Pawel's letters

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Pawel's letters are memoirs of the German writer Monika Maron , published in 1999 by S. Fischer in Frankfurt am Main.

In this illustrated autobiography, the author explores a time that has been lost but not forgotten. Pawel, Monika Maron's Polish maternal grandfather, a Jew , died a “violent death”; was a victim of National Socialist expulsion and extermination in the summer of 1942 . Monika Maron writes about her grandfather: "He was born a Jew, he died a Jew, but he did not live a Jew."

Pawel and Josefa

Pawel Iglarz was born on January 15, 1879 in Ostrów Mazowiecka . Josefa Przybylski, an illiterate Catholic , was born in the Kurow countryside in the Łask district. When Josefa was four years old, her mother died.

Pawel and Josefa converted to Baptists independently at a young age and got to know each other in their Łódź congregation. Josefa was a maid in Lodz and worked as a weaver. Pawel, baptized on October 7, 1900 in the iryrardów Baptist Church, tailored.

The two young people emigrated to Germany in 1905 and stayed in Rixdorf at Schillerpromenade 4. In the 1920s, the couple - they already had their children Marta, Hella, Bruno and Paul - wanted to go to America. The idea of ​​emigrating remained a mere intention. Pawel was a trade unionist , a fellow campaigner in the Neukölln Red Front Fighters League and later as a Baptist member of the KPD . He took part in battles against the Nazis . Peek and Cloppenburg released Pawel around 1937 after a neighbor denounced him in writing as a Jew.

In November 1938, Pawel was expelled as a Polish Jew and spent nine months in an emergency shelter on the German-Polish border because the Poles did not allow him to enter. The English also denied him entry. In the summer of 1939 he stayed in Berlin for two weeks . Josefa did not divorce Pawel as suggested by the authorities, but went with him to her hometown Kurów. Since July 18, 1939, the two expellees lived there for almost three years. At the end of April 1942, Pawel was summoned to the non-fenced Belchatow ghetto thirty kilometers away on a pretext . The latter was liquidated in August 1942. Monika Maron assumes that the grandfather was either shot or gassed. He was probably murdered in the Kulmhof extermination camp in August . The author sums it up with bitterness: "The Jews were driven back to the Jews in the ghettos and gas chambers, their cast or runaway sons and daughters."

Monika Maron only read Pavel's letters to his children from the Belchatow Ghetto in the summer of 1942 in 1997. Pavel wrote the last letter on August 8th.

Josefa had already died on June 11, 1942.

shape

On the very first page of her memory, Monika Maron addresses a well-known phenomenon: Parents who are asked by their children about the time of National Socialism usually turn out to be taciturn dialogue partners. The same goes for the author with her mother as the interviewee. The grandparents Iglarz died when Monika Maron was one year old. So only Mother Hella could be questioned. After all, the persistent questioner learns significant truths - even if these are occasionally based on guesswork. Hella said that her parents had left Poland in 1905 because their families could not understand the turning away from traditional beliefs.

The methodically proceeding author also makes use of a statement by Niklas Luhmann , according to which the vita of a person - here mother Hella - is shaped by turning points in her life.

Hella

Monika Maron's mother Hella, born in 1915, survived a collision with a team of horses when she was four. As a teenager she met Ernst Busch and Erich Weinert . In general, the mother can remember character heads; so to comrade Schmid . That was Anna Seghers ' husband. The SAJ separated from the young communist Hella. As a half-Jewish woman , Hella lost her work permit in Berlin. In 1937 Hella met Monika Maron's biological father, Walter. The mother broke up with him in 1945. In 1949 Walter returned from captivity. Before 1945 he had sent his mother his wages, visited her parents in Kurow, had been surrounded in Stalingrad , escaped and died of kidney failure after the war .

The communist Hella - the atheist - prayed in secret before 1950 , but then no longer at the SED party college . Hella was an editor at Neues Deutschland in 1953 and lived with her second husband, Karl Maron . In contrast to her daughter, Hella believed in the class struggle .

Monika Maron and her mother had Polish citizenship until 1953.

GDR

Monika Maron continues the story of her grandfather's life and death with her own vita and leaves little good in the GDR ; calls the system of rule a dictatorship and denounces its “material poorness”. She had her eleven-year-old son baptized and thus formed him as a potential conscientious objector . Monika Maron wanted a communist GDR, but didn't get it. It was not until 1984 that Monika Maron said goodbye to communism. Your comment on the autumn of 1989: “… besides spoiled biographies”, the GDR didn't leave much behind. As an opponent of the GDR, she sees herself as the “winner of history” after 1989. To the back and forth of the narrator through the iron curtain - monitored by a "colossal secret service " - the reader asks himself: Could that have been so in detail? Hella's story, however, is presented as thoroughly believable. The mother stands by her stubborn daughter in every precarious situation - no matter what party punishment it will be.

reception

  • April 10, 1999, FAZ : Pawel's letters : Pawel's letters are something like a slap in the face of the later-born know-it-alls. The tone of the narrator's voice is aptly described in two sentences: “Monika Maron is not above things. She writes shyly and cautiously, deeply insecure, stammering in parts and distraught, ... "
  • June 1, 1999, Eike Brunhöber: Letters and Questions. Monika Maron's “Pawels Letters” : The author fights against all-too-human repression, but she cannot and does not want to proclaim absolute truths. Many questions can no longer be answered today.
  • 1999, Rita Utzenrath: Approaching Yesterday : In spite of all clear, precise language, the difficult forgetting and remembering is poetically reflected.
  • 1999, Ursula Reinhold : Generations and their fates : The reviewer outlines the inner structure of the work with an apt sentence: “If the reconstruction of the grandparents' fate forms the central material axis of the book, the thought axis is determined by the tension between mother and daughter . "
  • 2000, Christine Cosentino, Rutgers University , Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Foreign Languages, Camden : Pawels letters : "... a disturbingly beautiful book about kind people with the courage to be different ..." However, the appendix, in which the confrontation of the Author with the staff of Markus Wolf .
  • June 6, 2011, Friederike in Jüdische Lebenswelten in the 20th and 21st centuries : Monika Maron: Pawel's letters : The reviewer addresses two important details. First, praise: nothing is added. Second, whether Monika Maron wants it or not - she is a well-known GDR writer .

Used edition

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 118, 6. Zvo
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 50, 7th Zvu
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 53, 4. Zvo
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 136, 7. Zvo
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 132, postcard
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 81, 5. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 98, 12. Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 88, 2nd Zvu
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 89, 1. Zvo
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 99, 14. Zvu
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 203, 3rd Zvu
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 38, 10th Zvu
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 62, 2. Zvo
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 129, 6th Zvu
  15. ↑ Edition used, p. 130, 10. Zvo
  16. ↑ eng. Christine Cosentino-Dougherty