Valentīna Freimane

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Valentīna Freimane b. Loewenstein (born February 18, 1922 in Riga ; † February 16, 2018 in Berlin ) was a Latvian film and theater scholar of Jewish descent. She survived the Holocaust from 1941 to 1944 in various hiding places in Riga .

Life

Valentīna’s father Leopold came from a German-speaking Jewish family from Courland , her mother Eva, née Lulow (actually Lulaf), a Russian-speaking Jewish merchant family from St. Petersburg , who moved to Liepāja shortly before the First World War . The young Loewenstein family moved from Riga to Paris in 1923 for professional reasons and to Berlin at the turn of the year 1926/27 , where Leopold worked as a legal advisor at UFA ; as a result, he became acquainted with film stars like Anny Ondra and Karel Lamač , who went in and out of the Bergmann guesthouse, where the Loewensteins lived. After starting school in Berlin, Valentīna lived with her grandparents in Riga from 1931 and attended a German school. Her parents were forced to leave Berlin in 1935 and also went to Riga.

After the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, a Soviet officer was forcibly billeted in the apartment. In June 1941 she married the medical student Dietrich Feinmanis; She was given the surname Freimane due to an official error.

After the German occupation of Latvia in June 1941, her parents and all other relatives were deported to the Riga ghetto and later murdered; Strongly encouraged by her mother, she hid herself with her husband. During a house search, she escaped undetected, while her husband was arrested and later died in a Riga prison. Thanks to good relationships, Valentīna Freimane was able to find refuge in several places one after the other, including one and a half years with the minority politician and journalist Paul Schiemann , who, unlike most Baltic Germans, had refused to move “home to the Reich”. He dictated his memoirs to her. After his death in June 1944 she was able to hide in an apartment in Riga's old town, where she witnessed the invasion of the Red Army on October 13, 1944.

After the Second World War , Freimane had to struggle with difficulties in the Soviet dictatorship, both because of her upper-class and supranational origins and as a surviving Jew; nevertheless she was able to make a career as a film and theater scholar. In 1949 she graduated from the Faculty of History of the Latvian State University ; from 1950 to 1963 she worked in Liepāja as a pedagogue and as an editor for the daily newspaper Komunists . From 1962 to 1965 she studied as an external student at the State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow, did her doctorate and worked from 1968 to 1980 at the Institute for Language and Literature at the Latvian Academy of Sciences . Until 1989 she taught theater history at the Faculty of Theater at the Latvian State Conservatory . Thanks to her excellent contacts with Moscow artists' associations, she succeeded in bringing semi-legal films from all over the world, which were not allowed to be shown publicly in the USSR, to Riga and in bringing her students to the “cinema lectorium, which she founded and directed and which has since become legend “To demonstrate. One of her students at the time was the later theater director Alvis Hermanis . In 2001 Freimane received the three-star medal of the Republic of Latvia for her work .

Since the restoration of the independence of the Republic of Latvia and the accompanying freedom to travel, Valentīna Freimane spent most of her old age in Berlin near her close friends Henning Rischbieter and Michail Ryklin ; since the mid-1990s she also worked for Deutschlandradio and gave seminars at the Free University of Berlin .

In 2010 her autobiography Ardievu, Atlantīda! Was published in Latvia . which became a bestseller there and describes her life until October 13, 1944. The German translation was published in March 2015 under the title Adieu, Atlantis. Memories published by Wallstein Verlag . The Latvian composer Arturs Muscat wrote the opera Valentina based on the motifs in the book .

Work on the second volume of her memoirs, which was to cover the period from October 1944 to around 1962, remained unfinished.

Works

  • Ardievu, Atlantīda! , Atēna, Riga 2010, ISBN 978-9984-34-410-2 .
  • Personības un parādības (Personalities and Phenomena), Liesma, Riga 1986.
  • Latviešu padomju teātra vēsture (History of the Latvian Soviet Theater), 2 vol .; Collaboration Vol. 1: Chapter 5 Jaunatnes teātris (1944–1954) and 6 Liepājas teātris (1944–1954) , Vol. 2: Chapter 4 Ļeņina komjaunatnes Jaunatnes teātris (1954–1970) and 5 Liepājas teātneis (1954–1970). , Zinātneis , Riga 1973.
  • Liepājas teātra 50 gadi (50 years of Liepāja theater), Latvijas Valsts izdevniecība, Riga 1958.

Web links

(all accessed on March 2, 2018)

Film portraits

  • Valentīna Freimane in an interview in the ZDF broadcast aspekte on February 27, 2015
  • Rosa von Praunheim : Valentina - A Latvian Jewess (22 min., 2012) in the series "Strong Women - Jewish Worlds"

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Information on the opera "Valentina" on the Latvian National Opera website
  2. ^ Andre Sokolowski: Too maudlin, too nationalistic. Review of May 20, 2015 on "KULTURA-EXTRA - the online magazine"
  3. ↑ Udo Badelt: Once to Riga and back . In: Der Tagesspiegel from May 16, 2015
  4. ↑ Freimane's "Ardievu, Atlantīda!" tulkota krieviski on March 6, 2012 on tvnet.lv
  5. ↑ Рецензии на книгу «Прощай, Атлантида!» on livelib.ru
  6. ↑ Rosa von Praunheim's blog at the German Film Institute
personal data
SURNAME Freimane, Valentina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Loewenstein, Valentīna (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Latvian-Jewish film and theater scholar
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 2018
Place of death Berlin