Annette Leo

Annette Leo is a German historian and biographer.[1][2]

Annette Leo
Born25 February 1948
Berlin, West Germany
Alma materHumboldt University of Berlin, East Germany
OccupationJournalist
Historian
Biographer
Academic/researcher
University teacher (Jena)
Spouse(s)Wolf Leo
Unusually, Wolf took his wife's family name when the couple married. The marriage nevertheless ended in divorce.
ChildrenMaxim Leo
Parent(s)Gerhard Leo (1923 – 2009)
Nora Lubinski (1922 – 2010)

Life

Annette Leo was born in Düsseldorf, the eldest of her parents' daughters. When she was four her parents, relocating against the overwhelming east-west tide of central European migration during the 1950s, took her to live in East Berlin. She later discovered that the sudden move was triggered not - at least not directly - by political conviction, but by an instruction her father had received from the Communist Party: alongside his other work, her father was working for the party.[3] The family took a winter break in Thuringia in 1952 and simply never returned to West Germany. Annette Leo grew up in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).[2] Gerhard Leo (1923 – 2009), her father, was a Jewish journalist originally from Berlin who had escaped Nazi Germany and spent the war years as a Résistance fighter in France.[4] Her mother, born Nora Lubinski (1922 – 2010),[5] was the daughter of Dagobert Lubinski (1893 – 1943), another left-wing journalist and a resistance activist: he stayed in Germany and died at Auschwitz.[6] As she grew up in East Berlin, anti-fascism was one of the things that bound the Leo family together.[7] That never translated into a comfortable relationship with the allegedly anti-fascist East German state, however.[7]

In 1966 Annette Leo joined the party.[8] (East Germany had been a one-party dictatorship since shortly after 1946.[7]) 1966 was also the year in which she passed her Abitur (school final exams), opening the way to a university-level education. More immediately, however, she undertook a two year internship with the Berliner Zeitung (newspaper).[9] Between 1968 and 1973 Leo studied History and Romance studies at the Humboldt University, at that time in East Berlin.[10] Her son, Maxim Leo, was born in 1970 while she was still working for her degree.[11]

On graduating, she embarked on a career in journalism. One of the publications to which she contributed between 1979 and 1981 was the political and economic weekly magazine Horizont.[3] She had always wanted to become a journalist, but now she hated it: "... party hacks and burned out security service employees ... people who put on a jacket to walk down the corridor".[3][lower-alpha 1] In 1982 she received her doctorate from Berlin University: her dissertation concerned the "Spanish Workers' Commissions in the struggle against Franco".[12][lower-alpha 2] Between 1982 and 1986 she worked as a contributing editor with the Neue Berliner Illustrierte (weekly magazine). Then, from 1986 till 1989, she supported herself as a freelance historian and journalist.[9] As it began to appear that time was running out for the East German one-party dictatorship, in January 1990 Annette Leo was a co-founder of Die andere, described by backers as "the first alternative [weekly] newspaper in the German Democratic Republic".[9][lower-alpha 3]

After reunification, between 1991 and 1993 Leo took an academic position at the Prenzlauer Berg Museum on the south side of Berlin.[14] Then from 1993 till 1996she worked with the Research Institute for Workers' Education ("Forschungsinstitut Arbeit, Bildung, Partizipation") at Recklinghausen.[15] Here she worked on the oral history project "Politisch-gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Geschichtsbewusstsein von Arbeitnehmern in den alten und neuen Bundesländern" (loosely, "social and political change in historical awareness of workers in the old and new federal states (i.e. in former West Germany and former East Germany))".[9]

She worked between 2001 and 2005 with the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the so-called Technical University of Berlin.[9] While working at the centre, in 2004 she published a biography of the linguist and folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz (1905 – 1967).[16] In 2006 Leo became a research associate at the Historical Institute of the University of Jena, where for some years she also held a teaching chair.[9] The Steinitz book was not her first serious biography. In 1991 Annette Leo published "Briefe zwischen Kommen und Gehen", a biography of Dagobert Lubinski, her maternal grandfather who had been a communist journalist and a resistance fighter. Lubinski was also Jewish and was murdered at Auschwitz.[17]

In 2008 Annette Leo received the Annalise Wagner Prize for a piece of work she produced on daily life in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp at Fürstenberg during the Hitler years.[14][18] In 2012 her biography of Erwin Strittmatter (1912 – 1994) triggered a widespread debate on the author's historical role as one of the most popular novelists in the German Democratic Republic.[19]

Annette Leo's 2018 documentary film "Das Kind auf der Liste" ("The child on the list") presents the story of the Sinto child Willy Blum and his family. In 1944 Willy Blum, then aged 16, was taken with his 10-year-old brother Rudolf from the Buchenwald concentration camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp where both boys were murdered.[20][21] They were part of a batch of 200 children and young people sent on the death train from Buchenwald to Auschwitz. Originally the two hundredth on the list was to have been the three-year-old toddler Stefan Jerzy Zweig but at some stage someone had crossed out Zweig's name and substituted that of the Sinto child. The fates of the boy who died and that of the boy who survived were accordingly always intertwined. A heavily politicised version of the story from the perspective of Zweig (who has subsequently achieved a measure of notability on his own account as an author and cameraman[22]) was already familiar to many German readers, cinema goers and television audiences thanks to the success of the 1958 East German novel Naked Among Wolves which has been adapted for the big screen and (at least twice) for the small screen, but until Annette Leo produced her documentary the story of the boys who died was unknown. At least one critic reacted by asking why it had taken so long for the story of the Blum boys to come into the public sphere ("Endlich! Warum erst jetzt?").[20]

Maxim

Annette Leo's son, Maxim Leo (born 30 January 1970) is a Franco-German author, screen-write and journalist who writes for the Berliner Zeitung.[7][23]

Notes
  1. ... abgehalfterte Parteigänger und verbrannte Geheimdienstler ... Leute, die ihr Jackett anzogen, wenn sie auf den Gang gingen.[3]
  2. "Spanischen Arbeiterkommission im Kampf gegen Franco"[12][13]
  3. als"... der ersten alternativen Zeitung der DDR."[9]

References
  1. Martin Sabrow (2009). Annette Leo. Erinnerungsorte der DDR. C.H.Beck. p. 617. ISBN 978-3-406-59045-0.
  2. "Biografien / Annette Leo * 1948 in Düsseldorf". Reise ohen Wiederkehr / A one-way journey. Museum des Landkreises Oberspreewald-Lausitz Schloss und Festung Senftenberg. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  3. Waltraud Schwab (18 February 2008). ""Erwartet habe ich ein Gefühl von Verantwortung"". taz Verlags u. Vertriebs GmbH, Berlin. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  4. Lucien San Biagio (7 October 2009). "Gerhard Leo. Allemand dans la résistance française". Gerhard Leo, ancien journaliste à Neues Deutschland est décédé. L'Humanité, Paris. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  5. Thomas Föhl (compiler) (2 April 2018). "Nora Leo (Lubinski)". Geni.com. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  6. Hermann Weber; Andreas Herbst. "Lubinski, Dagobert * 17.7.1893, † 22.2.1943". Handbuch der Deutschen Kommunisten. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin & Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Berlin. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  7. Jean-Paul Piérot; Maxim Leo (1 December 2010). "Trois générations d'une famille allemande". L'Humanité, Paris. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  8. Klaus Pokatzky (moderator) (16 January 2019). "Der Großvater als Kompass". Historikerin Annette Leo. Deutschlandradio (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), Köln. Retrieved 11 December 2010.
  9. "Dr. Annette Leo". Annalise-Wagner-Preisträger 2008. Annalise-Wagner-Stiftung, Neubrandenburg. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  10. "Dr. Annette Leo, Curriculum vitae". Historisches Institut, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  11. "... Maxim Leo: Haltet euer Herz bereit. Eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschichte". Martin Luther und Nordend. Evangelische Kirchengemeinden in Berlin-Pankow, Berlin. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  12. Jürgen Leinemann (25 January 1993). ""Immer quer, immer daneben"". Der Spiegel (online). Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  13. Leo, Annette (Verfasser). "Spanische Arbeiterkommissionen im Kampf gegen das Franco-Regime". Hochschulschrift. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  14. "Dr. Annette Leo". Annalise-Wagner-Preisträger 2008. Annalise-Wagner-Stiftung, Neubrandenburg. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  15. Jürgen Danyel (March 2019). Annette Leo. Ost-Berlin: 30 Erkundungen. Ch. Links Verlag. p. 438. ISBN 978-3-96289-013-1.
  16. "Wolfgang Steinitz - ein jüdischer Intellektueller zwischen sozialistischer Utopie und Wirklichkeit: Wolfgang Benz im Gespräch mit Annette Leo, der Biographin von Wolfgang Steinitz" (PDF). Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Newsletter. TU Berlin. December 2004. pp. 4–5. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  17. Wolfgang Benz. "Annette Leo: Briefe zwischen Kommen und Gehen (synopsis and review)". Verlag BasisDruck. ISBN 978-3-86163-017-3. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  18. Anne Kwaschik (16 January 2009). "Rezension zu: Leo, Annette: "Das ist so'n zweischneidiges Schwert hier unser KZ ...". Der Fürstenberger Alltag und das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Berlin 2008". Clio-online – Historisches Fachinformationssystem e.V. c/o Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. ISBN 978-3-938690-61-1. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  19. Helmut Peitsch (21 June 2013). "Rezension zu: Leo, Annette: Erwin Strittmatter. Die Biographie. Berlin 2012". Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult. Clio-online – Historisches Fachinformationssystem e.V. c/o Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. ISBN 978-3-351-03395-8. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  20. Christoph Dieckmann (16 May 2018). "Welcher Junge kam nach Auschwitz?". Annette Leo erzählt, wer anstelle des legendären Buchenwald-Kindes starb. Die Zeit (online). Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  21. Tom Fugmann (13 March 2018). "Willy Blum - das vergessene Kind aus dem KZ Buchenwald und die Geschichte seiner Familie". Die Geschichte hinter "Nackt unter Wölfen": Willy Blum war 16 Jahre alt, als er ermordet wurde. Von ihm blieb nur ein Name auf einer Liste, neben dem durchgestrichenen Namen Stefan Jerzy Zweigs, der durch Bruno Apitz' Roman weltberühmt wurde. Über Willy Blum und seine Familie wusste man bislang nichts. Die Historikerin Annette Leo hat sich auf die Suche gemacht und erzählt in ihrem Buch "Das Kind auf der Liste" die Geschichte der Familie Blum. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  22. Bill Niven; William John Niven (2007). The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction, and Propaganda. Harvard University Press. pp. 172–173. ISBN 978-1-57113-339-7.
  23. Thomas Wieder (22 August 2019). "Berlin, 1989 : les folles heures de l'étudiant Maxim Leo". 1989, mon dernier été en RDA (5/6). Alors âgé de 19 ans, le futur journaliste et écrivain travaille comme apprenti laborantin et prépare l’équivalent du baccalauréat en cours du soir. La nuit, avec d’autres jeunes de Berlin-Est, il brave le régime communiste en déclin, squattant les appartements abandonnés pour y organiser de grandes fêtes. Le Monde, Paris. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
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