Ursula von Kardorff
Ursula von Kardorff (born January 10, 1911 in Berlin , † January 25, 1988 in Munich ) was a German journalist and publicist .
Life
Ursula von Kardorff was the daughter of the painter Konrad von Kardorff . Initially raised as a “senior daughter” and only interested in glamorous occasions, she worked for a short time in 1937 as the estate secretary at Neuhardenberg Castle and then entered journalism. After the first feature articles for the Nazi newspaper The Attack and, above all, for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ) in Berlin, she passed the so-called editor admission test in order to be allowed to publish regularly. In doing so, she proved to be completely ignorant of National Socialist dogmatics, the knowledge of which was the sole criterion for admission. Because she was given the certificate of proficiency with the condition that she only write on non-political topics, she was initially a trainee at the DAZ and from 1939 to 1945 she was a feature editor.
Like almost all of her friends and acquaintances for a long time, she became an ardent opponent of the Nazis , especially after the death of her younger brother Jürgen von Kardorff (1918–1943) - he fell as a lieutenant in a reconnaissance department near Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine . However, she continued to work as a journalist in the supposedly apolitical feature section. Due to her closer acquaintance with members of the resistance , especially Werner von Haeften , Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg , Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and Julius Leber's wife , she came under suspicion after July 20, 1944 and was twice by the Gestapo interrogated, but could cleverly talk his way out.
In March 1945 she was released by the DAZ at her request and fled from the approaching Red Army to Jettingen in Bavarian Swabia . After the end of the war, she initially struggled to get a job as a journalist again because of some of the articles she had written - including about flak helpers . After reporting on the Nuremberg trials on behalf of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1946 , she joined the newspaper in 1950 as an editor, for which she worked in Munich until her death in 1988 .
The diaries
In her diary, which was first published in 1962 (“Berlin Records 1942 to 1945”), she reports in a memorable and colorful way about her life between adaptation and resistance and between superficial parties and life in the air raid shelter.
The diaries are still considered a valuable original source of life in Berlin during World War II. Of course, these are not authentic wartime records; the work was only written in 1947 on the basis of actually existing diaries, personal memories, conversations with friends, private letters and short calendar notes.
As the edition of the diaries obtained by Peter Hartl after the death of Ursula von Kardorff in 1993 and expanded to include a critical apparatus makes clear, there are some differences to the original wartime records.
Awards
- 1980 Schwabing Art Prize
See also
literature
- Norbert Frei, Johannes Schmitz: Journalism in the Third Reich . 3. Edition. CH Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-45516-6 , p. 150 ff.
Web links
- Literature by and about Ursula von Kardorff in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ursula von Kardorff: Berlin records 1942 to 1945 . Reissued and commented by Peter Hartl using the original diaries . Munich: CH Beck 1992, p. 67
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kardorff, Ursula von |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German journalist and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 10, 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 25, 1988 |
| Place of death | Munich |