Maud von Ossietzky

Maud Hester von Ossietzky (born December 11, 1888 - according to marriage certificate 1884 - in Hyderabad , India ; † May 12, 1974 in Berlin ; born Lichfield-Woods) was the daughter of a British officer and great-granddaughter of an Indian princess. She was the wife of the German journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Carl von Ossietzky and, after the end of the Second World War, was one of the re-founders of the magazine Die Weltbühne , which her husband published from October 1927 to March 1933.

Life

Maud Lichfield-Wood's father died when she was six years old, her mother a year later; therefore she was taken in by an aunt in England . She gave her niece to boarding school, which Maud von Ossietzky describes as not very pleasant in her memoirs. When she came of age, she moved to Manchester , where she worked as a nurse and joined the suffragettes .

When Carl von Ossietzky met his future wife, she had already been politically active for several years and was involved in the English women's rights movement. They first met in January 1912 in a Hamburg café. The two married in England on August 19, 1913. At the time of their wedding, Maud von Ossietzky still had a considerable fortune from her father's inheritance. However, this was confiscated at the beginning of the First World War .

After the end of the First World War, the family moved from Hamburg to Berlin , where their daughter Rosalinde was born on December 21, 1919 . The fact that Carl von Ossietzky was a busy journalist in the 1920s and later became the publisher of Weltbühne seems to have seriously affected family life. "The paper took my father from me and made my mother sick," complained daughter Rosalinde looking back. This illness refers to Maud von Ossietzky's alcohol addiction .

The health problems are also said to have resulted in Carl von Ossietzky being arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire and unable to leave Germany. Since he did not want to leave his wife unannounced that night, he returned to his apartment despite urgent warnings, where two police officers arrested him in the early morning of February 28, 1933.

After her husband's arrest, Maud von Ossietzky spent some time in a Berlin sanatorium, and later moved to live with her father-in-law in Hamburg. Daughter Rosalinde was able to travel to England. The release of Ossietzkys from concentration camp detention on May 28, 1936, allowed the couple to see each other in Berlin again. Since Carl von Ossietzky stayed in a hospital in the two years up to his death, the two did not live together in one apartment. Maud von Ossietzky played a tragic role in the attempt to sensibly invest the prize money associated with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize . She fell for the lawyer Kurt Wannow , who acted without a chamber license , who assured her that he would administer the prize sum of almost 100,000  Reichsmarks . But Wannow embezzled the money, so that it finally came to the process.

After the end of the Second World War , Maud von Ossietzky tried to carry on the journalistic legacy of her deceased husband. Born in England, she applied to the British occupation authorities for a license to publish a magazine that was to appear monthly under the title Carl von Ossietzky's Weltbühne . It received the license in November 1945. The previous owners of the Neue Weltbühne , which had appeared in exile until 1939, filed an objection to this publication of the magazine . In addition, the journalist Peter de Mendelssohn was to be appointed by the British as the censor of the paper, which the editors around Maud von Ossietzky did not like.

The magazine then appeared monthly from June 1946 under its previous title Die Weltbühne in the Soviet Sector of Berlin and was continued on October 7, 1949 after the GDR was founded. The appearance was based strongly on the original edition up to 1933. The title page also referred to Carl von Ossietzky as the original publisher. After 47 years of existence, the newly released Weltbühne had to stop its appearance again in 1993 (approx. Three years after German reunification ).

Maud von Ossietzky died on May 12, 1974 in Berlin.

literature

• Maud von Ossietzky: Maud von Ossietzky tells. A picture of life . 2nd edition. Verlag der Morgen, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-371-00168-7 (EA 1966).
• Hermann Vinke : Carl von Ossietzky . 2nd edition Dressler Verlag, Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3-7915-5007-1 .
• Ursula Madrasch-Groschopp: The world stage. Portrait of a magazine. Bechtermünz Verlag im Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1999, ISBN 3-8289-0337-1 (reprint of the Der Morgen publisher, Berlin 1983).