Hilde Eisler

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Hilda Eisler
Born
Brunhilde Rothstein

28 January 1912
Ternopil, Galicia, Austro-Hungary
Died8 October 2000 (2000-10-09) (aged 88)
Berlin, Germany
Occupation(s)Political activist
Journalist
Managing editor (Das Magazin)
Political partyKPD
SED
SpouseGerhart Eisler (1897–1968)
ParentSalo Vogel-Rothstein (?-1942)

Hilde Eisler (born Brunhilde Rothstein: 28 January 1912 – 8 October 2000) was a political activist and

German Democratic Republic (East Germany),[1][2][3] 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.[4]

Eisler is sometimes described as a German journalist of Jewish provenance. She was born in what was, at the time, the

Nazi power seizure of 1933.[4] She spent most of 1935 in prison and escaped into exile from Germany in 1936.[1]

During the late 1940s, when she was living in the United States, her communist background (along with her acquisition by this time of a communist husband) attracted unwelcome intervention in her life from those who took their political lead from Senator McCarthy.[5] At the end of June 1949 she was expelled from New York and returned to Berlin.[1]

Life

Family provenance and childhood

Brunhilde Rothstein was born in

Germany, where her mother's parents had been based for many years. It was in Frankfurt that Brunhilde Rothstein grew up, in moderately comfortable circumstances.[5] She attended the city's Jewish lyceum (secondary school) and was a member of the Jewish Pathfinder Association. She would later describe her childhood in Frankfurt as "beautiful and protected" (" ... eine schöne und behütete Kindheit").[4]

Work and politics

In 1929/30 she undertook a training in the book trade, after which, still aged only eighteen, she moved to

Marxism–Leninism Institute and the Nazis closed it down.[4] Acting on instructions from the institute back in Moscow she now went each day to the main public library in central Berlin where she borrowed and then copied out any articles she could find on or by Karl Marx, then delivering the copies to the Soviet embassy. This activity ceased after the library director banned her because, as he put it, he did not want a nice German girl corrupted by Marxist literature. It was as she recalled the incident many years later that she wryly added that, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, it would never have occurred to anyone that she might be Jewish.[4]

Nazi Germany

The party central committee then ordered her to

Poland from where, helped by relatives, Brunhilde Rothstein made her way via Prague to Paris where she arrived before or during 1937.[7]

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.[8]

Escape from Europe

Following the outbreak of the

New York.[11][12]

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.

war, in May 1945, they had been under growing police surveillance in the context of the Cold War tensions of the time. Gerhart Eisler was denounced as a Soviet agent by a party comrade (possibly his sister, from whom he had been estranged since 1933) and accused by the authorities of having lied about his Communist Party links on his immigration application.[9] The case against Gerhart Eisler became increasingly politicised. Press reports surfaced indicating that Eisler was the "boss of every red, directly controlled by the Kremlin".[4] Hilde traveled across the country, from New York to Hollywood, gathering support and money to fund her husband's defense.[4] However, in May 1949, temporarily at liberty pending his final appeal, Gerhart Eisler managed to escape by pretending to be blind and smuggling himself on board a Polish liner, which then dropped him off unceremoniously in London from where, after several further unpleasantnesses, he was freed[12]
and permitted to move on to Germany.

Following discovery of her husband's disappearance, Hilde Eisler was immediately arrested. She was invited to inform on her husband, in return for which her US interrogators offered to give her a permanent visa. Disclosing how he had escaped as a stowaway on a Polish ship (at a time before news of his discovery on board by the liner's crew had been received) would have amounted to a betrayal, however. Given that continuing renewal of her temporary immigration permits was no longer an option, there was no question of her being able to remain in the United States. Having found no evidence-based reason to detain her further, after six weeks imprisonment the authorities released Hilde Eisler and she was expelled via Ellis Island at the end of June 1949.[5][14]

Back in Berlin

Berlin, to which the Eislers returned, was now surrounded by a large section of Germany which was

contentious circumstances just three years earlier, was aggressively consolidating its role as the ruling party in a new kind of single-party German dictatorship. Hilde Eisler became a member of the "Defence Committee for Victims of American Reactionism".[1]
At some stage she embarked on a career in journalism.

In 1952/53 she worked as deputy chief editor of the newspaper "Friedenspost", where she worked with

demise of East Germany as a separate state, and its website currently (2016) asserts that some people referred to it as "The New Yorker of the east".[18] Eisler took over from Heinz Schmidt as editor in chief starting with the June 1956 issue.[15] Regardless of any comparisons with The New Yorker, she demonstrated political and journalistic skill in steering the publication for two decades or more, providing what the magazine itself describes as "an unusual mixture of journalism and literature".[18] It was the only mass circulation magazine in East Germany that regularly featured photographs and reports from beyond the Iron Curtain. Eisler's time in New York and her talent for networking meant that she had contacts with foreign writers that other editors lacked, and Das Magazin published contributions on fashion from Vienna, London and Florence.[19] 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.[4] Even if the subject matter was non political, it is noteworthy that the publication acknowledged and published some critical letters along with the adulatory ones.[4]

Hilde Eisler retired in 1976[1] or 1979[18] (sources differ) but retained her links with Das Magazin till her death in 2000.

Awards and honours


References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Bernd-Rainer Barth; Andreas Herbst. "Eisler, Hilde geb. Brunhilde Rothstein * 28.1.1912, † 8.10.2000 Chefredakteurin der Zeitschrift "Magazin"". Wer war wer in der DDR?. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag [de], Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  2. ^ "Das Magazin, A Brief History". Retroculturati. 18 October 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  3. New York Times
    (archives). Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Marlies Menge (21 October 1988). "Zwei aus einer Straße ... Hilde Eisler und Freia Eisner: Adresse Karl-Marx-Allee". Die Zeit (online). Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  5. ^
    ISBN 0-472-10584-1
    . Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  6. Poland (1919), the Soviet Union (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: 1939), Germany (1941), the Soviet Union (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: 1944) and Ukraine
    (1991).
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-3-412-02800-8
    . Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  8. ^ Engelhardt, Manfred [de]. "Die Publizistin Hilde Eisler wird heute 85 Jahre alt ... Ein Leben-mit so vielen Verlusten..." [Journalist Hilde Eisler Turns 85 Today... A Life With So Many losses...] (in German). Neues Deutschland. 28 January 1997. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  9. ^ a b c Filardo, Peter; Gottfried, Erika; Greenhouse, Nicole; et al. (eds.). "Guide to the Gerhart Eisler FOIA Files TAM.219 ... Historical/Biographical Note". Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. New York: Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
  10. ISBN 978-1-84904-496-7
    .
  11. ^ a b In December 1945 Hilde Eisler placed a small announcement in the newspaper Aufbau in which she reported the death of her father which had taken place in the Lviv area at the start of 1942. She gave her own address as 48-46 47th Street, Long Island City, N.Y. [1]
  12. ^ a b "Interview With Gerhardt Eisler America's No 1 Communist (1949)". Radio interview. British Pathé News & The WorldNews (WN) Network. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
  13. ^ Einhorn, Barbara [de]. "Heimkehren" nach Ostdeutschland. Jüdische Rückkehrerinnen ["Coming Home" to East Germany: Jewish Refugees] (in German). pp. 57–58. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  14. ^ The reference used here gives the term of her imprisonment by the US authorities as three months, but other sources give the duration as six weeks, which fits better with the overall time lines.
  15. ^ a b "Hilde Eisler". DAS MAGAZIN ... Kultur. Gesellschaft. Leben. Seit 1924. Kurznachzehn Verlag GmbH, Berlin. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
  16. ^ Barth, Bernd-Rainer. "Eisler, Gerhart * 20.2.1897, † 21.3.1968 Vorsitzender des Staatl. Rundfunkkomitees". Wer war wer in der DDR? (in German). Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag [de], Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
  17. ISBN 978-3-515-07651-7
    .
  18. ^ a b c "DAS MAGAZIN Kultur. Gesellschaft. Leben. Seit 1924. ... Überblick" (in German). Berlin: Kurznachzehn Verlag GmbH. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  19. ^ Gunkel, Christoph (27 May 2015). ""Einzig amtlich zugelassene Nackte der Republik" ... Magazine in der DDR:Plötzlich wurde in der DDR gespottet, kritisiert und über Koitusdauer gesprochen: Die streng reglementierte Staatspresse suchte ab den Fünfzigern Erfolge mit bunten, frischen Unterhaltungsblättern - und einer Prise Sex". Der Spiegel (online). Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  20. ^ Neues Deutschland, 28 January 1982, p. 2
  21. ^ Gratulation bei Hilde Eisler, In: Neues Deutschland, 29 January 1987, p. 6
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hilde_Eisler&oldid=1210149563"