Family provenance and childhood Brunhilde Rothstein was born in
Ternopil, a major city and administrative centre in the eastern part of
Galicia which at that time was part of the
Austro-Hungarian empire. Her father, Salomon Vogel-Rothstein was a Jewish merchant, and it was in connection with his work that when she was six months old the family relocated to
Antwerp in
Belgium. Two years after that
war broke out and her father was conscripted into the
Austrian army (but would survive the experience). Her mother, Amalie "Malie" Gross, now found herself identified as an
enemy alien and in 1914 the two of them moved again, this time to
Frankfurt am Main in
Germany, where her mother's parents, Feivel and Gissela Gross, had been based for many years. It was in Frankfurt that Brunhilde Rothstein grew up, in moderately comfortable circumstances.
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.
Escape from Europe Following the outbreak of the
Second World War in September 1939 and the
German invasion of France in May/June 1940 most of the German political exiles in France were suddenly identified as enemy aliens and arrested. As the holder of a Polish passport, Brunhilde Rothstein was not arrested. She supported herself with a series of casual jobs, at one stage wrapping sweets (candies) for a living. After some weeks they were permitted to resume their journey, now required to board a ship to
New York City. Despite being in possession of a transit permit, they were then interned for three months on
Ellis Island, On 24 August 1942 Rothstein married Eisler (as his third wife) and they made their home in the
Queens district of
New York.
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. But if she had let her husband return home without her she would, as she later told an interviewer, have "found no sympathy with ... American friends" if she "would have, so to speak, deserted [their marriage]".
Back in Berlin Berlin, to which the Eislers returned, was now surrounded by a large section of Germany which was
being administered as the
Soviet occupation zone. They had no home to go to and lived, initially, with
Wilhelm Pieck (the future president of East Germany) and
his daughter. Hilde Eisler found a city transformed, and not just by bombs and Soviet artillery. In the city which had been her home thirteen years earlier there was no one left who knew her. Hilde started to create a future for herself, while her husband took on the leadership of the Office for Information. During 1953 she worked as a translator. Eisler took over from
Heinz Schmidt as editor in chief starting with the June 1956 issue. 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. 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. Hilde Eisler retired in 1976 or 1979 (sources differ) but retained her links with
Das Magazin till her death in 2000. ==Awards and honours==