Viola Drath

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Viola Herms Drath (born February 8, 1920 in Düsseldorf ; † August 12, 2011 in Georgetown, Washington DC ) was a German-American author and journalist.

Life

Viola Herms was born in Düsseldorf into a wealthy family. She attended boarding school in Scotland and was fluent in English. She studied art and fashion and initially worked as a playwright, in 1946 her play "Lebwohl, Isabell" was performed at the Straubing Theater. She also worked as a journalist for various newspapers. At the end of the 1940s she met her future husband, Lt. Col. Francis S. Drath, who was stationed as Deputy Military Governor in Bavaria. She followed her husband in 1947 to Lincoln , Nebraska , where she studied philosophy and literature . Meanwhile she also worked for German-language magazines in the USA and as America correspondent for German magazines.

In 1968 the family (one daughter was born in 1962) moved to Washington, DC , where Drath took up a position as foreign correspondent for the Handelsblatt . She worked for the newspaper for almost 27 years. The focus of their work was mostly on German-American relations. As a journalist and privately, she was involved in politics, art and culture.

In 1981 her husband Francis died of cancer. A few months later she became engaged to the German Albrecht Gero Muth (* 1964), who was more than 40 years her junior and whom she had met in early 1980 as an intern at a press conference. The couple was only married in 1990 by a Virginia Supreme Court judge. In the following years, Muth led an eccentric party life in the common household, pretending to be a German nobleman, Iraqi general or spy for various services, while he actually lived unemployed on monthly donations from his wife. In 2002, the couple temporarily separated when Muth began a relationship with a man he moved in with. Later, Drath and Muth lived in the same household again.

Circumstances of death

On August 12, 2011, Muth called the police and stated that he had found his wife lifeless in the bathroom where she had fallen. However, the accidental death was strongly doubted, on August 16 Muth was officially accused of murder ( second degree murder ) of his wife. On March 6, 2012, a grand jury of the Superior Court in the District of Columbia raised an extended first degree murder charge against Muth. In January 2014, the jury found him guilty and later sentenced to 50 years in prison.

filming

The relationship between Muth and Drath and their murder are the focus of the directorial debut of the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz . He himself (as Ulrich Mott) and Vanessa Redgrave (as Elsa Brecht) play the main roles in Georgetown . The film will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2019.

Fonts

  • Germany in world politics . Cyrco Press, 1979
  • Willy Brandt, prisoner of his past . Chilton Book, 1975
  • Engagement and provocation: texts by contemporary German-speaking authors . Macmillan, 1973
  • What do the Germans want ?: 21 contemporaries . Macmillan, 1970
  • Typical German? . Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969
  • The complicated Germans: intimate conversations . Blaisdell, 1967
  • Reporter in Germany: a reader for beginners . Holt, 1959
  • Goethe's elective affinities and Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde . MA University of Nebraska 1953

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Viola Drath's Cultural Legacy: A Look at the Works of a Murdered DC Writer . Washington City Papers, August 25, 2011
  2. ^ Murder trial against impostors , FAZ, January 13, 2014
  3. ^ Viola Drath, Albrecht Muth's strange marriage . ABC News, Feb. 28, 2012
  4. ↑ Albrecht Muth Indicted in Viola Drath Murder . Georgetown Patch, March 6, 2012
  5. ↑ German has to be imprisoned in the US for 50 years for murder ( Memento from May 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), April 30, 2014
  6. ↑ Christoph Waltz makes directorial debut as an impostor. Die Presse , April 23, 2019, accessed April 25, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Drath, viola
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Drath, Viola Herms (full name); Herms, Viola (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 2011
Place of death Georgetown, Washington DC