Meta Scheele

Meta Scheele (* 25. October 1904 in Uetersen , † 1. June 1942 in Erbach ) was a German Roman writer and historian .

Life

Childhood and youth

Meta Scheele was the daughter of the later school councilor and local researcher Heinrich Julius Scheele (1876–1952) and his wife Gertrud Henriette Friederike Scheele (née Lempfert) and was born in Uetersen and spent her childhood there. Her brother was Walter Scheele (1906–1978), who from 1943 was a university lecturer and professor of chemistry at the University of Hanover . Meta Scheele later grew up in Ratzeburg (Ernst Barlach-Haus) and graduated from the Ernestinenschule in Lübeck in 1924 .

Early work

From 1924 to 1928 she studied history , German and English at the universities of Hamburg , Berlin and Göttingen . In 1928 she completed her doctorate at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on historical Pyrrhonism , the tradition of skepticism about history in France and Germany. The dissertation was supervised by the Göttingen historians Alfred Hessel (1877–1939) and Arnold Oskar Meyer as well as the Germanist Rudolf Unger (1876–1942). In 1930, the dissertation was published under the title Knowledge and Faith in History. Studies on historical Pyrrhonism in France and Germany in Carl Winter's university bookstore in Heidelberg as the first monograph on the history of skepticism related to history.

Years of marriage with Werner Pehmen

Dr. phil. Meta Scheele married on December 28, 1930 in Ratzeburg her fellow student Dr. phil. Werner Pleisterve (1904–1982). Werner Pehmen had received his doctorate in 1927 in Göttingen with a thesis on Justus Möser ("The intellectual development of Justus Möser up to the writing of the Osnabrück history in 1762"). Pleist and Scheele moved in a nationally conservative milieu and were in contact with Hans Grimm , among others . From 1932 to 1937 Werner Pleister, a member of the NSDAP , headed the literary department of the Deutschlandsender in Berlin , and from 1938 to 1939 the Reich office for educational films. After the end of the war, Werner Pleister moved to Hamburg , became radio program director at the NWDR in Hamburg in 1950 and the BRD's first television director in 1952. In 1959 he was dismissed from this office and later moved to Munich. In 1937 the marriage between Meta Scheele-Pleistern and Werner Pleistern was divorced.

The last few years

Meta Scheele left Berlin and lived in Ratzeburg and Lübeck in the following years . On November 5, 1938, she was admitted to the Strecknitz mental hospital in Lübeck. From there she was deported on September 23, 1941 to the Eichberg Clinic near Erbach / Eltville in the Rheingau. As a victim of the second phase of the National Socialist " euthanasia ", the Brandt campaign , she died on June 1, 1942 in the Eichberg Clinic.

plant

Between 1930 and 1936, Meta Scheele worked as a reviewer and columnist for various newspapers and magazines and published several novels, some in the style of New Objectivity ( Women in War , Gotha 1930; Der geliebte Klang , Berlin 1934), a historical novel ( Stier and Jungfrau , Leipzig 1936) and, in the line of a specifically German Rembrandt cult, a biography romancée about Rembrandt van Rijn ( Die Sendung des Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn , Leipzig 1934, Berlin 1934 and others; published posthumously as a Wehrmacht edition 1943/44 ). In doing so, she continued her historical interests and mixed historiography and novels in a way that the historical Pyrrhonists treated in her dissertation had already considered highly problematic.

bibliography

• Knowledge and Faith in History. Studies on historical Pyrrhonism in France and Germany , Heidelberg 1930
• Also a life of the Virgin , Osnabrück 1928
• Women at War , Gotha 1930
• The beloved sound , Berlin 1934
• The broadcast of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn , Leipzig a. Berlin 1934
• Bull and Virgo , Leipzig 1936

Secondary literature

• Gisela Schlüter: "The true story of the Meta Scheele (1904-1942)", in: The Eighteenth Century . Journal of the German Society for Research in the Eighteenth Century, 31/2 (2007): Historischer Pyrrhonismus , ed. v. G. Schlueter, 246-258.

Web links

• Literature by and about Meta Scheele in the catalog of the German National Library

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• Uetersen local history museum