Thomas Sessler

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Thomas Sessler (born Gabriel Peter Hanno Zeiz on December 14, 1915 in Berlin ; died December 7, 1995 in Pfarrkirchen ) was a German-Austrian publisher and writer.

Life

Gabriel Peter Zeiz was a son of the writer August Hermann Zeiz and Gertrud Segall. His mother was deported during the Nazi era and murdered in Auschwitz .

Zeiz completed a book trade apprenticeship in Berlin, worked in the profession, began to write for the Berliner Tageblatt and became involved in the KPD . After the transfer of power to the National Socialists , he continued to do illegal work for the communists.

In 1935 he fled to Vienna via Czechoslovakia, where he wrote for Wiener Tag and Die Stunden and worked at the Scala Theater . He was an employee of the intelligence service of the Spanish Republic . After the annexation of Austria in 1938, he fled to Zurich . There he founded the “Neue Bühnenverlag”, which was also a center of camouflaged resistance activities against National Socialist Germany. He was co-editor of the newspaper Der Free Österreicher , which was smuggled into Austria. In 1939 he broke with the communists. In 1941 he married Charlotte Leuenberger, who lived in Bern, he married again in 1949 Hildegard Steiner from Bregenz and in 1967 Ruth Judith Berger, a painter from St. Gallen .

Since political activity on Swiss soil was forbidden by law for the refugees, the Swiss authorities arrested him in January 1944 for illegal political activity, and after an acquittal he was transferred to the internment camp in Magliaso and then in Engelberg . Zeiz was the liaison man of a group that sent it the Rhine water level on behalf of the US Army , which was important for the Allied campaign against the German Reich. At the end of 1944 he was arrested again in Switzerland, but was able to escape to liberated France in early 1945. A Swiss court sentenced him in absentia in March 1945 to 18 months in prison for intelligence work. Zeiz meanwhile worked as a liaison officer for the US Army and for the Office of Strategic Services .

After the end of the war Zeiz went to Austria. It was founded in 1946 by the Baroness Malvine by Sessler Heart Inger adopted and changed his name to Thomas Sessler-Zeiz and Thomas Sessler . He received Austrian citizenship. In Vienna he worked as a culture editor for the newspaper Welt am Abend until 1951 and, together with his father, renewed the “Georg Marton Verlag”, which his father had directed before 1938. In 1952 he moved to Munich , where he founded the Thomas Sessler Verlag , which moved to Vienna in 1967. From the beginning of 1952 to 1970 Sessler worked for the Gehlen organization and the Federal Intelligence Service .

Fonts (selection)

  • Five against a whole city. A story for the youth . Illustrations by L. Schindler-Edlinger. Linz: bridges; 1947
  • Bees legend and other parables . Linz: Bridges, 1947
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe : Uncle Tom's Cabin . For d. Youth retold by Thomas Sessler. Illustrations by Franz Bureš. Vienna: Leuen, 1951
  • Rudolf Erich Raspe : Wonderful journeys on water and on land. Campaigns and funny adventures of the Baron von Münchhausen . Illustrations by Franz Bureš. Vienna: Leuen, 1951
  • Infinity will remain . Selected poems. Vienna: Austrian Publishing House, 1969
  • Under the sign of the rat . Play in 3 acts. Munich: Thomas-Sessler-Verlag, 1970
  • Guardian of Dreams: Poems . Vienna: Edition Roetzer, 1986
  • you will find the valley of pearls: poems . Afterword Frederick Mayer . Eisenstadt: Edition Roetzer, 1986

literature

  • Christian Baertschi: Sessler, Thomas . In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . December 18, 2012
  • Ursula Seeber (Hrsg.): Small allies: expelled Austrian children's and youth literature . Vienna: Picus, 1998 ISBN 3-85452-276-2 , p. 160
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 690
  • Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 3: S – Z, Register. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 1257 (entry 9637).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Since there have been no nobility titles in the Republic of Austria since the Nobility Repeal Act of 1919, the emphasis on titles in the Swiss Historical Lexicon used here appears doubtful.
  2. ↑ Ronny Heidenreich: The GDR espionage of the BND. From the beginnings to the construction of the Wall (= publications of the Independent Commission of Historians for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 Volume 11). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-96289-024-7 , pp. 464, 469 (see there also the overall chapter The Networks of Thomas Sessler , pp. 465-497).
personal data
SURNAME Sessler, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zeiz, Gabriel Peter Hanno; Sessler-Zeiz, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian publisher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 7, 1995
Place of death Parish churches