Marie Simon (historian of philosophy)

Marie Simon (born as Marie Jalowicz on April 4, 1922 in Berlin ; died on September 16, 1998 there ) was a German classical philologist and historian of philosophy who, after her death, became known to a wider public through her testimony as a victim of National Socialist persecution.

Life

Marie Simon's parents Betti and the lawyer Hermann Jalowicz died in 1938 and 1941, an exit from Germany with the father failed, and the father and daughter also lost their apartment. In the spring of 1940 she herself was hired as a forced laborer for Siemens . During this time she also began to offer resistance, committed acts of sabotage, and resisted the system, for example by ignoring summons. When the Gestapo was supposed to pick her up in June 1942 , she managed to escape and go into hiding in Berlin. She was able to survive until 1945 thanks to the help of other people and at the end of the Nazi regime she was one of the approximately 1,500 Jewish people who survived the Holocaust in the Berlin underground . During this time it belonged to the wider area of ​​the left resistance. In 1945 she became a member of the KPD .

Jalowicz married the orientalist and Judaist Heinrich Simon . In February 1951 she was with Liselotte Richter with a dissertation on the topic The concept of nature in the physics and logic of the ancient Stoa . A contribution to the understanding of stoic ideology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, completed his doctorate in 1969 with the work Die Gestalt des Epikurer in oriental literature . Both Simons made careers in the GDR and were also a well-known and well-known scientist couple internationally. Simon's specialty was the philosophy of antiquity , she held a professorship for ancient literary and cultural history at the Humboldt University. The focus of her work was research on Hellenistic philosophy, in particular stoicism , Epicureanism and Aristotelian social theory. She often did research with her husband, especially on ancient Jewish philosophy. She has worked several times in major projects of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR , in particular the Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology , including the cultural history of antiquity and the lexicon of antiquity . She was close friends with the ancient historian Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf , who held a similarly prominent and privileged position in the GDR. She did not lose her position, even though she continued to belong to the Jewish community. Simon very much separated private from professional and political life. Thanks to her position, she was able to maintain a state-supportive and yet critical attitude towards the state in the GDR. She held lectures until the early 1990s. In 1987 she was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze.

Simon's son, the historian Hermann Simon , who was born in 1949 , interviewed his seriously ill mother shortly before her death in the 1990s about her survival in the Berlin underground during the Nazi era. The 77 tapes resulted in a transcript of 900 pages that took a long time to process. The book was finally published in 2014, immediately received a lot of attention and even achieved an international response; several translations of the book have already appeared or are in preparation.

At the big Berlin exhibition in 2013, Jews in Berlin. 1938–1945 , which was present throughout the cityscape, Simon was one of the personalities portrayed.

tomb

She is buried next to her husband in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee .

Fonts

• with Heinrich Simon : The old Stoa and its concept of nature. A contribution to the history of philosophy of Hellenism. Structure, Berlin 1956, DNB 454717849 .
• with Heinrich Simon: History of Jewish Philosophy. Union, Berlin 1984 (also Beck, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-406-09850-9 ); 2nd edition 1990, ISBN 3-372-00376-4 ; New edition Reclam, Leipzig 1999, ISBN 3-379-01656-X .
• Marie Jalowicz Simon: Submerged. A young woman survived in Berlin 1940–1945. Edited by Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon . With an afterword by Hermann Simon. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-036721-1 ; (= Federal Agency for Civic Education : Series of publications , Volume 1532), BpB, Bonn 2014, ISBN 978-3-8389-0532-7 . (Additional offer online ).
  • English edition: Underground in Berlin. A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany (translated by Anthea Bell). Knopf, Canada 2015, ISBN 978-0-345-80969-8 .
  • as an audio book : Nicolette Krebitz reads: Untergetaucht. A young woman survived in Berlin 1940-1945 , with original sound recordings by Marie Jalowicz Simon, edited by Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon, directed by Vera Teichmann. Reading version: Irene Stratenwerth, 7 CDs (8 hours 16 min.), Argon, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-8398-1316-4 .

Web links

• Interview by Anita Wünschmann with Hermann Simon and Detlev Lücke: Tell the whole truth at the end of your life . In: Friday , March 30, 2014
• David Dambitsch: Memories of a Jewish woman in hiding in Berlin . In: Deutschlandfunk, Schalom - Jewish Life Today, March 28, 2014
• Otto Langels: A Jew in Berlin in the 1940s . In: Deutschlandfunk , March 24, 2014
• Philip Oltermann: Submerged: the Jewish woman who hid from Nazis in Berlin . In: The Observer , March 16, 2014
• Solveig Bach: As a submarine in Berlin. How Marie Simon escaped the Nazis . In: n-tv , March 9, 2014
• Pieke Biermann: Memories: Alone in the German ice desert . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur March 6, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Berliner Zeitung , October 2, 1987, p. 4
2. ↑ Review by Pieke Biermann: Memories: Alone in the German ice desert. Marie Jalowicz Simon: Submerged. A young woman survived in Berlin 1940–1945. Review. In: Deutschlandradio Kultur . March 6, 2014.