Margarete Buber-Neumann

Margarete Buber-Neumann (née Thüring; 21 October 1901 – 6 November 1989) was a German writer. As a senior Communist Party of Germany member and Gulag survivor, she was turned into a staunch anti-communist. She wrote the famous memoir Under Two Dictators, which begins with her arrest in Moscow during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, followed by her imprisonment as a political prisoner in both the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi concentration camp system, after she was handed over by the NKVD to the Gestapo during World War II.

Buber-Neumann was also known for having testified in the so-called "Trial of the Century" about the Kravchenko Affair in France. In 1980, she was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of West Germany. Her father, Heinrich Thüring (1866–1942), was a master brewer; her mother was Else Merten (1871–1960). She had four siblings: Lisette (known as "Babette"), Gertrud ("Trude"), and two brothers, Heinrich and Hans. She disliked the militarism of German culture in her youth and the way that her father was awe-struck by officers of Potsdam's large Imperial German Army garrison.

Education and activism East German stamp of 1949 commemorating the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In 1919, Buber-Neumann enrolled at Pestalozzi-Fröbel Haus in Berlin to learn to teach kindergarten. In 1921, she attended a memorial for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. with Heinz Neumann, the Comintern representative to Germany. In 1931 and 1932, the Neumanns visited the Soviet Union twice and then Spain, where they reorganized the Spanish Communist Party.

Internment

On 27 April 1937, while living at Moscow's Hotel Lux, Heinz Neumann was arrested as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. Buber-Neumann never learned in her lifetime that her husband was executed on 26 November 1937.

In February 1940, she was handed over to the Gestapo, as part of the NKVD-Gestapo co-operation During the train ride, she had not known the plans and was crestfallen when she learned that she was not being freed. and Milena Jesenská.

She later wrote:

Buber-Neumann worked in a clerical capacity in the Siemens plant attached to the camp and later as secretary to a camp official, SS-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld.

Anti-communism In 1950, Buber-Neumann returned to Germany and settled in Frankfurt am Main as a staunch anti-communist. She continued to write for the next three decades.

In 1951, she became editor of the political journal Die Aktion. In 1957, she published Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges ("From Potsdam to Moscow: Stations of an Erring Way").

In 1963, she published a biography of her Ravensbrück friend Milena Jesenská Kafkas Freundin Milena. In 1976, she published Die erloschene Flamme: Schicksale meiner Zeit (The Extinct Flame: Fates of My Time) in which she argued that Nazism and communism are practically the same.

Later years and death Buber-Neumann became a political conservative and joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1975. (Original quote: "Margarete Buber-Neumann traverse le XXe siècle avec un bien triste privilège : elle est la seule à avoir publiquement témoigné par écrit de sa double expérience des camps soviétiques et nazis.) La jeune et fervente communiste, accusée de « déviationnisme » par le pouvoir stalinien, survit à trois ans de Goulag sibérien pour se retrouver déportée à Ravensbrück après le pacte germano-soviétique, pendant cinq ans. Elle survivra pour raconter, inlassablement, sans amertume et sans illusions, ce que le pouvoir fait de ceux qui le détiennent et à ceux qu’il détient."

The writer Camila Loew chose Buber-Neumann along with Ruth Klüger, Marguerite Duras and Charlotte Delbo as "main witnesses" to "reflect on the relationship between history and literature, or between the materiality of pain (the experience of [the] body) and its representation in text."

Works Her works have been translated into many languages.

Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (1957) – Mistress to Kafka: the life and death of Milena; introduction by Arthur Koestler (1966)

. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der kommunistischen Geheimarbeit (1970) Dokumentation einer Manipulation (1972) d. Kraft zu überleben (1978) Vorträge aus 35 Jahren – Janine Platten und Judith Buber Agassi (2000)