Maria Osten had taken on Soviet citizenship in order to obtain a work permit and right of residence, it was no longer possible for her to leave the country.

East then took care of others, such as the terminally ill Margarete Steffin , whom Bertolt Brecht had left behind in Moscow on his escape from the National Socialists and who was also under observation by the NKVD. On June 25, 1941, Osten was arrested by the NKVD. She was sentenced to death on August 8, 1942 as an alleged spy and immediately shot by an NKVD commando. In 1957 Maria Osten was "rehabilitated" by the military tribunal in Moscow - her conviction was overturned.

Many of Maria Ost's texts have been lost, but the surviving parts of her novel Potato Schnapps , an autobiographically tinged East Elbe chronicle, reveal Ost's talent for intensely atmospheric portrayal, her psychologically keen view of the landlord class and her unconditional commitment to the exploited rural population. Ostens contributions to the German-language exile press deal with the responsibility of intellectuals and writers in the fight against fascism , but less on the level of political slogans than on that of practical solidarity. Not all of her works could appear at the time; a collection of the scattered texts is still pending.

Works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 31.
  2. ↑ Waksberg (1993), p. 33.
  3. ↑ Waksberg (1993), p. 34.
  4. ↑ Maria Osten in German Communists ...
  5. ↑ Waksberg (1993), p. 32.
  6. ↑ Georg Lukács, Johannes R.Becher, Friedrich Wolf a. a .: The Purge: Moscow 1936 Shorthand of a closed party meeting . Edited by Reinhard Müller, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-13012-2 , 1957, p. 233.
  7. ↑ On 16.09.1942 the writer Maria east of Stalin's henchmen was murdered. In: memoreal37.wordpress.com, accessed August 3, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME East, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Greßhöner, Maria (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Muckum
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1942
Place of death Moscow