Margarete Buber-Neumann

The French-German channel Arte has just released a series in 8 chapters: "Broken dreams of the inter-war years". One can follow the dramatic, often tragic, lives of thirteen characters, French, German, Russian, Italian, Austrian, British. The characters actually existed, some are known, like the communist Hans Beimler, the Nazi Rudolf Höss (not Hess), the young English aristocrat Unity Mitford, the star of silent film Pola Negri.


The subject of this blog is the period 1918-1933. The Weimar Republic ends when the Nazi nightmare begins. The Arte series goes further: it embraces also those terrifying years in Germany that followed 1933.

Margarete Buber-Neumann would have deserved a place in the series. Born in Potsdam, near Berlin, in 1901, she was still a teenager at the time of the fall of the German Empire. In the 1920s, she joined the KPD (Communist Party of Germany). She marries Rafael Buber, son of philosopher Martin Buber and communist. They divorce and Margarete then lives with Heinz Neumann, a leader of the KPD.

In 1932, Neumann opposed Stalin on the strategy to be followed vis-à-vis the Nazis and was pushed aside in the party. The Nazis came to power, the couple left Berlin for Moscow, where they faced the fate of so many German refugees in the USSR. In 1937, Neumann was a victim of Stalinist purges. Margarete is arrested by the NKVD in 1938.

One may wonder why Neumann, who was already frowned upon because of his criticism of Stalin, did not choose instead to go to France, or to Czechoslovakia, like other German anti-nazis. But what we know today about the throes of Stalinist communism was not yet known at the time. Rumors ran, but they were - in leftist circles - dismissed as imperialist propaganda.

So, Neumann disappeared forever in the depths of Siberia. In 1940, Margarete moved directly from the Gulag to the Ravensbruck Nazi camp: a gift from Stalin to his new friend Hitler, with whom he had just signed a non-aggression pact. The infamy of the Stalinist regime will never be stressed enough.

In the camp, Margarete meets journalist Milena Jesenská, former partner of Franz Kafka. She survives and dies in 1989 in the Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of "Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler", where she tells her terrible experiences.

It seems difficult to find a destiny more dramatic than hers, which sums up the whole, often nightmarish, history of the twentieth century.

    

Election day in Berlin

An interesting film document that shows the climate on the eve of the parliamentary elections of December 1924.
They did not result in a change of government, having been won by the "Weimar Coalition" (Zentrum (Catholics), SPD (Social Democrats) and DDP (Center Liberals) .The extremes of the political rainbow both the Communists and the Nazis,suffered losses. Wilhelm Marx of the Zentrum was able to continue to lead the government. 1924 marks the beginning of the golden era of the republic, the years of relative economic stability and even a relative prosperity.

    

Karl Holtz, an artist that neither Hitler nor Stalin could stand

Street scene in Berlin -  around 1924

Karl Holtz, born in Berlin in 1899, published his first drawings in Ulk (illustrated supplement of the socialist Berliner Tageblatt), later in Der Wahre Jacob, Jugend, Simplicissimus and Uhu.
He is persecuted by the Nazis and settles after the war in the GDR. No luck with the communists either: in 1949 he is sentenced to 25 (!) Years in prison for a caricature of Stalin published in Switzerland. Rehabilitated in 1956, once the Little Father of the Peoples happily passed away, he died in Potsdam, near Berlin, in 1978. 

Picasso also had problems with the French Communist Party because of a not enough respectful portrait of Comrade Stalin in 1953. But the communists not being in power in France, Pablo escaped prison (Gulag?).

Friedrichsstrasse in Berlin

Karl Holtz in 1956

Stalin assuming the role of Peace Angel. 25 years of prison for this drawing.

 

Lisbet Juel, a Swedish-Danish Berliner.

We don’t know much about Lisbet Juel. Was she born in Stockholm, Sweden or in Copenhagen, Denmark ? What we do know is that her mother was Swedish and her father a Dane. And, most important : she was one of the most gifted illustrators, not so much in Sweden or in Denmark, but in Berlin, working mostly for Ulk, the weekly supplement of Berliner Tageblatt. Here : some of her works, from 1925-1926, the golden years of the Weimar Republic, after the big inflation and before the world crisis of 1929. 

More about Lisbet: 

Lisbet 1

Lisbet 2
 

And also:  lisbetjuel.blogspot.com

    

Anita Berber

Born in Leipzig in 1899 to a musician and an aspiring actress and singer, Anita Berber was raised mainly by her grandmother in Dresden. At 16, she moved to Berlin and made her debut as a cabaret dancer. By 1918 she was working in film, and she began dancing nude in 1919. Scandalously androgynous, she wore heavy dancer's make-up.

Berber consciously broke every social and theatrical convention of her time, and then proclaimed some theory to justify her provocative, outlaw behavior. She haunted the Friedrichstadt quarter of Berlin, appearing in nightclubs, casinos, and hotel-lobbies (like the Adlon hotel) radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap that shadowed her gaunt shoulders and a pair of patent-leather pumps. One year, Berber made her post-midnight entrances clad only in those heels, a frightened pet monkey hanging from her neck, and an heirloom silver brooch packed with cocaine.

On Berlin’s cabaret stages, Anita Berber danced out bizarre erotic fantasias—scenic displays, fueled by noxious concoctions of ether-and-chloroform, cognac, morphine injections, and a chic, pan-sexual disposition. Her dances had names such as « Cocaine » or « Morphium ». Satiated Berliners, after a few riotous seasons in the early Twenties, finally tired of Berber’s libidinous antics. The high priestess of choreographic decadence died a pauper’s death in 1928, the result, more or less, of a desperate attempt to quit cold-turkey from her most beloved of addictions, cognac.

Anita appeared in the ground-breaking Richard Oswald film ‘Different From The Others” (Anders als die Anderen), which deals with homosexuality. Besides her love affairs with men, she favoured also women. She is said to have dated the young Marlene Dietrich.

She appeared on stage not only in Berlin but also in Vienna, Belgrad, Cairo and Beirut. 

By Otto DIx, 1925

Some of the information comes from Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon.