Hilde Eisler

Hilda Eisler
Born
Brunhilde Rothstein

28 January 1912
Ternopil, Galicia, Austro-Hungary
Died8 October 2000 (2000-10-09) (aged 88)
Berlin, Germany
Occupation(s)Political activist
Journalist
Managing editor (Das Magazin)
Political partyKPD
SED
SpouseGerhart Eisler (1897–1968)
ParentSalo Vogel-Rothstein (?-1942)

Hilde Eisler (born Brunhilde Rothstein: 28 January 1912 – 8 October 2000) was a political activist and journalist. In 1956 she took over as editor in chief of Das Magazin, a lifestyle and fashion magazine in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany),[1][2][3] noteworthy according to Eisler herself when interviewed in 1988 as the first and for some years the only magazine in East Germany to feature nude pictures.[4]

Eisler is sometimes described as a German journalist of Jewish provenance. She was born in what was, at the time, the Austro-Hungarian empire. Because of the frontier changes mandated in 1919, as a young woman she carried not a German or Austrian passport, but a Polish one. She did come from a Jewish family, though on account of her non-stereotypical blonde hair and blue eyes this was not immediately obvious to Gestapo officers and other government officials with whom, usually on account of her record of Communist involvement, she came into contact after the Nazi power seizure of 1933.[4] She spent most of 1935 in prison and escaped into exile from Germany in 1936.[1]

During the late 1940s, when she was living in the United States, her communist background (along with her acquisition by this time of a communist husband) attracted unwelcome intervention in her life from those who took their political lead from Senator McCarthy.[5] At the end of June 1949 she was expelled from New York and returned to Berlin.[1]

  1. ^ a b c Bernd-Rainer Barth; Andreas Herbst. "Eisler, Hilde geb. Brunhilde Rothstein * 28.1.1912, † 8.10.2000 Chefredakteurin der Zeitschrift "Magazin"". Wer war wer in der DDR?. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag [de], Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  2. ^ "Das Magazin, A Brief History". Retroculturati. 18 October 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  3. ^ Morris, Earl (23 May 1971). "Expatriate Chess On the Other Side Of the Wall". New York Times (archives). Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  4. ^ a b Marlies Menge (21 October 1988). "Zwei aus einer Straße ... Hilde Eisler und Freia Eisner: Adresse Karl-Marx-Allee". Die Zeit. Die Zeit (online). Retrieved 4 January 2017.
  5. ^ Borneman, John (1996). "Identity, Exile and Division: Disjunctures of Culture, Nationality and Citizenship in German-Jewish Selfhood in East and West Berlin". In Bodemann, Y. Michal (ed.). Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. pp. 131–153. ISBN 0-472-10584-1. Retrieved 4 January 2017.