Terence Prittie

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Terence Cornelius Farmer Prittie (born December 15, 1913 ; † May 28, 1985 ) was an Irish-born journalist and author who, as a foreign correspondent, published various political biographies and works on German and Israeli contemporary history.

Life

Terence Cornelius Farmer Prittie was born in Ireland to the Peerage of Ireland's Henry Cornelius O'Callaghan Prittie, 5th Baron Dunalley of Kilboy, and his wife, Beatrix Evelyn Graham. During the Second World War he reached the rank of lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade (SR), in which his father had served as a veteran of the Second Boer War and First World War to the rank of major. Prittie was involved in the fighting from 1939 to 1940, was mentioned in the war reports and was interned in 1940 as a prisoner of war in Germany in Colditz (Oflag IV C). In 1946 he was named Member of the Order of the British Empire because of his services .

The trained journalist as Germany - correspondent of the Manchester Guardian 1946-1963 for The Nation and other major newspapers of the United Kingdom and the United States wrote and for the British Broadcasting Corporation worked, the author of several books on contemporary history, especially to the of divided Germany, National Socialism and the history of Israel, but also in the English-speaking area relatively popular biographies of the Federal Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt . His works saw numerous new editions, such as Germany (1961) and Israel: miracle in the desert (1967) 19 editions, the Adenauer biography (1971) as well as his story about Germans who fought against the German Reich under Adolf Hitler , 12 editions. A characteristic of Prittie's judgment on Adenauer was his characterization during the war as a "inactive non- Nazi " in order not to expose himself to the danger of martyrdom . Even Sebastian Haffner described Adenauer to as non-Nazi, which was also rezipiert of the general population. Prittie himself kept a close eye on whether Adenauer had former National Socialists on his staff and quickly discovered that when preparing a committee to organize a future foreign ministry in the young Federal Republic, 14 out of 31 employees had previously been party members of the NSDAP .

In addition, Terence Prittie published a biography of Levi Eschkol , Israel's third prime minister .

Some of his works have been translated into German, with the Adenauer biography also being reissued in various editions. In this context, as a correspondent, he succeeded in eliciting a quote from John Milton from the German Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder on the Élysée Treaty and Adenauer's motives : "The desire for fame is the last disease of noble spirits". Politically, he saw the division of Germany as a result of Nazi rule and thus solely to blame for the Germans themselves.

Terence Prittie coined various terms on both sides of the channel through his strong presence in both the English and German media on Germany and European politics. The coining of the term Young Turks for Wolfgang Döring , Walter Scheel and Willi Weyer is commonly attributed to Terence Prittie, who failed to recognize that these younger members of the FDP had already got into positions of responsibility and did not need a real coup at all. As a connoisseur of the Saarland , the invention of the pictorial term “coal dust metropolis” is said to have gone back to him, as he used it several times in his Adenauer biography.

In addition, he decisively shaped the British image of the German economic miracle by describing the chilling consequences of German materialism for the social life of the German population, which would cause a distance to democracy through the dominance of economic policy .

In addition to these pictorial associations, Prittie's style was known for reproducing characteristic anecdotes from his wealth of experience as a Germany correspondent, with which he was so honest that he himself could not rule out a legendary origin. For example, he reported on the defensive bishop of Münster and opponent of National Socialist racial hygiene , Clemens August Graf von Galen , that he had asked two Gestapo officers who asked him to accompany them for a moment in which he could change. He used this to put on his full regalia , whereupon the two secret police decided to leave him alone.

However , when it came to reproducing authentic quotes , Prittie could vigorously protest if something like this was officially denied. In 1948 he quoted Adenauer, who had described the Germans as " Belgians with megalomania ". After the federal election in 1949 , this statement was denied, whereupon Prittie publicly advocated the truth of the quote. However, this only moved Adenauer to one of his well-known sayings, “that in politics it is not decisive whether you are right, but whether you are right”. The journalist reciprocated by reproducing the passage in his Adenauer biography.

Honorable Terence Cornelius Farmer Prittie was married to Laura Dreyfus-Dundas from August 29, 1946 until his death; from the marriage came two sons, Alan Graham Prittie (* 1948) and James Hugo Cameron Prittie (* 1950).

Because of his works on the history of Israel and his work for the London newspaper The Jewish Chronicle , to whose inner circle he belonged, Prittie was also referred to by colleagues as an "Anglo-Irish, Christian Zionist ".

review

Germans against Hitler (1964) was described in the English specialist press almost 20 years after its publication as one of the shorter, but nevertheless best-readable, accounts of the resistance against Hitler, as it was written by the recognized journalist and proven authority on the subject of Germany was written.

The reviewer in Die Zeit was full of praise on the occasion of the publication of Germans against Hitler in 1966: “Its author proves to be an excellent journalist who is able to captivate his readers with reports on brittle or already known topics. Prittie describes and tells without ever getting lost in the gossip . On the contrary, the author's cool, distant style makes it clear to the reader again and again that the book does not spread wishful thinking, but rather reports facts. It is astonishing to see how little even the Germans, who experienced the Nazi era consciously and at the same time with an inner political distance, know today about the German resistance against the National Socialists. Again and again the author captivates the reader with only brief descriptions such as the report on the end of Ossietzky or the detailed description of the activities of the " Red Orchestra " or even with the chapter about a company that has become so well known as the Scholl siblings' conspiracy . The reason for the fascination of this book, which is not at all excitingly written, is due to two circumstances: On the one hand, the author is one of the best experts in Germany and the Germans and is therefore able to characterize the protagonists, the resistanceists, often with very few brief words, so that the reader can see them ”.

In the English-speaking world, Terence Prittie's Adenauer biography was to remain the most prominent representation for a long time. Even specialist historians credited her with the fact that she was particularly interested in the fact that it was written by a well-informed journalist from the Bonn press club. It was only with the translation of the two-volume standard work by the renowned political scientist and contemporary historian Hans-Peter Schwarz (1995/1997) that a publication by a scientist on Konrad Adenauer was finally received in English.

In retrospect, however, Prittie's Brandt biography, as well as other contemporary depictions of the popular Federal Chancellor, were confirmed to have “ hagiographic features”.

His works have been translated into German , Danish , French , Catalan , Spanish and Japanese .

Works

  • South to freedom . London 1947.
  • Escape to freedom . Hutchinson, London 1954.
  • The Saar. Key to European Planning . In: The Listener 51, 1954, pp. 679-681.
  • Neo-Nazi outrages . New York Times , Dec. 31, 1959, p. 20.
  • Germany divided; the legacy of the Nazi era . Little, Brown, Boston 1960.
  • The German Conscience. Atlantic Monthly 206, no. 5 (November 1960), pp. 108-113.
  • The Generation of Nazis. The New Republic 142, no.3, January 18, 1960, pp. 9f.
  • Germany . Time, Inc., New York 1961.
    • Germany . Translated from English by Eva Boldemann, Time Life, Amsterdam / Frankfurt a. M. 1967.
  • Germans against Hitler . Little, Brown, Boston 1964.
    • Germans against Hitler: a depiction of the German resistance against National Socialism during Hitler's rule . Translation by Bernhard Mann, Wunderlich, Tübingen 1965.
  • Israel: miracle in the desert . Praeger, New York 1967.
  • Solid, Sober End to Kosygin Visit - But No Big Breakthrough. The Guardian , February 14, 1967.
  • Eshkol. The Man and the Nation . Pitman Pub. Corp., New York 1969.
  • Konrad Adenauer, 1876–1967 . Cowles Book Co., Chicago 1971.
  • together with Otto Wolfgang Loeb: Moselle . Faber and Faber (Faber Books on wine), London 1971.
  • together with Bernard Dineen: The double exodus: a study of Arab and Jewish refugees in the Middle East . Goodhart Press, London 1974.
  • Willy Brandt: portrait of a statesman . Schocken Books, New York 1974.
  • Willy Brandt. Biography . Goverts Krüger Stahlberg, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-7740-0442-0 .
  • together with Walter Henry Nelson (ed.): The economic war against the Jews . Random House, New York 1977.
  • Through Irish eyes. A Journalists Memoirs . Bachman & Turner, London 1977.
  • The velvet chancellors: a history of post-war Germany. F. Muller, London 1979.
    • Chancellor in Germany . Translation by Angela Frémont, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1981.
  • Whose Jerusalem? . F. Muller, London 1981.
    • Who owns Jerusalem . Translated from English by Ruth Achlama, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-608-93007-8 .
  • My Germans. 1933-1983 . Wolff, London 1983.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ His war memories are described by the English specialist literature as conciliatory, vg. SP Mackenzie: The Colditz myth: British and commonwealth prisoners of war in Nazi Germany . Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2004, p. 59.
  2. ↑ Charles Mosley (Ed.): Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage . 107th edition, 3 volumes (Wilmington, Delaware, USA: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), Vol. 1, p. 1202.
  3. ↑ David Childs: The Wirtschaftswunder ?: British Views on the German Economy and the Germans, 1949–1964 . In: Franz Bosbach , John R. Davis, Andreas Fahrmeir (eds.): Industrial development: a German-British dialogue  : The promotion of industry: an Anglo-German dialogue . Walter de Gruyter / Saur, Munich 2009, pp. 73–88, here p. 76ff.
  4. ↑ Text excerpts: on Herbert Sulzbach . Accessed November 18, 2011.
  5. ↑ Bernhard Josef Neumann: Däh, now ham mer the creep. How it came about, what followed from it . Vol. 1, p. 659.
  6. ↑ Nick Thomas: Protest movements in 1960s West Germany: a social history of dissent and democracy . Berg, Oxford 2004, p. 24.
  7. ^ Terence Prittie: Konrad Adenauer, 1876–1967 . Cowles Book Co., Chicago 1971, p. 199.
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Franz Eibl: Politics of the Movement: Gerhard Schröder as Foreign Minister 1961–1966 . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2001, p. 171, fn. 103.
  9. ↑ See Daniel Gossel, Michael Salewski, Jürgen Elvert (Eds.): Brits, Germans and Europe: the German question in British foreign policy, 1945–1962 . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, p. 25.
  10. ^ With regard to his report on Germany, Germany divided; the legacy of the Nazi era . Little, Brown, Boston 1960.
  11. ↑ Young Turks at dictionary.reference.com (English)
  12. ↑ Cf. Lutz Nickel: Dehler - Maier - Mende party chairman of the FDP: Polarizer - President - General Director . Martin Meidenbauer Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 85, fn. 91
  13. ↑ Herbert Elzer: Konrad Adenauer, Jakob Kaiser and the "little reunification". The federal ministries in the foreign policy struggle over the Saar from 1949 to 1955 . Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2008, p. 295.
  14. ^ Menno Spiering: Evil Europeans in Angus Wilson's The Old Man and the Zoo . In: A. Boxhoorn, Joseph Theodoor Leerssen, M. Spiering (eds.): Britain in Europe . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1988, pp. 27-58, here p. 31.
  15. ^ Richard Terrell: Christ, Faith, and the Holocaust . West Bow Press, Bloomington 2011, p. 111.
  16. ^ Colin Bingham: Wit and wisdom: a public affairs miscellany . Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1982, p. 169.
  17. ↑ Dominic Terence Prittie on thepeerage.com , accessed August 20, 2015.
  18. ^ David Cesarani: The Jewish chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, pp. 211f.
  19. ↑ http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/news-archive/category/about-the-writers
  20. ^ Hans Wilhelm Gatzke: Germany and the United States, a "special relationship?" . Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 293.
  21. ↑ The German Resistance . . In: Die Zeit , January 28, 1966. Retrieved November 18, 2011.
  22. ^ Hans-Peter Schwarz: Adenauer. The climb. 1876-1952 . Stuttgart 1986 a. Ders .: Adenauer. The statesman . 1952-1967. Stuttgart 1991.
  23. ↑ Jonathan Grix: Contemporary Germany: research methodologies and approaches . Continuum International Publishing, Birmingham Press, Birmingham 2001, p. 25.
  24. ^ Matthias Dahlke: The attack on Olympia '72. The political reactions to international terrorism in Germany . Martin Meidenbauer Verlag, Munich 2006, p. 35, fn. 196.
  25. ↑ Almost the same as the entire text section: Matthias Dahlke: Democratic State and Transnational Terrorism: Three Paths to Intransigence in Western Europe 1972–1975; Government action in West Germany, Austria and the Netherlands in the face of transnational terrorist hostage-taking and kidnappings in the early 1970s. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2011. p. 83, fn. 282.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Prittie, Terence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Prittie, Terence Cornelius Farmer (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1913
DATE OF DEATH May 28, 1985