Peter Finkelgruen

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Peter Finkelgruen (born March 9, 1942 in Shanghai ) is a radio editor , correspondent and author .

Life

Peter Finkelgruen was born in Shanghai, where his parents Ernestine and Hans Finkelgruen had emigrated due to Nazi persecution. In 1943, under pressure from the German government, the Shanghai district of Hongkew was declared a ghetto for so-called stateless refugees by the Japanese occupiers ( Shanghai Ghetto ); Peter Finkelgruen's father died that same year.

In 1946, after the liberation of Shanghai by American troops, Peter Finkelgruen's mother and her son returned to Prague , where their mother, Anna Bartl, lived. Anna Bartl hid Martin Finkelgruen (1876–1942), Peter Finkelgruen's grandfather, in the shared apartment for some time and continued his business. She was denounced, deported and survived, in contrast to Martin Finkelgruen, who lived in the small fortress Theresienstadt SS guard Anton Malloth was beaten to death at the Ravensbrück , Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps .

Peter Finkelgruen attended elementary school in Prague until 1951 and after the death of his mother emigrated with his grandmother to Israel , where he graduated from the Tabeetha School, Jaffa, run by the Church of Scotland eight years later . In the same year Peter Finkelgruen and his grandmother moved to the Federal Republic of Germany , where Finkelgruen first studied political science , sociology and history in Freiburg im Breisgau, and later in Cologne and Bonn .

From 1963 he worked as a radio editor and spokesman for Deutsche Welle and from 1964 was head of the Bonn office of the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review for two years . In 1966 he returned to Deutsche Welle as an editor.

In 1981, Finkelgruen was sent to Israel as a foreign correspondent for Deutsche Welle and from 1982 to 1988 headed the Jerusalem office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation . During this time he wrote articles for various magazines, such as Das Parlament , liberal and published texts in anthologies, e.g. B. Foreign in your own country .

After his return from Israel, Peter Finkelgruen was informed by a fellow prisoner and later girlfriend of his grandmother about the circumstances surrounding the murder of his grandfather Martin Finkelgruen. In the following 10 years, Finkelgruen left no stone unturned to get Anton Malloth to be charged by a German public prosecutor. Peter Finkelgruen documented the associated experiences in the two autobiographical books Haus Deutschland. The story of an unpunished murder and Erlkönig's empire. The story of a deception .

This story was also taken up by the Israeli writer and playwright Joshua Sobol under the title Schöner Toni in a play that premiered in 1994 in the adaptation and staging by Bruno Klimek at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. In 1998, the documentary filmmaker Dietrich Schubert made a film about Peter Finkelgruen with the title Unterwegs als Safe Place . In December 2010, Finkelgruen publicly took a critical stance on the so-called Cologne “Wailing Wall”, which he, together with other authors, described as anti-Semitic.

Peter Finkelgruen worked as a co-initiator of the Article 19 publishing house in 1989 and is listed as co-editor in the first German edition of the Satanic Verses .

Until 2011, Finkelgruen was a board member of the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad .

In July 2013 Peter Finkelgruen was sent as a deputy member of the WDR Broadcasting Council .

In March 2012, a memorial stone was inaugurated near his apartment by the Cologne-Sülz district council and friends on the occasion of his 70th birthday and in memory of his murdered grandfather Martin Finkelgruen. At the end of June 2016, the memorial stone was desecrated by an anti-Semitic paint attack.

In February 2017 he gave a Shoah commemorative address in Beijing at the joint invitation of the embassies of the Czech Republic, Israel and Germany.

In 2020 his book, "As far as he was Jude ...", which he completed in 1981, was published in 2020, first on haGalil.com and then as a book.

Peter Finkelgruen, who is married to the writer Gertrud Seehaus , currently lives and works in Cologne .

Works

  • House Germany. The story of an unpunished murder . Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1992.
  • Erlkönig Reich. The story of a deception . Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1997.
  • Grandpa and Grandma did not have a bike , together with Gertrud Seehaus. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2007.
  • "As far as he was a Jew ..." morality on dealing with the resistance. The Edelweiss Pirates as the fourth front in Cologne. Editors: Roland Kaufhold, Andrea Livnat and Nadine Engelhart. Books on Demand. Norderstedt 2020.

As editor

Literature and film

  • Joshua Sobol: Nice Toni . Play, world premiere in the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, 1994.
  • Dietrich Schubert: On the move as a safe place . Documentary, Germany, 1997.
  • Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke : Silent help for brown comrades . Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin, 2002.
  • Roland Kaufhold (2012): No home. Nowhere. From Shanghai via Prague and Israel to Cologne - Peter Finkelgruen turns 70 , haGalil
  • Roland Kaufhold (2016): The refugee child and the bullfrog. Peter Finkelgruen - From Shanghai via Prague and Israel to Cologne. The life stages of a journalist and writer , haGalil

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Finkelgruens on the anti-Semitism of the Cologne “Wailing Wall” and a strange court judgment on this hagalili.com, December 19, 2010
  2. ↑ Peter Finkelgruen on the pages of the "PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad". Retrieved October 6, 2016
  3. ↑ Press release of the pirate faction in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia ( Memento of the original from September 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed July 19, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.piratenfraktion-nrw.de
  4. ^ Anti-Semitic Handwriting , haGalil.com, July 2, 2016
  5. ^ Roland Kaufhold: Peter Finkelgruen's commemorative speech in Beijing. A Chinese-Czech-German remembrance event for the Shoah. February 23, 2017. Retrieved March 24, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Finkelgruen, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli broadcast editor, correspondent and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Shanghai