Wanda Brońska-Pampuch

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Wanda Brońska-Pampuch , pseudonym Alfred Burmeister , (born September 6, 1911 , † February 9, 1972 ) was a German-Polish writer , publicist and translator .

Life

Wanda Brońska's father Mieczysław Broński was a Bolshevik revolutionary and, as a close confidante of Lenin, was the Soviet Ambassador to Austria from 1920 to 1922 . Wanda grew up in Zurich and Berlin ; In 1931 she moved to Moscow , where her daughter Majka was born in 1934. In the course of the Stalinist purges , Wanda's parents were executed in 1937 and in 1938 they were sentenced to eight years of forced labor in a gulag camp on the Kolyma on the Sea of ​​Okhotsk .

In 1946 the Polish government brought her to Warsaw and in 1948 sent her to the press department of the Polish Military Mission in West Berlin . In 1952 she and her husband Bernhard Pampuch went to Munich . There she worked first for the Americans and then for the West German press - above all for the Süddeutsche Zeitung , later also for radio and television. She wrote her first articles on the advice of friends under the pseudonym Alfred Burmeister, “because political statements by women in the West are not taken seriously”. In 1953, the State Secretariat for State Security (SfS) of the GDR planned the murder of Wanda Brońska-Pampuch by Józef Światło , who, however, overflowed to the West.

In 1958 Brońska-Pampuch published her first book Poland Between Hope and Despair . She translated works by the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski and other authors, including Kazimierz Brandys and Stefan Kisielewski , from Polish into German. In 1963 her autobiographical novel Without Measure and End was published ; the book went through several editions and was translated into Dutch.

In 1968 she played the role of Mrs. Saizewa in the film The artists in the big top: perplexed .

The historian Wolfgang Leonhard was Wanda Brońska's half-brother.

Fonts (selection)

  • Poland between hope and despair. Publishing house for politics and economy, Cologne 1958
  • Without measure and end. Piper, Munich 1963
    • In de rode maalstrom. Translation into Dutch by Magdalena G. Schenk. Barn - De Boekerij, Antwerp 1964
  • View across borders - Europe in the east. Verlag Mensch und Arbeit, Munich 1965

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Wanda Bronska-Pampuch: A glass of water. Review of the novel Without Measure and End . In: Der Spiegel No. 49 of December 4, 1963, pp. 130–132 (Culture / Books), accessed on November 10, 2019.
  2. ^ Richard H. Cummings: Operation SPOTLIGHT: The Defection of Colonel Jozef Swiatlo and RFE. In: Cold War Radio Broadcasting. December 10, 2010, accessed September 3, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Brońska-Pampuch, Wanda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burmeister, Alfred (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish journalist and translator
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1911
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1972