Rolf Nuremberg
Rolf Nürnberg , also Ralph Nunberg (born August 26, 1903 in Berlin , † March 23, 1949 in New York ), was a German journalist .
biography
Journalist in Berlin
Rolf Nürnberg came from a wealthy family and worked as a journalist even before graduating from high school . After school he worked for the Berlin tabloid Das 12 Uhr Blatt , which belonged to his father Ludwig Nürnberg, first for the sports and theater editorial offices, then as head of both departments . From 1921 to 1922, at the time of Artistic Director Max Reinhardt , he was a member of the board of directors of the Deutsches Theater .
Nuremberg later also became the publisher of the newspaper. His colleague Curt Riess , who had a complicated love-hate relationship with Nuremberg until his death in 1949, wrote about Das 12 Uhr Blatt : “We were very cheeky and critical. We didn't respect anything. Our articles did not go on stilts, we wrote how we felt, not how 'one' wrote, that is, how the established newspapers did it. ”Riess characterized Nuremberg, whom he described as a“ brilliant journalist ”:
“Someone I got to know in the Romanisches Café and who would later play a not inconsiderable role in my life was a pretty ugly young person of the same age, bespectacled and - for his youth - astonishingly bad demeanor: Rolf Nürnberg. He had what is called a Berlin snout. He was extremely intelligent, knew a lot about a lot - especially about the theater - and was ruthlessly critical, in such a condescending tone that one wondered what kind of achievements he had to show that justified him to such arrogance, unless his extremely wealthy father and the prospect of a great fortune bequeathed by his uncle, which would be available to him at the end of his twenty-first year. [...]. His influence on me [...] was a thoroughly negative one. If possible, I became even more arrogant than him [...]. "
In Berlin, Nuremberg - like Paul Nikolaus , Willy Prager , Max Hansen , Peter Lorre , Theo Körner , Paul Morgan , Werner Finck and others - was part of a round table of artists and journalists in the famous Café Wien on Kurfürstendamm . On January 27, 1929, he participated in a radio talk with Bertolt Brecht and Meils on the subject of evening entertainment. Part about the importance of sport .
In 1932 he traveled to Los Angeles with a group of German journalists who reported on the performance of the German team at the Olympic Games . He accompanied Max Schmeling , whose boxing skills he had previously sharply criticized, on his US tours. For the 12 o'clock journal he wrote under the pseudonym Adam Judge the article "Max Schmeling. The novel of our days ”and later the biography of Max Schmeling, The story of a career in book form. “It was written in the best reportage style of the twenties, and it also had the advantage of only costing one mark.” In it, Nuremberg also described details of Schmeling's love life, which this autobiography, published two years earlier, had not mentioned because it contradicted the "clean" image of the German boxer built by his manager Joe Jacobs . As a result, Schmeling and Nuremberg fell apart, and Schmeling henceforth referred to Nuremberg as his “mortal enemy”. However, Schmeling later wrote that Nuremberg had sent him a conciliatory telegram after his victory over Joe Louis in 1936, "which pleased me more than anyone else".
Emigration to the USA
After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Nuremberg, who was of Jewish origin, "resigned" his position at the 12 o'clock newspaper after receiving a "tip on this matter". In plain language: although he was co-owner of the newspaper, he was forced to leave the editorial office immediately and was banned from working . His last article appeared on April 1, 1933. His book on Schmeling, which also contained critical passages on political issues, was banned by the Nazis, "because the book made the Führer contemptible," according to the official reasoning. Most likely in 1937 , Nuremberg finally emigrated to the United States, having previously traveled back and forth between Berlin and New York several times. He initially lived there in a well-off, as his father had transferred funds to accounts in the USA at an early stage, and published the Hollywood Tribune.In 1936 he secured the grave of actress Annie Kalmar in Hamburg's Ohlsdorf cemetery by paying the fee due .
In the spring of 1938, Nuremberg traveled again to Germany, as emissary of Thomas Mann with a Czechoslovak diplomatic passport , who at that time was a citizen of this country. With a power of attorney provided by Mann, he was supposed to have his manuscripts and private papers, which the Munich lawyer Valentin Heins kept in safe hands, extracted so that he could safely take them out of the country as courier luggage . However, Heins refused to hand over the documents because, as he later explained, he had withheld the possession of these documents from the Gestapo despite repeated requests: "This storage was very dangerous for me." He had previously heard that the Gestapo had the courier baggage of foreign diplomats don't pay attention and leave. Therefore he had to deny possession of the documents to Nuremberg.
In 1940 Rolf Nürnberg got involved in Franklin D. Roosevelt's election campaign by giving campaign speeches in German in North and South Dakota . Professionally, however, he could not gain a foothold, as he had numerous personal relationships with prominent German emigrants (including Fritz Lang , Billy Wilder , members of the Mann family and Marlene Dietrich ), but spoke very poor English. In addition, he was, according to Riess, “a newspaper man focused on West Berlin”. However, he was well valued by his intellectual German friends: He was part of a discussion group made up of Theodor W. Adorno , Max Horkheimer , Friedrich Pollock , Herbert and Ludwig Marcuse, and Günther Anders , who wrote a paper by Ludwig Marcuse on Friedrich Nietzsche in Los Angeles in 1942 discussed.
According to Riess' memories, Nuremberg is said to have speculated not only with its own money but also with that of others and made great losses. From 1942 to 1949 he lived in New York, where he worked temporarily as a newspaper seller and as a journalist for the newspapers Aufbau , New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and Austro American Tribune, and as a correspondent for the Swiss newspaper Die Tat . As an author and journalist, he called himself Ralph Nurnberg . His German citizenship was revoked in 1940 after the German consulate in Los Angeles reported to the Foreign Office in Berlin: “A certain Jew from Germany who appears here under the name Ralph Nurnberg is intensely involved in the agitation against the Third Reich . He is said to be identical to a certain Rolf Nuernberg, who used to work on the ›new Berliner 12 Uhr Blatt‹. In particular, he is referred to as the driving force behind the well-known anti-German ›Hollywood Tribune‹. ”According to Riess, he should never have obtained US citizenship, as Nuremberg claimed, but only with a visitor visa (which has now expired) resided illegally in the US. In 1945 his book The Fighting Jew was published to use historical facts to dispel the prejudice of the supposed cowardice of Jewish people.
During these years he began to take drugs, especially amphetamines , which led to delusions in him, so that he was finally admitted to a clinic on the initiative of Riess and his then wife Ilse. At this point he was financially ruined and the marriage ended in divorce (probably in 1948). In March 1949, Rolf Nürnberg died of a heart attack at the age of 45 while his second wife Maria was on tour as a choir member of the Metropolitan Opera .
family
Rolf Nürnberg was a son of Ludwig Nürnberg, who is listed in the Berlin address book from 1933 as a businessman . The family owned a large house at Tauentzienstrasse 13a and was known for their parties and receptions in Berlin; The son also lived in this house, in front of which there are stumbling blocks in memory of the murdered neighboring Jewish family Hahn. After 1933 the father emigrated with his wife and daughters to South America, where he celebrated his 90th birthday in Buenos Aires in 1953 . Rolf Nürnberg was married for the first time to Ilse Posnanski, the divorced wife of Curt Riess, who reports in his memoirs that the two couldn't stand each other at the time of Riess and Posnanski's marriage. In his second marriage, Nuremberg was married to the singer and Berlin-born Maria Avellis Lebeis from 1948.
Publications
- Max Schmeling. Story of a career . Large Berlin printing company for the press and book publishing. Berlin 1932
- Lindbergh. Captain in America . Publishing house Dr. Rolf Passer. Leipzig / Vienna 1936
- (as Ralph Nunberg) Franklin D. Roosevelt . Hollywood 1942
- (as Ralph Nunberg) The Fighting Jew . Creative Age Pres. New York 1945. With a foreword by Curt Riess
literature
- Volker Kluge: Max Schmeling. A biography in 15 rounds . Construction Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-351-02570-X .
- Curt Riess : That was my life! Memories. Ullstein publishing house. Berlin 1990.
- Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Red.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933. = International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Émigrés 1933–1945. 3 volumes. Saur, Munich 1980–1983, ISBN 3-598-10087-6 .
- Volume 2: The Arts, Sciences, and Literature. 2 parts (Part 1: A – K. Part 2: L – Z. ). 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 . Here part LZ p. 868.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Karsten Schilling: The Destroyed Heritage. BoD - Books on Demand, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-6777-7 , p. 388 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ a b c d e f g Röder, Strauss: Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 , Volume 2.2, p. 868
- ↑ Riess: That was my life! , P. 131.
- ↑ Curt Riess: That was my life! Frankfurt / Berlin 1990, p. 73.
- ^ Barbara Konietzny-Rüssel: The media practitioner Bertolt Brecht. Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3702-3 , p. 17 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- ^ Kluge: Max Schmeling , p. 166
- ↑ a b Volker Kluge : CVs of athletes and sports officials between sports, politics, culture, media and society A short history of sports autobiography. In: BIOS, vol. 18 (2005), issue 2. Verlag Barbara Budrich. 2005, accessed December 15, 2015 .
- ↑ Jessica Almond: The equestrian and the flirt on the Atlantic . In: Die Welt , February 9, 2005
- ↑ Michael Krüger: German sport on the way to the modern age. LIT Verlag Münster, 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10140-2 , p. 358 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- ↑ Hans-Joachim Leyenberg: The brave Max. In: FAZ.net . September 28, 2004, accessed December 15, 2015 .
- ↑ Max Schmeling: My life. BoD - Books on Demand, 2012, ISBN 978-3-95455-349-5 , p. 85 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- ↑ Riess: That was my life! , P. 149.
- ^ Kluge: Max Schmeling , p. 196
- ↑ Riess: That was my life! , P. 223f.
- ↑ Karl Kraus: "How geniuses die". Wallstein Verlag, 2001, ISBN 978-3-89244-475-6 , p. 163 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ Thomas Mann - Lost Manuscript . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1962 ( online ).
- ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1937–1939 . Ed .: Peter de Mendelssohn. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-16063-4 , pp. 678 - Footnote No. 5 - March 9, 1938 .
- ↑ Riess: That was my life! , P. 259 f.
- ↑ a b c Riess: That was my life! , P. 285
- ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School's 'Nietzschean Moment' . In: Constellations . 8, No. 1, 2001.
- ^ Kluge: Max Schmeling , p. 395.
- ^ Henry B. Kranz: Jews on the Fighting Fronts. In: The Saturday Review . September 8, 1945, accessed December 15, 2015 .
- ↑ Riess: That was my life! , P. 286 f.
- ↑ Nuremberg, Ludwig . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1933, Part 1, p. 1928.
- ↑ Stolpersteine Tauentzienstr. 13 A. In: berlin.de. Retrieved December 16, 2015 .
- ^ Old Acquaintances. (PDF) (No longer available online.) In: AJR 1953. March 1942, archived from the original on March 5, 2016 ; accessed on December 15, 2015 . 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.
- ↑ Riess: That was my life! , P. 119.
- ^ Rolf Nuremberg . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1949 ( online ).
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Nuremberg, Rolf |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Nunberg, Ralph (alternative name); Judge, Adam (pseudonym) |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German journalist |
DATE OF BIRTH | August 26, 1903 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
DATE OF DEATH | March 23, 1949 |
Place of death | new York |