Ruth Heinrichsdorff

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Ruth Heinrichsdorff (also Ruth Blatt, born as Ruth Koplowitz in 1906 in Königshütte , German Empire ; died 2001 in Australia ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism.

Life

Ruth Koplowitz was a daughter of the wood merchant Heinrich Koplowitz, one brother was the Germanist Oskar Seidlin (1911-1984). Dora Fabian was a cousin. She attended school in Königshütte (Chorzów) and from 1919 in Beuthen, which remained German, and studied German, history and philosophy at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau , Munich , Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main . She received her doctorate in 1931 with a dissertation on Friedrich Hölderlin . Koplowitz was involved in left student groups. In 1930 she met the German studies student Paul Heinrichsdorff (born 1907) in the Red Student Group in Frankfurt, they married in 1932. They were involved in the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP). After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, they helped the SAP functionary Paul Wassermann escape Germany. In May 1933 they also managed to emigrate to England, where Paul Heinrichsdorff found a job as an unpaid lecturer at University College in Southampton . Since Heinrich Koplowitz supported his daughter financially, she was able to take care of the voluntary support of refugees from Germany and participate in the founding of a new SAP branch in London. Ruth Heinrichsdorff typed the SAP bulletin The OTHER Germany on her typewriter , the first issue of which was published by Eugen Brehm , who was temporarily in London, in April 1934, and she was responsible for the next issues.

The Heinrichsdorffs tried to start an international campaign to support the SAP members Edith Baumann , Max Köhler and Klaus Zweiling who were arrested in Germany , and to help Walter Fabian and Dora Fabian financially. Ruth and Paul Heinrichsdorff separated in September 1934, and Paul Heinrichsdorff returned to Berlin at the end of 1934 to work as a teacher in a Jewish school and to prepare for his emigration to Palestine . She went to Paris to work near the SAP party leadership.

At Easter 1935 Ruth Heinrichsdorff undertook a conspiratorial journey from Paris to Basel, from there to Prague and then to her parents in Königshütte. The journey was then to be continued via Berlin to London, although the Gestapo expected it at the German-Polish border near Beuthen , as their plans had been betrayed by an informant in Paris. The trial for high treason began on March 31, 1936 before the People's Court in Berlin. Paul was sentenced to 18 months in prison, which he served in the Kantstrasse judicial prison in Charlottenburg, Ruth to five years in prison, which she served, temporarily in solitary confinement, in the Jauer women's penal institution in Silesia.

She survived imprisonment and managed to travel to Shanghai in 1940 , where she also had to endure the period of the Japanese occupation. She married the resistance fighter Max Blatt (1905–1981), who had been active in the New Beginning group. After the war ended, they went to Australia , where she found work as a modern language teacher.

In 1985, the student Anna Funder took German lessons with her and was inspired to write a book about Ernst Toller and Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm's death in London in 1935. In 1996, Ruth Blatt lived at the age of 90 in Caulfield North , Glen Eira City in the greater Melbourne area, and gave information to the British exile researcher Charmian Brinson . She died in 2001. In 2011 Funder's novel All That I Am , which she dedicated to Ruth Blatt, née Koplowitz, was published. The novel received the Australian Miles Franklin Award in 2012 and was published in German in 2014.

dissertation

  • Ruth Koplowitz: Holderlin as a letter writer . Augsburg, 1932 Frankfurt, Phil. Diss., 1931

literature

  • Charmian Brinson: Ruth Heinrichsdorff: An SAP Activist in British Exile , in: Charmian Brinson (Ed.): No complaint about England? : German and Austrian exile experiences in Great Britain 1933–1945 . Munich: iudicium, 1998, pp. 157-174
  • Anna Funder : Everything I am . Translation from the English Reinhild Böhnke. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-021511-6
  • Alex Miller : The Simplest Words: A Storyteller's Journey . London: Atlantic Books, 2014 ISBN 978-1-925576-30-6 (The book contains a photo of Ruth and Max Blatt. According to Miller, the Blatts shared a house with Rosa and Robert Kohner in Caulfield)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Heinrichsdorff: Lenzen's religious attitude , Berlin: Ebering, 1932. Frankfurt, Phil. Diss., 1931, at DNB
  2. ↑ Max Blatt at Oliver Schmidt: "My home is - the German labor movement". Biographical studies on Richard Löwenthal in the transition from exile to the early Federal Republic . Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007, ISBN 978-3-631-55829-4 , p. 152, note 118
  3. ^ Seidlin, Oscar , in: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors , Volume 19, 2012, p. 212
  4. ↑ on Robert Kohner see Sophie Fetthauer: Robert Kohner , in: Lexicon of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era , Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Heinrichsdorff, Ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Koplowitz, Ruth (maiden name); Blatt, Ruth (married name from the second marriage)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Chorzów
DATE OF DEATH 2001
Place of death Australia