Lotte Moos

Margarete Charlotte Moos (née Jacoby; 9 December 1909 – 3 January 2008) was a German-born politically active poet and playwright. She had been a young Communist in Germany, but was disillusioned by her experience of the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, she lived in England, frequently writing under the pseudonym Maria Lehmann

Early life Daughter of Samuel and Luise Jacoby, she was born in Berlin on 9 December 1909. She soon showed her talent as a writer, when, in 1919, her essay on eastern European refugees was published in the Berliner Tageblatt and she was thanked personally by the editor, Theodor Wolff. After a brief period at the school of the Berlin State Theatre she worked as assistant to a photographer and then in the Workers' Theatre. Here she met left-wing economist Siegfried Moos, "Siege", whom she married in 1932. When Goold-Verschoyle was assigned as a military advisor to the Second Spanish Republic, it was with express orders to break off all contact with Moos.

She succeeded in returning to Britain. In 1939, having been identified by the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky as a possible spy, she was arrested and interrogated by MI5 in Holloway Prison. Then, with the outbreak of war, she was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man.

Oxford and Durham On release from internment Lotte rejoined her husband in Oxford, where he was working at the Institute of Statistics under William Beveridge. Lotte worked as a nursemaid, translator, typist and teacher, and under the pseudonym Maria Lehmann, she also wrote a column for a London-based German-language Exilliteratur newspaper, Die Zeitung.

Published poetry