Ilse Barea-Kulcsar

Ilse Wilhelmine Elfriede Barea-Kulcsar (; 20 September 1902 – 1 January 1973), also known as Ilsa, was an Austrian journalist, novelist, translator and teacher. She was also a communist political activist, anti-fascist activist and resistance fighter who campaigned in Austria, volunteered in the Spanish Civil War and went into exile in Britain.

Early life and education Barea-Kulcsar was born on 20 September 1902 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, as the eldest of three children. Barea-Kulcsar's father Valentin Pollak (1871–1948) was of Jewish descent with ancestors from the Jewish communities in Eisenstadt and Mattersburg. He worked as director of the Wasa-Gymnasium.

Barea-Kulcsar was educated at the first girls high school in Vienna, Black Forest School (German: ), which was founded by pedagogue Eugenie Schwarzwald.

Activism Barea-Kulcsar became involved in left wing politics and grassroots activism while a student, serving as deputy chairwoman of the Association of Socialist Secondary School Students. She joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (SDAP) and it's youth wing Socialist Youth Austria (SJÖ). She was also a member of the Socialist Students of Austria (VSStÖ) and was editor of their newspaper.

In 1921, Barea-Kulcsar left the SDAP for ideological reasons and joined the recently established Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ). In 1922, they married.

In 1925, Barea-Kulcsar travelled to Hungary for the Communist International. She was arrested in Budapest and spent four months in prison. She was deported to Vienna in 1926. She also wrote the brochure Great Powers of Finance and Industry (German: Großmächte der Finanz und der Industrie) for the party in 1930.

Under the proto-fascist government of the Chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, from 1932 to 1934, Barea-Kulcsar organized with the underground resistance. She wrote for the German anti-fascist newspaper Der Funke,

Barea-Kulcsar and her husband participated in the Austrian Civil War (German: Österreichischer Bürgerkrieg) in February 1934, also known as the "February Uprising." who was living in Vienna that year while studying on a Rockefeller scholarship. Barea-Kulcsar and her husband were also expelled from the SDAP Under threat of rearrest, She and her husband became friendly with socialist leader Otto Bauer, who offered them financial aid. writing under the pseudonym "Robert Werner."

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in the autumn of 1936 Barea-Kulcsar left Brno for Valencia, Spain, to support democracy, anti-fascism and the Republican faction. She was helped to travel by the Spanish Embassy in Paris, France, and was given a letter of recommendation from the Spanish ambassador and Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) member Luis Araquistáin.

Her husband Kulcsar remained in Czechoslovakia, working for the embassy of the Second Spanish Republic in Prague. She was, however, able to mediate and translate between Spaniards and foreign journalists thanks to her language skills. often sleeping on cots in the office. Her first husband Kulcsar died on 28 January 1938 in Prague, under "mysterious circumstances" which may have been linked to the Soviet secret police. She remarried to Barea in February 1938.

Life in exile After the defeat of the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War, Barea-Kulcsar and her new husband went into exile. They firstly moved to Paris, where they lived in poverty in a small room at the Hôtel Delambre During World War II, from August 1939 she worked for the BBC Monitoring service as a journalist and translator in Evesham, Worcestershire, England. Barea-Kulcsar became a British citizen in 1948 Her niece Uli was orphaned during World War II and moved to live with them in England.

While in exile in France and England, Barea-Kulcsar wrote the serialised novel Telefónica, an account of four days during the Spanish Civil War. The book was released as a single work in Spanish and German for the first time in 2019, with an afterword by Georg Pichler. She also described the variety of people living in the building, including foreign correspondents, members of the military and civilian administration, security and intelligence officers, censors, leaders of political parties and trade unions, telephone operators, refugees, women and children. She wrote of her own experiences that:

Return to Austria Barea died from a heart attack caused by undiagnosed cancer In Austria she resumed Austrian citizenship, continued to write and worked as an educational official for the SPÖ. which was originally published in English. The book was republished as second edition by Faber & Faber in 2012.

In 2021, a commemorative plaque in Barea-Kulcsar's honour was erected on Bernhardtstalgasse in Vienna.