Willy Harzheim

Willy Harzheim (born April 6, 1904 in Horst, today Gelsenkirchen-Horst , † December 27, 1937 shot in Western Siberia ) was a German working-class writer and communist .

Life

Willy Harzheim was initially a miner in collieries in Gelsenkirchen and Essen . In 1920 he joined the Communist Youth Association (KJVD), in 1923 the KPD . After his release from the mining industry, he went to Stuttgart as a construction worker for a year. There he was a member of the district management of the KJVD. In 1929 his first publications appeared in communist newspapers.

At the end of 1929 Harzheim tipped from the Ruhr area to Berlin . There he became an employee of the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers , soon also its secretary, and as such was in charge of the journal Linkskurve published by the federal government . Contributions from him also appeared there. In November 1930 he participated as a member of the German delegation at the Second International Conference of Proletarian and Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov , for the preparation of which he had already been in Kharkov in May together with Otto Biha . In 1932 Harzheim married the typist Nora Schapiro (born in Dvinsk , Vitebsk Governorate ) in Berlin . Apparently he did not live with her, but probably only given her citizenship through marriage. Nora Harzheim was sentenced to imprisonment during the Nazi era, was able to emigrate to England after serving her sentence and lived again until her death under the first name Sarah imposed on her by the Nazis in Berlin-Köpenick after the war .

At the beginning of the Nazi era , Harzheim helped Johannes R. Becher with the emigration and then emigrated to the Soviet Union himself . He was sent to Prokopyevsk in Western Siberia as a cultural worker ; there he edited the newspaper Der Rote Bergmann . For some time he lived with the communist writer Emma Tromm (1896–1991), who had been dismissed as secretary of the German group of writers in Moscow in the course of the purges ; both organized together u. a. an agitprop theater group.

On November 20, 1937, Willy Harzheim was arrested in the course of the German operation of the NKVD and shot on December 27, 1937 for "counter-revolutionary activity". The KPD in Moscow expelled him from the party; Only in March 1957 was this exclusion reversed by the SED - albeit with the usual secrecy. The West Siberian District Military Court overturned the judgment on August 23, 1957 and rehabilitated Harzheim. As in most cases, this rehabilitation was not known until much later.

Fonts

• Between tanks and barbed wire. Story from the days of the occupation of the Ruhr. Published by the KPD in 1932.

literature

• Wilhelm Mensing (Ed.): Willi Harzheim 1904–1937. Worker writer from Horst. Klartext, Essen 2001, ISBN 3-89861-038-1 .
• Harzheim, Willi (Wilhelm) . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Willy Harzheim in the catalog of the German National Library
• Willy Harzheim in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Selected biographical sketches of the persecuted: Harzheim, Willi