Victor Gollancz

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Sir Victor Gollancz (born April 9, 1893 in London ; † February 8, 1967 there ) was a British-Jewish publisher , social democrat , humanist and fighter for human rights . He was an early opponent of Hitler and a critic of the treatment of the Germans after the Second World War , in particular the expulsion .

Life

His father, who lived as a jeweler in London, was the son of a rabbi who immigrated to England from Poland ( Witkowo near Gniezno) . His uncles were the Rabbi Sir Hermann Gollancz (1852-1930) and the English literary scholar Sir Israel Gollancz (1864-1930). The family lived in the Jewish Orthodox tradition.

He attended St. Paul's School and New College in Oxford and broke away from orthodox thinking and the often petty-bourgeois prejudice of his family. The guild movement exerted a strong influence on his political thinking for several years .

In 1914, Victor Gollancz volunteered as a war volunteer without completing his classical philology studies at New College, Oxford, which he had begun in 1912. In 1915 he received his officer's license and was employed on the Northumberland coast .

In 1916 he was dismissed from active service because of his bad eyesight and got a job as a teacher of English and Latin at the military boarding school in Repton . After he had tried in 1918 to set up a "Civil Class" - a civics course - in which issues such as militarism, imperialism etc. were dealt with, his career in the British Army ended .

His professional development began immediately afterwards with the Ernest Benn Verlag , the turnover of which he was able to increase from £ 2,000 per year to over £ 250,000.

In 1919 he married Ruth Lowy, with whom he had five daughters.

Political differences of opinion with the publisher Benn led to the separation in 1927, Gollancz founded his own publishing house in 1928. He used the Victor Gollancz publishing house as a mouthpiece for his political convictions, in which he especially sought to promote pacifism and social democracy and opposed nationalism , but especially anti-Semitic National Socialism .

With his book club ( Left Book Club ), founded in 1936 , to which up to 60,000 people ultimately belonged, he succeeded in bringing socially and politically committed publications to large sections of the population at low cost. Its authors included Clement Attlee , Katharine Burdekin , Arthur Koestler , André Malraux , Daphne du Maurier and George Orwell .

Pacifist, humanist and enlightener about nationalism

In 1936 Gollancz published the book The yellow spot , written by an anonymous author, in his publishing house , which, mainly using German original sources, detailed the disenfranchisement and ostracism of Jews after three years of the Nazi regime. More books on this topic followed in the next few years. In his written during the Christmas season 1942 publication Let my people go ( Let my people go ), which was published in six editions with a total of a quarter million copies in 1943, described Gollancz what the Jews by the Germans and their helpers had been done. Looking back, he stated in April 1945: “The last of these books was “ Let my people go ” , where, by describing the events in Poland, I tried to evoke public opinion that would force certain practical measures to save a small percentage of these victims before it was too late. The attempt failed: we now know that around four million Jews - a quarter of the Jewish population worldwide - were massacred in the midst of every conceivable form of terror and disgrace. If you want to know how it happened, read this excerpt from a letter from a Polish-Jewish child: 'Now I have to say goodbye to you, mother will come to the gas chamber tomorrow and I will be thrown down a shaft.' ” And Gollancz turned to his British readers: “No, there was never the slightest excuse for pretending to be ignorant. Now ask yourself, reader, what have you done about it? - Nothing? - Why?"

When the Third International called for the sabotage of the “imperialist war” of Great Britain against the German Reich after the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin Pact , this was heavily criticized in 1941 by Gollancz and other prominent members of the Left Book Club .

From May 1945 he passionately turned against the thesis of the collective guilt of the Germans, led campaigns against hunger and condemned the expulsion of the Germans from East Central Europe. In addition, Gollancz was one of the initiators of the movement against nuclear weapons with Bertrand Russell and Robert Jungk . He was also a critic of the death penalty and a champion of international understanding .

In 1948 the Israeli-Arab war prompted him to appeal for donations for the Palestine refugees .

Critic of the expulsion of the Germans

In 1945 he published a paper under the title "What Buchenwald really means", in which he turned against the thesis of the collective guilt of an individual people. In 1946 he founded the aid organization " Save Europe Now ".

In his book Our Threatened Values (London, 1946; published in Zurich in 1947 with the title Unser threatened Erbe in German) Gollancz lamented the crimes committed against the defeated Germans: “If the conscience of mankind should ever become sensitive again, these expulsions will be considered the immortal shame remain in the mind of all who caused it or who came to terms with it. The Germans were driven out, but not simply with a lack of excessive consideration, but with the highest conceivable degree of brutality. "

Among other things, he describes the situation of Sudeten German prisoners in a Czech concentration camp : “They lived crammed together in huts regardless of gender or age ... They were between the ages of 4 and 80 years. Everyone looked starved ... The most outrageous sight were the babies ... ". When Marshal Montgomery wanted to allocate the Germans only 1000 kcal a day and referred to the only 800 kcal for the prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a justification , Gollancz wrote about the dying of hunger in Germany that many of the refugees did not even receive this 1,000 kcal. “There really is only one method of re-educating people,” he explained, “namely the example that you set yourself.” Gollancz triggered a wave of helpfulness. It was not least his commitment that led to the British government lifting the ban on sending food parcels to Germany in December 1946.

In the name of humanity and democracy , Gollancz has repeatedly turned against nationalist derailments. “We want to be absolutely clear that nationalism is a vice. By 'nationalism' we mean any undue emphasis on nationality ... Nationalism is a vice because it directs its attention to comparatively insignificant things ... and overlooks the essential, which is simply that it (every person) is a person. (...) What does it matter that I speak English and someone else German, that my skin is white and that of a Negro is black, that I am Jewish and my neighbor of a different faith ... Let us then in the name of reason and health To forget these differences with common sense so that we can remember our common humanity ”.

Awards

Many German streets as well as the adult education center in the Berlin district of Steglitz-Zehlendorf and a school in Berlin-Frohnau are named after him. In Göttingen, the Victor Gollancz House is the seat of the Society for Threatened Peoples .

Works (selection)

  • The Betrayal of the Left. An Examination and Refutation of Communist Policy from October 1939 to January 1941. With Suggestions for an Alternative and an Epilogue on Political Morality . Gollancz, London 1941 (with Harold Laski , George Orwell and John Strachey ).
  • Leaving them to their fate: the ethics of starvation ('Left to their fate: The ethics of starvation'). Gollancz, London 1946.
  • In Darkest Germany . Gollancz, London 1947.
  • In Darkest Germany . With an Introduction by Robert M. Hutchins . Hinsdale, Ill .: Regnery 1947. free download
  • My dear Timothy. An autobiographical letter to my grandson; Memories ("My dear Timothy" and "More for Timothy"). New edition Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1960 (earlier edition in the two volumes: “Aufbruch und Treffen” and “Auf das Erde”).
  • Political education at a public school . Gollancz, London 1918 (with David Somervell ).
  • Shall our children live or die? A reply to Lord Vansittart on the German problem . Gollancz, London 1942.
  • Voice out of the chaos. A selection of the fonts . 2nd edition Nest-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1960 (edited by Julius Braunthal ).
  • Our threatened heritage ( "Our Threatened Values"). Atlantis-Verlag, Zurich 1947.

literature

  • Ruth D. Edwards: Victor Gollancz. A biography . Gollancz, London 1987, ISBN 0-575-03175-1 .
  • Friedrich M. Reifferscheidt: Victor Gollancz's call “Save Europe!” . Desch Verlag, Munich 1947.
  • Richard Storey: The personal papers of Sir Victor Gollancz (1893-1967). Publisher, humanitarian and campaigner . University of Warwick, Coventry 1997.
  • Karl-Heinz Grohall: Gollancz, Victor , in: Hugo Maier (Ed.): Who is who of social work . Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998 ISBN 3-7841-1036-3 , p. 210f.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Victor Gollancz: My dear Timothy. Sigbert Mohn Verlag, Gütersloh 1960, p. 386
  2. ↑ Circular letters from the Victor Gollancz Foundation.
  3. ↑ Janina Struk: Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence . IB Tauris, London 2005, ISBN 1-86064-546-1 , pp. 39 .
  4. ^ Victor Gollancz: What Buchenwald Really Means . Pamphlet. Brimpton, April 24, 1945.
  5. ↑ Victor Gollancz, John Strachey, George Orwell, Harold Laski (editors and collaborators): The Betrayal of the Left. An Examination and Refutation of Communist Policy from October 1939 to January 1941. With Suggestions for an Alternative and an Epilogue on Political Morality. London 1941.
  6. ↑ Victor Gollancz Our threatened heritage , Zurich, Atlantis 1947, pp. 156–157.
  7. ^ The winner in 1960: Victor Gollancz. In: Friedenspreis-des-Deutschen-Buchhandels.de. Retrieved December 24, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Gollancz, Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British publisher and peace activist
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1967
Place of death London