Margarete Thüring was born on 21 October 1901, in Potsdam, Imperial Germany.[2] 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.[3][a] 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.[7] He was a "tyrant", while her mother was "well-read and liberal."[8]
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.[3] She sought to become a member of groups of kindred spirits to fight injustice. Also in 1921, she joined the Socialist Youth League. In 1926, she joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).[7] Buber-Neumann developed an interest in literature and Expressionist paintings.[7]
Personal life
In 1921 or 1922, Margarete Thüring married Rafael Buber, the communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber, with whom she had two daughters, Barbara and Judith.[7] She lived on Babelsberger Strasse, where she took in communists, like the Dimitroff couple, who were evading police.[7]
Following her divorce in 1929, she lived in unmarried union[9] with Heinz Neumann, Comintern representative to Germany.[7] He criticized Stalin's German policy in the 1930s, sealing his fate.[7] She married Helmuth Faust after she went to live in Frankfurt-am-Main; they divorced.[3]
Her daughters lived with her and then with their paternal grandparents. Because they were part Jewish, they left Nazi-controlled Europe for Palestine.[8]
Career
She obtained a job as an editor for Inprecor, the International Press Correspondence.[7][b] In 1931 and 1932, the Neumanns visited the Soviet Union twice and then Spain, where they reorganized the Spanish Communist Party.[7] In November 1933, Neumann received a recall from Moscow but instead left for Zürich, Switzerland. They were both deported to the Soviet Union in June 1935. They were watched by guards during their stay at the Hotel Lux in Moscow,[7][c] where they worked as translators.
[10]
On 27 April 1937, while living at Moscow's Hotel Lux, Heinz Neumann was arrested as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.[11] Buber-Neumann never learned in her lifetime that her husband was executed on 26 November 1937.[3] On 19 June 1938, she was arrested for "counter-revolutionary organization and agitation against the Soviet state."[3][10] She was held at the Lubianka prison, then Butyrka, and then sent to labour camps, first in Karaganda, then in Burma, both places in Kazakhstan.[12]
Surviving female prisoners gathered when the Red Cross arrived at Ravensbrück (April 1945)
In February 1940, she was handed over to the Gestapo, as part of the NKVD-Gestapo cooperation[7] initiated by the Stalin-Hitler Pact (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact).[13] She was sent to Germany along with some other Soviet political prisoners, including Betty Olberg, a wife of a German communist who was executed in 1936.[14][d] During the train ride, she had not known the plans and was crestfallen when she learned that she was not being freed.[10]
She was then detained with other "political prisoners" in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she became friends with Orli Wald[13] and Milena Jesenská.[7] The conditions were especially inhumane and many women died of starvation, disease, and extermination.[7] She worked long days of forced-labor and was hated[why?] by most of the women. Her existence improved when she had the companionship of Jesenská.
[16]
She later wrote:
The SS had no fabric for the production of new prison clothing. Instead they drove truckloads of coats, dresses, underwear and shoes that had once belonged to those gassed in the east, to Ravensbrück... The clothes of the people were sorted, and at first crosses were cut out, and fabric of another color sewn underneath. The prisoners walked around like sheep marked for slaughter. The crosses would impede escape. Later they spared themselves this cumbersome procedure and painted with oil paint broad, white crosses on the coats.
— Fånge hos Hitler och Stalin (1949)
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.[1] She remained in the camp until the end of World War II.[10] On April 21, 1945, Buber was released with 60 other women with freedom papers. Seeking to avoid the advancing Russian troops, she made it to Hanover, Germany, where she sent a telegram to her daughters in Palestine.[17]
Under Two Dictators
Arthur Koestler urged Buber-Neumann to write her memoir Under Two Dictators (photo from 1969)
After World War II, Buber-Neumann accepted an invitation by the International Rescue and Relief Committee to live in Sweden, where she lived and worked for three years.[7] In 1948, she published Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (published in German and Swedish, then the following year in French and English as Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler) in 1949. At the urging of her friend Arthur Koestler, in this book she gave an account of her years in both Soviet prison and Nazi concentration camps.[5]Die Gazette said of these works, "they shook up the post-war generation in West Germany because they reported for the first time and in great detail on the camps of the Soviet gulag."[7]
On 23 February 1949, Buber-Neumann testified in Paris in support of Victor Kravchenko, who was suing a French magazine connected with the French Communist Party for libel after it accused him of fabricating his account of Soviet labor camps. Buber-Neumann corroborated Kravchenko's account in great detail, contributing to his victory in the case.[18][19]
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").[3] In 1959, Arthur Koestler asked her to join him at his home in Alpbach to meet Whittaker Chambers and his wife Esther Shemitz while they were visiting Europe. On 24 June 1959, Chambers wrote in a letter:
Then K had the idea to wire Greta Buber-Neumann: 'Komme schleunigst. Gute Weine. Außerdem, Whittaker C.'... There we sat and talked, not merely about the experiences of our life... We realized that, of our particular breed, the old activists, we are almost the only survivors – the old activists who were articulate, consequent revolutionists, and not merely agents.[21]
In 1963, she published a biography of her Ravensbrück friend Milena JesenskáKafkas 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 were in practice the same.[3]
Regarding Communism and Nazism, Buber-Neumann wrote:
Between the misdeeds of Hitler and those of Stalin, in my opinion, there exists only a quantitative difference... I don't know if the Communist idea, if its theory, already contained a basic fault or if only the Soviet practice under Stalin betrayed the original idea and established in the Soviet Union a kind of Fascism.
Margarete Buber-Neumann had the sad privilege to span the 20th century as the only person to have testified publicly in writing about the experience of both Soviet and Nazi camps. The young and fervent communist, accused of "deviationism" by Stalinist powers, survived three years of the Siberian Gulag only to be deported to Ravensbrück after the German-Soviet pact for five years. She would survive to tell, tirelessly, without bitterness and without illusions, what power does to those who hold it and to those whom it holds.[17][e]
Writer Camila Loew chose Buber-Neumann as 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."[24]
Works
Her works have been translated into many languages.[7]
Fånge hos Hitler och Stalin: Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler. Natur och kultur. 1948. LCCN50027706.
Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler. Verlag der Zwölf. 1948. LCCN49029725.
Déportée en Sibérie. Baconnière. 1949. LCCN50015683.
Under Two Dictators. Gollancz (UK), Dodd, Mead & Company (US). 1949. LCCN49006527.
^In 1920, Buber-Neumann's sister, Babette Thüring, had married Fritz Gross of Vienna, who moved to Germany after World War I and became a member of the KPD. They had a son in 1923, then separated. Babette retained her married name of "Babette Gross" for the rest of her life. (Fritz Gross moved to England in the 1930s, helped refugees during World War II, and died in 1946 with a considerable corpus of mostly unpublished work.)[4] Gross then became the common-law spouse of Willi Münzenberg.[5] Koestler would remain a friend after both he and Buber-Neumann left the party. As "Babette Gross", Buber-Neuman's sister later wrote a biography of Münzenberg.[6]
^Inprecor is a contraction of International Press Correspondence.
^DNB states that she and Neumann moved emigrated to the Soviet Union in May 1935.[2]
^In the transit in Moscow on her way to Germany she met Carola Neher. They were to be transferred to Germany together but for unknown reasons Neher was turned back to the Gulag where she died in 1942.[15]
^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."[17]
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