Robert Goldmann

Robert B. Goldmann (born May 1, 1921 in Reinheim ( Odenwald ); † October 9, 2018 ) was an American journalist of German origin. For a long time he was also a senior employee of charitable foundations and organizations. Goldmann last lived in New York City .

Life

His father Dr. med. Jacob Goldmann was a respected country doctor in the Odenwald town of Reinheim. From 1934 the Jewish family lived in Frankfurt am Main . After the November pogroms in 1938 , Robert Goldmann passed the Abitur examination at the Frankfurt Philanthropist in 1939 and then emigrated with his parents via Great Britain to the United States to New York City, where the family settled in 1940.

Goldmann initially got by with odd jobs to finance his studies (including at Columbia University ). He worked for several years as a journalist (as a radio reporter for Voice of America ) before he devoted himself to social and development policy tasks in the Third World as spokesman for the Latin American program launched by John F. Kennedy and from 1968 as an employee of the Ford Foundation , and finally a pioneer for the German-Jewish understanding. Goldmann worked for the American Jewish Committee and in 1980 joined the Anti-Defamation League , whose European office in Paris he headed for several years.

In 1996 he published his highly regarded life and family story “Flucht in die Welt”. He published regularly in American and German media ( International Herald Tribune , Deutschlandradio Kultur , Rheinischer Merkur and, above all, in the column "Fremde Federn" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ).

In 1999 the city ​​council of Reinheim endowed the annual "Robert Goldmann scholarship" for people "who deal with issues of racism and the preservation of human dignity, taking particular account of the German-Jewish relationship".

Honors

• 1996 Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class
• 1998 honorary citizen of the city of Reinheim

literature

• Robert Goldmann: Escape into the world. A life journey to New York. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1996. ISBN 3-596-12966-4
• Robert B. Goldmann: From Independence to Statehood. Frances Pinter, London 1984. ISBN 0312307233 (together with AJ Wilson)
• Robert Goldmann: A Work Experiment: Six Americans in a Swedish Plant. Ford Foundation, New York 1976. ISBN 978-0916584009

Web links

• Interview with Robert B. Goldmann on January 27, 2009
• On the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. (PDF; 30 kB) Speech by Robert Goldmann on the occasion of the award of the Robert Goldmann scholarship 2007 from the city of Reinheim to Monika Schmidt
• Germany 70 years later (PDF; 20 kB). Speech by Robert Goldmann on the occasion of the award of the Robert Goldmann Scholarship 2008 by the city of Reinheim to Petra Schlie
• Tenth award of the Robert Goldmann Scholarship on May 21, 2009 in Reinheim (PDF; 73 kB). Greetings from Federal Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries
• Remembrance - Responsibility - Integration: Twenty Years of German Unity in the light of Robert Goldmann's comments (PDF; 149 kB). Speech by NRW State Secretary Michael Mertes on the occasion of the award of the Robert Goldmann Scholarship 2010 by the city of Reinheim to Andreas Ross
• Short obituary

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary , accessed January 31, 2019
2. ↑ See this: Robert Goldmann: Flucht in die Welt. A life journey to New York.
3. ↑ A collection of his IHT columns from 1990 ff. Appeared in 1996 under the title November 9 - Fires of Terror, Fires of Joy (Washington Occasional Paper No. 27/1996 of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , Washington DC 1996).
4. ↑ Radio commentary from January 14, 2010
5. ↑ See biographical information about Robert Goldmann on the website of the city of Reinheim ( memento of the original from November 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.