Hilde Eisler

Hilde Eisler (born Brunhilde Rothstein: 28 January 1912 – 8 October 2000) was a political activist and journalist. In 1956 she took over as editor in chief of Das Magazin, a lifestyle and fashion magazine in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), noteworthy according to Eisler herself when interviewed in 1988 as the first and for some years the only magazine in East Germany to feature nude pictures. She spent most of 1935 in prison and escaped into exile from Germany in 1936. At the end of June 1949 she was expelled from New York and returned to Berlin. Her father, Salomon Vogel-Rothstein was a Jewish merchant, and it was in connection with his work that when she was six months old the family relocated to Antwerp in Belgium. Two years after that war broke out and her father was conscripted into the Austrian army (but would survive the experience). Her mother, Amalie "Malie" Gross, now found herself identified as an enemy alien and in 1914 the two of them moved again, this time to Frankfurt am Main in Germany, where her mother's parents, Feivel and Gissela Gross, had been based for many years. It was in Frankfurt that Brunhilde Rothstein grew up, in moderately comfortable circumstances.

French exile Paris was by now established informally as the western headquarters of the German Communist Party in exile. In 1937 she started working for "Deutsche Freiheitssender 29.8", a radio operation which provided broadcasting facilities for and on behalf of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The radio station transmitted initially from Madrid, but celebrity supporters (and others) unable or unwilling to make their way across war torn Spain, including Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Mann, were also able to speak on the station from an improvised studio in Paris. The radio station therefore retained a small editorial team in Paris of which Rothstein was a member. Another member was the communist political activist Gerhart Eisler whom, a few years later, she would marry.

Escape from Europe Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the German invasion of France in May/June 1940 most of the German political exiles in France were suddenly identified as enemy aliens and arrested. As the holder of a Polish passport, Brunhilde Rothstein was not arrested. She supported herself with a series of casual jobs, at one stage wrapping sweets (candies) for a living. After some weeks they were permitted to resume their journey, now required to board a ship to New York City. Despite being in possession of a transit permit, they were then interned for three months on Ellis Island, On 24 August 1942 Rothstein married Eisler (as his third wife) and they made their home in the Queens district of New York.

Expulsion from America Gerhart Eisler worked as a journalist in New York. Available sources are silent on Hilde Eisler's activities there. War ended in May 1945 and Gerhart Eisler was keen to return to Europe. Hilde would have preferred to stay in New York. Towards the end of 1945 she found out that her parents and sister had been murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. But if she had let her husband return home without her she would, as she later told an interviewer, have "found no sympathy with ... American friends" if she "would have, so to speak, deserted [their marriage]".

Back in Berlin Berlin, to which the Eislers returned, was now surrounded by a large section of Germany which was being administered as the Soviet occupation zone. They had no home to go to and lived, initially, with Wilhelm Pieck (the future president of East Germany) and his daughter. Hilde Eisler found a city transformed, and not just by bombs and Soviet artillery. In the city which had been her home thirteen years earlier there was no one left who knew her. Hilde started to create a future for herself, while her husband took on the leadership of the Office for Information. During 1953 she worked as a translator. Eisler took over from Heinz Schmidt as editor in chief starting with the June 1956 issue. According to Eisler, it was nevertheless the nude pictures which attracted the most reader reaction: one correspondent asked why there were no pictures of naked men and another reader complained that in a previous edition the only naked picture had been one showing the subject from behind. 1987 Patriotic Order of Merit gold clasp