Sigrid Schultz

Sigrid Lillian Schultz (born January 5 or 15, 1893 in Chicago , Illinois , † May 14, 1980 ) (pseudonym John Dickson) was an American journalist.

Life and work

Schultz's father Hermann Schultz came from Norway , his mother Hedwig Jaskewitz had Russian, Polish, French and German roots. Schultz spent her early childhood in Chicago. In 1901, her family moved to Europe, initially only temporarily, after Schultz's father Hermann Schultz had been hired by the Württemberg royal court to make a portrait of the royal couple. Schultz's parents then decided to stay in Paris for the time being, where he set up a studio. The daughter was sent to the lyceum there and from 1912 studied international law at the Sorbonne .

Schultz later went to Germany with her parents, where she stayed during the First World War due to the critical health of her parents , which she experienced from the perspective of the Central Powers, although she was an American citizen. Financially, Schultz, who spoke fluent German, English, Norwegian and French, got her head above water by teaching English and French before becoming a translator for an Iraqi diplomat in Berlin in 1917, where she first came into direct contact with high-level politics. When the United States entered the war, she was declared an enemy citizen that year, but she was spared internment. That same year, her Norwegian fiancé died when his ship sank after a submarine attack.

In 1919, because of her German language skills, Schultz was hired by the editors of the Chicago Tribune as a correspondent for Germany. In the period that followed, for more than twenty years, as a constant reporter, she brought the important political and social events in the German Reich and above all the capital Berlin closer to the American audience. The significant events she reported on included the Kapp Putsch of March 1920 and the Tiergarten uprisings of the same year. In 1926 - as one of the first women in a journalistic position of this importance - she was entrusted with the management and coordination of the reporting of the correspondent network for all of Central Europe.

During her time as a reporter in Germany, Schultz, who was regarded as one of the best-informed foreign reporters in Berlin, interviewed numerous leading figures in public life, including Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler . After she was injured during an air raid on Berlin in 1940, she returned to the United States in early 1941. There she went on an extended lecture tour, during which she warned of the aggressive nature of German National Socialism . In 1944 Schultz returned to Europe as a war correspondent. She reported on the Allied landings in Normandy and was one of the first reporters to visit Buchenwald camp after it was liberated.

Schultz died in 1980 while working on a comprehensive work on the history of anti-Semitism . Her estate is now held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Fonts

• Germany wants Try Again , New York 1944.
• Sigrid Schultz , 1970.

literature

• Susan Ware: Notable American Women , 2004, p. 577ff.

Web links

• Radio reports by Sigrid Schultz in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library