Samuel Saenger

Samuel Saenger (born February 17, 1864 in Saagar near Riga , Russian Empire (now Lithuania ), † May 6, 1944 in Los Angeles , USA ) was a German diplomat .

Life

After graduating from high school in Berlin, Samuel Saenger studied philosophy and history in Heidelberg and Freiburg from 1884 to 1888. He married Irmgard Sethe. Their daughter Elisabeth Saenger-Sethe married Eugene Spiro in 1917 . Samuel Saenger was a grammar school teacher in Berlin in 1888. From 1898 to 1900 his "glosses on contemporary history" appeared regularly in the Berlin magazine Die Nation by Theodor Barth . From 1900 to 1907 Saenger wrote for the magazine Die Zukunft von Maximilian Harden .

From 1908 to 1919, Samuel Saenger was the political editor of the Neue Rundschau of the Fischer publishing house. Among other things, he wrote the monthly “political chronicle”, sometimes under the pseudonym “Junius”. Saenger left the publishing house and magazine in February 1919 and went to Prague as envoy of the Weimar Republic; his last 'Junius' chronicle appeared in the March issue of 1919. In Prague he was chargé d'affaires of the German embassy from April 1919 to February 1921. In his study for Fischer-Verlag, Peter de Mendelssohn wrote about Saenger's appointment: “The young republic tried to win over new, non-routine forces and burdened by Wilhelmine diplomacy for its diplomatic representation abroad, and Saenger had the delicate one The post of German envoy in the newly acquired Czechoslovak Republic, which was initially not very friendly to Germany - a task that the responsible man could not avoid. ”According to the historian Manfred Alexander, he was chosen because he had personal relationships with President Masaryk and also because of his Jewish faith.

In January 1922 Saenger returned to Fischer-Verlag, but remained a lecturer in the Legation Council in the Foreign Office in Berlin, where he also participated in the training of diplomats. In the 1920s he published an article with "S. Saenger" on page 1 or 2 of the Prager Tagblatt almost daily. In 1929 he successfully negotiated for the Fischer publishing house with Trotsky about the publication of his writings in Germany. In 1939 he emigrated to Paris , where he worked on the magazine “Das Neue Tage-Buch”. In March 1941 he emigrated to the United States, first to New York, then to Los Angeles. Saenger died there on May 6, 1944.

Publications

• Literature by and about Samuel Saenger in the catalog of the German National Library

literature

• Biographical manual of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Volume 4: p . Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service, edited by: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3 , p. 4f.
• Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . ed. from the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Peter de Mendelssohn: S. Fischer and his publishing house (S. Fischer, 1986), p. 819.
2. ↑ Clanek | Radio Prague. Retrieved April 28, 2019 . 
3. ↑ ANNO-Prager Tagblatt. Retrieved April 28, 2019 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Fritz Freiherr von Gebsattel	Ambassador of the German Reich in Prague April 1919 to October 1920	Walter Koch