Ruth Koerner

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Ruth Körner (born May 16, 1908 in Vienna ; † September 5, 1995 in Munich ) was an Austrian author.

Life

Elisabeth Friederike Theresia Schwarz was the daughter of a wealthy art dealer who died in 1909. The mother Cornelia, b. Schulhoff wrote literary texts but couldn't find a publisher; until her death at the age of 71 in London in 1945 she lived with her daughter. Elisabeth Schwarz received acting lessons at the Burgtheater as a child and was already on stage in Plauen at the age of fifteen . She broke off an unsteady and mediocre career as an actress in 1929 , and did not pursue her studies at the Berlin School of Politics with vigor, but became involved in daily politics and the KPD . On the trips she took with her mother in the Middle East , she wrote travel reports that were accepted by the Berliner Börsen-Courier and the Berliner Tageblatt . After the handover of power to the National Socialists in Germany in 1933, both fled to Vienna. Even before the Austrian Social Democratic Party was banned in 1934 , it, which was now called Ruth Körner, had joined the party. Her small apartment on Taborstrasse in the 2nd district was an illegal meeting place for members of the Republican Protection Association , and Josef Luitpold Stern was hidden there by her. In 1934 she traveled to the Soviet Union , lived in Moscow with Klara Blum and was Ernst Toller's companion at the “First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers”. She worked as a journalist in Austria, but had to flee to Czechoslovakia in March 1938 after Austria was annexed to the German Reich . In October 1938 she fled to Great Britain .

Körner tried to do journalistic work in the new language. For a time she worked as a secretary for the emigrant cabaret Laterndl . At the emigrant newspaper Die Zeitung she was responsible for the Austrian pages, she worked for the BBC and the British Ministry of Information and, after the end of the war, in the re- education program for German prisoners of war in Great Britain. She left the chemist and publisher Rolf Passer (1897–1971), who was also exiled and married in 1946, in London in 1951, traveled through Canada and Australia and collected material for lectures and books there. From 1956 on, she lived in Munich in the Maxvorstadt and tried her hand at journalism, with lectures at the Volkshochschule and with secretarial work at the Institute for Contemporary History . For pragmatic reasons, she applied for German citizenship. She stayed in Israel for two years with the lawyer Fritz Schreier , but was not given a work permit there. Their long-standing friendship with the now living in the USA Richard Duschinsky she ended when he changed the political camp and supporters of the Vietnam policy of US President Richard Nixon was. In the meantime, she wrote a book about and against the Chilean military dictatorship by Augusto Pinochet .

Fonts

literature

  • Ruth Körner: Like the lily in the field. In: Wolfgang Benz : German Jews in the 20th Century: A History in Portraits. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62292-2 , pp. 246-257.
  • Sigrid Thielking: Good European women. Anna Siemsen and Ruth Körner in exile. (= Essen College for Gender Studies. Volume III ). 2001, DNB 989768821 .
  • Wilhelm Sternfeld , Eva Tiedemann: German Exile Literature 1933-1945. A bio bibliography. Schneider, Heidelberg / Darmstadt 1962.
  • Renate Wall: Lexicon of German-speaking women writers in exile: 1933–1945. Kore, Freiburg i. Br. 1995, ISBN 3-926023-48-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: German Jews in the 20th Century. 2011, p. 327.
personal data
SURNAME Grains, ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Passer, Elisabeth; Black, Elisabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian author
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 5th September 1995
Place of death Munich