Ruth Rewald

Ruth Gustave Rewald (born June 5, 1906 in Deutsch-Wilmersdorf near Berlin ; died probably in 1942 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a German children's and young adult book author of Jewish origin.

Life

Rewald was born in the apartment of her parents, the correspondent Artur Markus Rewald and Rose Wilhelmine nee. Hirschfeld was born at Nachodstrasse 4 in Deutsch-Wilmersdorf. She first studied law in Berlin and later in Heidelberg , but dropped out. Then Rewald wrote short stories that appeared in various newspapers.

In 1929 she married the left-wing German-Jewish lawyer Hans Schaul , after 1933 a member of the KPD, with whom she also sympathized. After the NSDAP and its German national alliance partners came to power and their husband was banned from working, the two fled to Paris in 1933 . There Rewald worked as a bookseller and continued to write on her books. Hans Schaul took on the side of the Republicans in the Chapayev battalion of the XIII. International Brigade took part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936/37 . Ruth Rewald traveled near Madrid and stayed there for five months. In 1937 their daughter Anja was born. Six months later, Rewald took up a job in the Ernst Thälmann children's home of the XI. International Brigade and looked after orphans and war victims. In 1938 she returned to France and wrote her book Four Spanish Boys there , which was based on an experience of her husband: Four Spanish boys had fled from the Franquists to the Chapayev battalion.

In 1940, Rewald fled with her daughter from the Nazis in Paris to the village of Les Rosiers-sur-Loire , where they were arrested by the Gestapo on July 17, 1942 and deported to Auschwitz . The last sign of life is a card she wrote to her husband. At that time, Schaul was already interned in a French camp. The card is postmarked Angers / Maine-et-Loire, 18. VII. 1942 . In 1944, Rewald's daughter Anja was also deported and gassed in Auschwitz. Rewald's husband Hans Schaul was able to flee to the Soviet Union from the Djelfa camp (Algeria) through connections to comrades in the KPD . There he survived the Holocaust . He died in East Berlin in 1988 .

In May 1945 soldiers of the Red Army found a box with personal documents, letters and manuscripts from Ruth Rewald in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. The estate was first brought to the Soviet Union and handed over to the competent authority in the GDR in 1957 . The documents are archived in the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde (previously in the German Central Archives ).

Works (selection)

Novels

• 1932: Müllerstrasse. Boys of today.
• 1933: Warning - Renate!
• 1934: Janko, the boy from Mexico
• 1936: Tsao and Jing-Ling - Children's Life in China
• 1938: Four Spanish Boys (first published in 1987, Röderberg-Verlag Cologne, ISBN 3-87682-838-4 )

Janko, the boy from Mexico and Tsao and Jing-Ling was published in 2002 on the sixtieth anniversary of Ruth Rewald's death as Volume 5 of the “Jewish Library” series by VWM Verlag Dr. Peter Wagener Mühltal with an afterword by Deborah Vietor-Engländer .

Short stories

• 1931: Rudi and his radio
• 1932: The scooter
• 1933: Bitter or sweet almonds
• 1933: How Gerda got her doll

literature

• Jutta Dick & Marina Sassenberg: Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993 ISBN 3-499-16344-6
• Dirk Krüger: The German-Jewish children's and youth author Ruth Rewald and children's and youth literature in exile. dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1990 ISBN 3-7638-0138-3
• Robert Cohen : Exile of Naughty Women. Novel. Rotbuch, Berlin 2009 ISBN 3-86789-057-9 (semi-documentary; also about Olga Benario & Maria Osten )
• Dirk Krüger:  Rewald, Ruth Gustave. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 479 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Ruth Rewald in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography at exilarchiv.de
• Dirk Krüger: Memory of Ruth Rewald
• Interview with Dirk Krüger about his research on Ruth Rewald

Individual evidence

1. ^ Birth register of StA Deutsch-Wilmersdorf, No. 653/1906
2. ↑ Birth register StA Deutsch-Wilmersdorf No. 653/06 .
3. ↑ Werner Röder / Herbert A. Strauss , Biographisches Handbuch der deutschen Emigration nach 1933, Vol. 1, Munich, New York, London, Paris 1980, p. 641.
4. ^ LiLi. Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics, 18 (1988), p. 116.
5. ↑ Information in this section based on: Mathilde Leveque, Four Spanish Boys de Ruth Rewald. L'unique roman allemand pour la jeunesse sur la guerre d'Espagne, Revue du Groupe Interdisciplinaire d'Etudes Nizaniennes, 2010, p. 61–73, see also: [1] .
6. ↑ All information according to: Rena Jacob, Ruth Rewald-Schaul. The daughter followed her to Auschwitz, see: [2] .