Mary Gerold

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Mary Alice Lilly Gerold (* November 15, July / November 27,  1898 greg. In Mordangen (Latvian: Mordanga) near Talsen , Kurland Governorate , Russian Empire ; †  October 16, 1987 in Kreuth ) was the second wife from 1924 to 1933 and estate administrator Kurt Tucholskys , whose work she was in charge of after his death. She founded the Kurt Tucholsky Archive and the Kurt Tucholsky Foundation . She was the editor of Kurt Tucholsky's letters.

Life

Mary Gerold came from a bourgeois Baltic German family in Riga. She got to know Tucholsky during the First World War when she was deployed as a volunteer at the Artillery Flying School East in Alt-Autz in Courland . She only saw Tucholsky again in Berlin after the turmoil of the post-war period in January 1920, but had previously had intensive correspondence and Tucholsky broke off his long-term engagement to Kitty Frankfurter . At the time of their reunion, Tucholsky was living with Else Weil , whom he married in May 1920. Despite the marriage, he maintained the relationship with Mary Gerold. After the breakdown of the marriage between Tucholsky and Else Weil, Tucholsky and Mary Gerold married on August 30, 1924, this marriage lasted until August 21, 1933. Although she was the woman of his life, they only lived together for phases, but stood until the divorce always in correspondence, even during the times when Tucholsky entered into relationships with other women. In November 1935, shortly before his suicide, he wrote her a moving letter and shortly afterwards made her sole heir. In the letter Tucholsky wrote about himself and his second wife: “Had a lump of gold in his hand and bent down for arithmetic pennies ; did not understand and did stupid things, did not betray, but cheated, and did not understand. "

After 1945 Mary Gerold set up a Kurt Tucholsky archive under the name Mary Tucholsky in Rottach-Egern am Tegernsee in Bavaria , which she looked after with great devotion for decades. In 1969 she handed over the Kurt Tucholsky Archive to the German Literature Archive in Marbach . Her primary concern was to preserve and present Tucholsky's literary work for posterity. But she also published Tucholsky's letters addressed to her, initially in an abbreviated form and later in a complete form. Her own letters, on the other hand, are unpublished until after her death, with the exception of a few quotations in a monograph from 1993 and sometimes extensive quotations in the comments in the Tucholsky Complete Edition.

After her death, the rights to Tucholsky's work were transferred to the Kurt Tucholsky Foundation in Hamburg, which Mary Gerold founded in 1969 together with Fritz J. Raddatz . An attempt by the GDR to secure the rights for the Academy of Arts in Berlin failed. Her grave is in the cemetery near the Protestant Resurrection Church in Rottach-Egern .

literature

  • Kurt Tucholsky: Our unlived life. Letters to Mary . Edited by Fritz J. Raddatz. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1982.
  • Kurt Tucholsky: Complete Edition. Texts and letters . Vol. 16-20. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 2005-2008 (there letters from Tucholsky to her in full; in the comments there are numerous excerpts from her diaries and letters to Tucholsky).
  • Fritz J. Raddatz: Troublemaker. Memories . Ullstein Heyne List, Munich 2003.
  • Klaus Bellin: It was like glass between us. The story of Mary and Kurt Tucholsky. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86650-039-6 (new edition, flap brochure, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-942476-19-5 ).
  • Fritz J. Raddatz: "Then two will become: We both". Kurt Tucholsky and Mary Gerold. Herder, Freiburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-451-06760-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Entry in the baptismal register of the municipality of Rönnen (Latvian: Renda)
  2. ^ Result display for Mary Gerold of the library search at DLA Marbach
  3. ^ BStU, MfS, AIM 9195/91 Vol. 1, Bl. 24