Teofila Reich-Ranicki

Teofila "Tosia" Reich-Ranicki (born on March 12, 1920 in Łódź as Teofila Langnas ; died on April 29, 2011 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a Polish - German artist and translator . She was married to the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and was the mother of their son Andrew Ranicki . Like her husband, she was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto .

Teofila Reich-Ranicki (2010)

Life

Teofila Langnas was born in 1920 into a Jewish merchant family. Her father Fajwel (Paweł) Langnas was a textile merchant and co-owner of the "Langnas, Goldblum and Zajackowski" cloth factory. The family owned several houses in Łódź. Langnas grew up there and attended a German private school. She played the piano, which she mastered up to concert maturity. Before the Second World War, she toured several European countries and intended to study art in Paris after finishing school .

Warsaw Ghetto

The entry of German troops into Poland and the expropriation of the family made their plans impossible. In 1939 she and her parents fled to Warsaw . Her older brother Aleksander had emigrated to the United States in 1932 . The father, expropriated by the National Socialists, took his own life on January 21, 1940, whereupon Helene Reich asked her son Marcel (Reich-Ranicki) to take care of Teofila. From that day on, the two became a couple.

They married in July 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto , where the couple lived from 1940 to 1943. Marcel Reich worked there as a translator, which meant that he and his wife were temporarily spared from deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp . When Helene Reich was deported to the extermination camp, she said to her daughter-in-law Teofila: "Take care of Marcel." At the request of the Judenrat, Teofila made numerous watercolors for an illustrated book about the first days of a baby's life for Ghetto Commissioner Heinz Auerswald , because Auerswald's wife was expecting a child. This was supposed to secure the release of Jewish children, which only happened two days before the deportation. Secretly, however, she also portrayed everyday life and dying in the ghetto; she was able to smuggle these watercolors out of the ghetto and have them hidden before she escaped. She kept these drawings under lock and key for over 50 years until the Jewish Museum Frankfurt developed an exhibition from them in 1999, which she later published as a book. After learning of the planned deportation of all ghetto inmates to the Treblinka extermination camp, Teofila and Marcel Reich fled the Warsaw ghetto on February 3, 1943. Marcel was accepted into the family of the unemployed typesetter Bolek Gawin, Teofila initially worked with forged papers as a housemaid. She was exposed several times and changed jobs. After an employer tried to take advantage of her situation to harass her, she too fled to the Gawins and was hidden by them until the end of September 1944.

People's Republic of Poland

During the last months of the war she worked for a military censorship unit on the staff of the 2nd Polish Army . On April 1, 1946, she left the censorship service at her own request. After the war, Teofila Reich worked in London as a correspondent for “Glos Ludu” and the army newspaper “Polska Zbrojna”, while her husband worked as a vice-consul for the Polish embassy. In 1948 the family changed the name "Reich", which was too reminiscent of the Germans, to "Ranicki" and in the same year their son Andrzej, later Andrew Ranicki, was born. After returning to Warsaw, she worked for the National Front .

Federal Republic of Germany

In 1958 the family moved to Germany, where Teofila Reich-Ranicki initially worked as a journalist for the Polish Press Agency and on the radio. As a graphic artist, she created the illustrations for several book editions by Erich Kästner . She also worked as a translator a. a. of children's books by Maria Krüger and film scripts from Polish into German.

Friends and acquaintances valued her sense of humor, precise powers of observation and her extraordinarily good memory. In biographical retrospectives, she is described as an independent and self-confident personality who nonetheless stood steadfastly by her husband and demonstrated this above all through her presence at almost all of his public appearances. Teofila Reich-Ranicki died on April 29, 2011 at the age of 91.

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1999: Pictures from the Warsaw Ghetto. Frankfurt am Main, Jewish Museum
• 2009: Pictures from the Warsaw Ghetto. Vienna, Jewish Museum 

Works

• Teofila Reich-Ranicki: Doctor Erich Kästner's Lyrische Hausapotheke. 56 poems written down and illustrated by Teofila Reich-Ranicki in the Warsaw Ghetto. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Munich 2000, ISBN 3-421-05373-1
• Teofila Reich-Ranicki, Hanna Krall , Roswitha Matwin-Buschmann: It was the last moment: life in the Warsaw ghetto. Watercolors by Teofila Reich-Ranicki and texts by Hanna Krall. Translated from the Polish by Roswitha Matwin-Buschmann. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-421-05415-0 .
• Erich Kästner : Mentally usable . Hanser , Munich 1998, ISBN 978-3-446-19509-7 (illustration).

literature

• Gerhard Gnauck : Cloud and Willow. Marcel Reich-Ranicki's Polish Years . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-608-94177-7 , p. 151 ff.
• Marcel Reich-Ranicki: My life. DVA, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-423-13056-3 , passim .

Movies

• My life - Marcel Reich-Ranicki . TV play, Germany, 2008/09, 90 min., Script: Michael Gutmann , director: Dror Zahavi , production: WDR , Katharina Trebitsch, actors: Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Matthias Schweighöfer , Teofila Reich-Ranicki: Katharina Schüttler
• Exchange of words . Walter Janson in conversation with Teofila Reich-Ranicki (draftsman). Talk, Germany, 2005, 30 min., Production: SWR

Web links

Commons : Teofila Reich-Ranicki  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Teofila Reich-Ranicki in the catalog of the German National Library
• Frank Schirrmacher : The unknown Teofila Reich-Ranicki. Here somewhere, here we are. FAZ , April 29, 2011
• Hellmuth Karasek : Marcel Reich-Ranicki mourns his wife. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , April 30, 2011
• Andrew Ranicki's memorial website
• My mother Teofila Reich-Ranicki (PDF; 3.4 MB) (Lecture by Andrew Ranicki , Edinburgh German Circle, February 28, 2012)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Felicitas von Lovenberg : Teofila Reich-Ranicki is dead: The rock in its surf. In: FAZ , April 29, 2011
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Frank Schirrmacher : The unknown Teofila Reich-Ranicki. Here somewhere, here we are. FAZ , April 29, 2011
3. ↑ Philipp Engel: Dear luck. The woman at his side: Teofila Reich-Ranicki on her 90th birthday. In: Jüdische Allgemeine , March 14, 2010.
4. ↑ Ulrich Weinzierl : An unlikely life. In: Die Welt , April 30, 2011
5. ↑ Teofila Reich-Ranicki - Pictures from the Warsaw Ghetto , Landtag Rhineland-Palatinate , exhibition January 9-27, 2008, ( PDF file; 413 kB)
6. ↑ tdo / dpa : Holocaust survivors: Teofila Reich-Ranicki is dead. Spiegel Online , April 29, 2011
7. ↑ Teofila Reich-Ranicki is dead ( Memento from May 1, 2011 in the web archive archive.today ), Hessischer Rundfunk , April 29, 2011.
   Eva Demski : Teofila Reich-Ranicki is turning ninety. Nobody teaches you this life. In: FAZ , March 12, 2010.
8. ^ Exhibition: Nazi horrors as drawings . ORF , September 15, 2009
9. ↑ My life at IMDb.com
10. ^ Film page: "Marcel Reich-Ranicki: My Life" ( Memento from April 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive )