Otto Michael Knab

Otto Michael Knab (born March 16, 1905 in Simbach am Inn ; † December 12, 1990 in Oregon , USA ) was a German journalist who had to flee to Switzerland from the Nazi regime in 1934 .

Life

Knab was adopted as a toddler by the married couple Otto and Margarete Knab. The (adoptive) father was a Privy Councilor and General Paymaster in Munich. Both parents were Catholic , and Knab, who lost his father at the age of eight, was to become a priest according to his mother's wishes. However, after four years at a secondary school in Altötting, he broke off this training and completed an apprenticeship as a printer from 1920 to 1924. From 1922 he was a member of the Kolping Society , from 1924 he worked as a typesetter and editorial assistant for the Land- und Seebote in Starnberg . In 1926 he took over the editorial office and from 1929 the chief editor. In the same year he married Judith Adele Bultmann (* 1905), who was the same age and with whom he had four children. At the end of June 1934, Knab and his family fled to Switzerland. The escape had apparently been planned, because the wife and - at the time two - children drove to Lake Lucerne a week in advance , while Knab met a friend on a motorcycle on the evening of June 30, 1934 ( night of the Röhm Putsch ) had the Swiss border brought. In Walchwil on Lake Zug , he found a new residence.
In the summer of 1936 Knab was stripped of his German citizenship because of "subversive behavior". In 1939 the Swiss authorities no longer extended Knab's residence permit, so he and his family had no other option than to emigrate to the USA . Initially active as a shipyard worker for a short time, from 1940 to 1944 he worked for a German-language Catholic weekly newspaper of the Benedictines in Mont Angel / Oregon. He later worked as a production manager in the printing industry, and then got a job as the editor of administrative publications for the US Government. In 1969/70 he came to Starnberg for half a year, where he worked on the Heimatbuch Stadt Starnberg .

Otto Michael Knab died on December 12, 1990 at the age of 85. He is buried in Mont Calvary Cemetery in Portland, Oregon (W-729-2).

Create

Knab had worked his way up from printer to editor and from 1929 to editor-in-chief of the Land- und Seebote in Starnberg. Since after 1933 he increasingly developed a critical view of the Nazi regime - the regional Nazi administration forced ready-made articles that had to be published under his name - he decided to flee to Switzerland at the end of June 1934. There he immediately wrote a certificate of Starnberg Nazi history with the small town under the swastika , in which he reproduced his impressions in great detail. He described his spiritual oppression by a regime that was becoming increasingly foreign to him. In the early days of the emerging Nazi regime, many of his contemporaries would certainly have tried to find positive aspects in the whole thing, in the hope that things could change for the better over time. That this hope was very soon bitterly disappointed and turned into the opposite, many should have experienced firsthand as the Nazi party continued to radicalize and deal brutally with those who think differently . This pamphlet shows how an existing resistance was nipped in the bud: how public opinion was manipulated, how editors were forced to shape and tone the content of their articles and how a former social lower class pushed itself to power. Resistance or publicly different thinking than prescribed by the state meant either the loss of work and thus the livelihood or the consignment to the Dachau concentration camp , in the worst case liquidation with or without trial.

Knab looked for another way out. He went abroad to avoid the fate of being sent to the concentration camp. How much the events in Starnberg moved him becomes clear in his first book, Small Town under the Swastika , which he wrote immediately after his escape and in which he recounted his experiences of the last year and a half. He often ridiculed the actions of the actors, and that was just unbearable for those people whose reputation as the founders of the Millennial Empire was damaged. He described how law and order were suspended on the grounds of a revolution that had been going on since 1933 and how all opponents could be viewed as outlawed and tyrannized. Most astonishing, however, is Knab's final remark, in which he predicted the downfall of the system as early as 1934 when he wrote: "But one day the people will see and shake off what has brought them contempt for the world and pity for the world today." In 1938, the book was put on the index of the list of harmful and undesirable literature of the National Socialists. During his time in Switzerland, he worked as a journalist for numerous newspapers ( Neue Zürcher Nachrichten , Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten , Schweizerische Rundschau, etc.). He also worked with Waldemar Gurian , where he was co-editor of the Catholic exile magazine Deutsche Briefe , which had to stop its publication in 1938 due to political pressure from the Swiss authorities. In 1938 another book was published, entitled: The Hour of Barabbas , in which the fate of a priest is described who died under the Nazi regime. Among his best known works are Otto Michael Knab's Fox Fables , which were published in 1966 by his son Bernhard M. Knab. Knab's strongly Catholic outlook on life and the subliminally recurring confrontation with the consequences of the Nazi regime determined his life's work.

Works (selection)

• Small town under the swastika. Grotesque memories from Bavaria. Lucerne 1934.
• It is not that easy. A story of courage and arrogance. Benziger publishing house, Einsiedeln / Cologne 1936.
• Nuisance (novel). Verlag Pustet, 1936 ( online ).
• The hour of Barabbas (published under the pseudonym "Otto Michael"). Lucerne 1938; (1943 reissued in the US as The Hour of Barabbas ).
• Otto Michael Knab's Fox Fables. Washington 1966 (Ed. Bernhard M. Knab).
• In My Second Language. Binsford & Mort Publishers, Portland, Oregon, 1977.

literature

• Martin Broszat , Elke Fröhlich: Bavaria in the Nazi era. Challenge of the individual. Stories of Resistance and Persecution. Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 1983, pp. 115-137 ( online ).
• Norbert Frei, Johannes Schmitz: Journalism in the Third Reich. Munich 1989, pp. 160-163.
• Herbert Schmied: Counter-image of the "small town" from afar. In: Authors, books, times change (= Starnberger Stadtgeschichte vol. 3). Starnberg 2008, pp. 117-119.
• Benno C. Gantner: Otto Michael Knab: Small town under the swastika. Annotated reprint edition. Starnberg 2014.
• Literature by and about Otto Michael Knab in the catalog of the German National Library .
• Rolf Tauscher: Literary satire of exile against National Socialism and Hitler Germany. From FG Alexan to Paul Westheim. Hamburg 1992, pp. 52-57.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Broszat, Fröhlich: Bavaria in the Nazi era. 1983, pp. 136-137. Online , accessed July 29, 2014
2. ↑ Portrait and photo of the tombstone , accessed on July 30, 2014.
3. ↑ Jakob Knab: False Glory. The Bundeswehr's understanding of tradition . Ch. Links, 1995, ISBN 3-86153-089-9 , pp. 164 . Online , accessed July 29, 2014
4. ^ Banned Books , accessed July 28, 2014