Margret Boveri

In 1900, Margret Boveri was born in Würzburg, Germany, the daughter of German biologist Theodor Boveri and American biologist Marcella O'Grady Boveri. Margret developed an early interest in foreign cultures and politics after spending time with people from various countries at a zoology station in Naples. Her father died in 1915 and her mother returned to the USA in 1925. Due to a lack of a university programme in foreign policy in Germany then, Margret studied German, history, philosophy, and English at the University of Würzburg. In 1932, she completed her doctorate at Berlin with a thesis on British Foreign Policy. She presented a negative view on Britain's international relations in her dissertation; she held this opinion throughout her journalistic career. Her switch to pursuing journalism instead of diplomacy and politics, she claimed was due to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. She did not want to work closely with the Nazi regime. Initially, she intended to work with Frankfurter Zeitung. However, this was met with rejections and claims that women cannot cover politics in journalism. == Career ==

From 1934, she worked in the Foreign Affairs section of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper, where she was promoted by the editor, Paul Scheffer. Boveri later credited her success to Scheffer's mentorship, "It was due to Scheffer that I started to become a name." After the Frankfurter Zeitung was banned by the German government in 1943, Boveri returned to Berlin, where her apartment was destroyed in an air strike. She then took up work as a report writer in the German embassy in Madrid before returning to Berlin in 1944 to work as a freelance writer with the Nazi Party weekly Das Reich. Among her friends and acquaintances were Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Theodor Heuss, Ernst von Weizsäcker, Freya von Moltke, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Armin Mohler, Gottfried Benn und Uwe Johnson. She died in Berlin in 1975. == Personal life ==

Margret cherished her identity as an unconventional woman. She took flying lessons. She also owned a personal car in which she travelled through parts of Europe that people, not only women, rarely had the opportunity to visit. Just before joining Berliner Tageblatt, in 1933, she drove through Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. These travels constituted her first publications. ==Works==

• Das Weltgeschehen am Mittelmeer, Zurich 1936 • Vom Minarett zum Bohrturm. Eine politische Biographie Vorderasiens, Zurich and Leipzig 1939 • Ein Auto, Wüsten, blaue Perlen. Bericht über eine Reise durch Vorderasien, Leipzig 1939 • modern edition: Wüsten, Minarette und Moscheen. Im Auto durch den alten Orient. Berlin, wjs 2005, • Amerika-Fibel für erwachsene Deutsche, Berlin 1946 (modern edition: Berlin (Landt) 2006, • 16 Fenster und 8 Türen, Berlin 1953 • Der Verrat im XX. Jahrhundert, 4 Volumes, Hamburg 1956–1960 • Wir lügen alle. Eine Hauptstadtzeitung unter Hitler, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau 1965 • Tage des Überlebens. Berlin 1945, Munich 1968. Modern edition: Berlin, wjs 2004, • "Erinnerte Mutmaßungen", in: Neue Deutsche Hefte 16, 205–208, 1969 • Die Deutschen und der Status Quo, Munich 1974 • Verzweigungen. Eine Autobiographie, published by Uwe Johnson, Munich 1977modern edition: Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1996, ==References==