Margarete Buber-Neumann

• Name — Margarete Buber-Neumann • Birth Name — Margarete Thüring • Born — 21 October 1901 • Birthplace — Potsdam, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire • Died — 6 November 1989 • Place of death — Frankfurt am Main, West Germany • Other Names — * Grete Buber • Greta Buber-Neumann • Margarete Buber • Margaret Buber Neumann • Citizenship — West Germany • Occupation — Writer • Years Active — 1921–1978 • Known for — Witness to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR during WWII • Notable Works — Under Two Dictators (1949) • Political Party — KPD (1926–1937), CDU (1975–1988) • Spouse — Rafael Buber, Helmuth Faust • Partner — Heinz Neumann • Children — Barbara Goldschmidt and Judith Buber Agassi • Relatives — Martin Buber (father in-law) • Awards — Bundesverdienstkreuz (1980)

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. He was a "tyrant" while her mother was "well-read and liberal."

• Illustration — East German 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.

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. She lived on Babelsberger Strasse, where she took in communists like the Dimitroff couple, who were evading police. Following her divorce in 1929, she lived in an unmarried union 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 Israel.

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. 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, where they worked as translators.

• Illustration — Map of Soviet Gulag 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. On 19 June 1938, she was arrested for "counter-revolutionary organization and agitation against the Soviet state". She was held at the Lubianka Prison, then at Butyrka Prison, and was sent to labour camps in Karaganda and then in Burma, both in Kazakhstan. • Illustration — 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 co-operation that was initiated by the Stalin-Hitler Pact (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). 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. During the train ride, she had not known the plans and was crestfallen when she learned that she was not being freed. She was then detained with other "political prisoners" in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she became friends with Orli Wald and Milena Jesenská. The conditions were especially inhumane, and many women died of starvation, disease and extermination. She worked long days of forced labour. Buber-Neumann was unpopular with most of the women, as communist inmates, who were influential in the camp, disapproved of her testifying to the hardships that she had endured in the Soviet Union. Her existence improved when she had the companionship of Jesenská. She later wrote: 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. 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.

• Illustration — 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. 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".

• Illustration — Poster featuring Victor Kravchenko (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.

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. She joined the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom with Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte and Sidney Hook. • Illustration — Front page from Die Aktion 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: 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. 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 are practically the same. Regarding Communism and Nazism, Buber-Neumann wrote:

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 Federal Republic of Germany. She died at age 88 on November 6, 1989, in Frankfurt am Main, three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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

Margarete Buber-Neumann was recorded at birth as Margarete Thüring. The authorities additionally record the heading Margarete Thüring. Her recorded language was German. She married Rafael Buber and Heinz Neumann. 2 children are recorded: Judith Buber Agassi and Barbara Goldschmidt.

Margarete Buber-Neumann is recorded as having received Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.