Renée Brand

Renée Brand (born Renate Johanna Brand , also Renée Johanna Brand-Sommerfeld , pseudonym Yolan Mervelt ) (born February 22, 1900 in Berlin ; † November 5, 1980 in San Francisco ) was a German-Jewish writer and psychologist . She is one of the German writers in exile .

She grew up in Berlin and went to school in England. With the beginning of the First World War she returned to Berlin and attended the Fürstin-Bismarck-Lyceum . After graduating from high school, she studied in Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau . She broke off her studies on the occasion of her marriage in 1922 to the Berlin building contractor Adolf Sommerfeld , who was a patron of the Bauhaus and knew a number of artists from the Weimar Republic . In 1926 they had a son. In Berlin-Dahlem they lived in a house built by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer , the Sommerfeld blockhouse (Limonenstrasse 30, 12203 Berlin, destroyed).

Renee Brand divorced her husband in 1931. After the seizure of power by the Nazis emigrated she and her son after France and the beginning of 1934 to Basel in Switzerland . From 1936 on , she studied Romance languages , art history and German with Friedrich Ranke and Walter Muschg . He advised her on her first literary work. In 1938, under the pseudonym Yolan Mervelt, she handed over the story Little Hand in My Hand, Where Are We Going? entered a literary competition organized by the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom .

In her work, No Man's Land , published in 1940, she described the desperate situation of emigrants who had to wait in no man's land in front of the Swiss border during World War II , some of whom illegally crossed the border installations to Switzerland and were brought back from Switzerland. The Swiss censorship authority, the Swiss Book Surveillance Office , banned the text after its publication. Renée Brand then went into exile with her son in the USA in 1941 , where a year later the translation of No Man's Land appeared under the title Short Days Ago .

In 1943 she received her doctorate and worked as a German teacher at Stanford University .

From 1944 to 1949 she studied in Los Angeles . She became a member of the CG Jung Institute and opened her own practice in San Francisco. With lectures and the publication of specialist literature, she dealt in particular with the work of Erich Neumann and advised the translation of his texts.

Works

• Little hand in my hand where are we going 1938 (competition entry, lost).
• No man's land . Zurich / New York: Oprecht, 1940; Engl. Short Days Ago . Transl. by Margaret H. Beigel, New York [u. a.]: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941.
• To the interpretation of the "Ackermann aus Böhmen" . Basel: Schwabe, 1943. (Phil. Diss., 1943).
• The experiment . San Francisco, Calif .: CG Jung Institute of San Francisco, 1981.

literature

• Renate Wall: Lexicon of German-speaking women writers in exile 1933–1945 , Gießen: Haland & Wirth, 2004, ISBN 3-89806-229-5 , pp. 52–54.
• Dorothee Schaffner, Urs Kaegi: When the substitute bench becomes a permanent seat : Young adults in social welfare , Basel: Basel Institute for Social Research and Social Planning of the University of Applied Sciences for Social Work in Basel, 2004 (Impact, No. 10/2004), p. 6.
• Regula Wyss, afterword , in: Renee Brand, Niemandsland , 1995, ISBN 3-905493-77-2
• German Exile Archive 1933–1945; Catalog of books and brochures , Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main. [Ed .: Mechthild Hahner]. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989, ISBN 3-476-00657-3 , No. 600.
• Wilhelm Sternfeld : Deutsche Exil-Literatur 1933–1945: Eine Bio-Bibliographie , 2nd edition, Heidelberg: Schneider, 1970, p. 68.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth register StA Berlin IX, No. 418/1900
2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

• Literature by and about Renée Brand in the catalog of the German National Library