Margarete Buber-Neumann

Margarete Thüring was born on 21 October 1901, in Potsdam, German Empire. 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==

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. She sought to become a member of groups of kindred spirits to fight injustice. Also in 1921, she joined the Socialist Youth League of Germany. In 1926, she joined the Communist Party of Germany. Buber-Neumann developed an interest in literature and Expressionist paintings. ==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. with Heinz Neumann, the Comintern representative to Germany. He criticized Stalin's German policy in the 1930s, which led to his arrest and execution in the Great Purge. She married Helmuth Faust after she went to live in Frankfurt am Main; they divorced. Her daughters lived with her and then with their paternal grandparents. Because they were part Jewish, they left Nazi-controlled Europe for Palestine. ==Career==

She obtained a job as an editor for Inprecor, the International Press Correspondence. In 1931 and 1932, the Neumanns visited the Soviet Union twice and then Spain, where they reorganized the Spanish Communist Party. ==Internment==

prison camps (1923–1961) 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. She remained in the camp until the end of World War II. On April 21, 1945, Buber was released with 60 other women with freedom papers. Seeking to avoid the advancing Soviet troops, she made it to Hanover, Germany, where she sent a telegram to her daughters in Palestine. ==Under Two Dictators==

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. In 1948, she published Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (published in German and Swedish and 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, she gave an account of her years in both Gulags and Nazi concentration camps. Die Gazette said of these works that "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". ==Kravchenko Affair==

(undated) On 23 February 1949, Buber-Neumann testified in Paris in support of Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector who was suing Les Lettres Françaises, a French magazine connected with the Communist Party of France, for libel after it had accused him of fabricating his account of Soviet labour camps. Buber-Neumann corroborated Kravchenko's account in great detail and so contributed to his victory in the case. ==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. '' that portrays Charles Péguy by Egon Schiele (October 1914) 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 1959, 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: 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 practically the same. Regarding Communism and Nazism, Buber-Neumann wrote: ==Later years and death==

Buber-Neumann became a political conservative and joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1975. In 1980, Buber-Neumann received the Great Cross of Merit of the West Germany. She died at age 88 on November 6, 1989, in Frankfurt am Main, three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. ==Legacy==

The poet Adeline Baldacchino wrote: The historian Tony Judt called her among "the most interesting political writers, social commentators, or public moralists of the age" in a list that includes Émile Zola, Václav Havel, Karl Kraus, Alva Myrdal, and Sidney Hook. The 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." ==Works==

Her works have been translated into many languages. • • • • • Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (1957) • Kafkas Freundin Milena – Mistress to Kafka: the life and death of Milena; introduction by Arthur Koestler (1966) • • Kommunistische Untergrund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der kommunistischen Geheimarbeit (1970) • Dokumentation einer Manipulation (1972) • Freiheit, du bist wieder mein ...: d. Kraft zu überleben (1978) • Plädoyer für Freiheit und Menschlichkeit: Vorträge aus 35 Jahren – Janine Platten und Judith Buber Agassi (2000) ==Notes==