The Prize for Peace

East and West Germany will be struggling this week over the centenary of the birth of the writer Carl von Ossietzky, one of the most remarkable of Hitler’s opponents, on October 3, 1889. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he was among the first sent to a concentration camp. The SS guards beat him and called him a “Polish swine.” Physically broken he became a symbol, the most famous political prisoner in the world in the mid-Thirties, his life saved by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Now a spate of books about Ossietzky has appeared. In East Germany, a statue is to be unveiled. A brilliant and perceptive writer, Ossietzky’s every word is being collected by rival archives in Oldenburg and East Berlin.

But Ossietzky remains something of an enigma. What was he like? Unexpectedly the chance came to meet his daughter Rosalinda, now in her sixties, when she was in Berlin filming a documentary on her father’s life in the first week of April.

The Ossietzkys were Catholics from the German-Polish borderlands, but Carl was born in Hamburg. His father, a soldier turned civil servant, died when he was two. The family’s aristocratic ‘von’ – so went the story – had been given to an ancestor in a regiment of Polish lancers ennobled by the eighteenth century Elector of Brandenburg in lieu of cash.

Rosalinda von Ossietzky-Palm wore black in the Thirties in silent protest at father’s imprisonment in Germany and she was wearing black when I met her. She went to school in England as a teenage exile in the years 1933-36 and still speaks the language fluently. The wounds of that time are evidently still painful for her. She now lives in Sweden in a restored inn with her husband, journalist Bjorn Palm, and has one son, Carl Ebbe.

Her father worked as a clerk in a Hamburg court before 1914, nursing a passion for literature and the stage. He was already politically active and was fined 300 marks for attacking German militarism in a newspaper article.

In August 1913 Carl married Maud Woods, a beautiful dark-haired Anglo-Indian woman. She had been a Suffragette and encouraged Carl in his journalistic career. Outsiders found him silent and shy though Rosalinda remembers her father as “a very witty man, a good storyteller.”  

Ossietzky served as a non-combatant on the Western Front which confirmed his view that war was mere “organised murder.” Germany’s defeat did not strike him as a shameful collapse as it did his contemporary Adolf Hitler, but as a moment of hope. The bonds of military discipline had broken and Germany became a republic.

He celebrated: “Everything antiquated has been cleared away. Secret energies have appeared and been harnessed… We must build the house in which the next generation shall live.” The couple moved to Berlin and here Rosalinda was born.

During the turbulent Weimar years Ossietzky played a leading part in the German peace movement and in an attempt to launch a left-wing Republican Party. But it was in 1927 he really came into his own as editor of Die Weltbühne (“The World Stage”), the leading literary and political magazine on the left. He became a national figure.

Ossietzky denounced military power in the Republic. The Reichswehr were funding secret military reserves that had turned to acts of terrorism and conspiracy against the state.

When the Berlin police killed thirty people firing on s banned May Day demonstration in 1929 most newspapers blamed the Communists, but Ossietzky helped set up an unofficial investigating commission that held the city’s Social Democratic police chief responsible. He did more than protest, he helped raise a relief-fund for the dead men’s widows and children.

The government repeatedly prosecuted Die Weltbühne. Rosalinda remembers her mother cried out and fainted when she was shown the headline announcing Carl was to be tried for high treason. He, as editor, was held responsible with Walter Kreiser, author of an article detailing secret (and illegal) military co-operation between Germany and Russia breaching the Treaty of Versailles. The prosecution was kept hanging over them for many months.

The trial before the Supreme Court in November 1931 was secret. No reporting was allowed. Impudently, the state claimed secret rearmament was based on “an imperious necessity above the laws” and that the two accused were sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. Kreiser fled to France and published an account of the trial, but Ossietzky refused to leave Germany even when contacted directly by General von Schleicher from the Defence Ministry. 

Free on appeal he fearlessly continued to attack President Hindenburg, Chancellor Brüning and the rising Hitler: “A cowardly effeminate slugabed, a petty bourgeois rebel.” The Nazi programme he derided as “a patchwork of nonsense from everywhere,” only the virulence of their antisemitism was unique. “We have gone back to the logic of the Grand Inquisitor: ‘Kill them all, God knows his own!’”

With the country on the verge of civil war he entered Tegel Prison on May 10, 1932 as a “living symbol of protest,” because there he would be “most embarrassing” to the government. He took leave of his readers cheerfully: “See you after the war at six in the evening in the Kelch pub!” “In a way he was safer in prison,” recalled Rosalinda.

There was to be a last chance. On December 22, 1932, the day after Rosalinda’s thirteenth birthday, a general amnesty of political prisoners freed her father. There was a big party in the Weltbühne offices in Kantstrasse, ex-prisoners rubbing shoulders with leading writers. “Everyone was there” Rosalinda remembers. 

Things seemed to be looking up both politically and for the family, then five weeks later Hitler came to power. The executive of the German League for the Rights of Man met in emergency session. Ossietzky said quietly, “This nightmare will either last fourteen days or fourteen years.”

On the night of February 27, 1933, during the run-up top new elections, the Reichstag was set ablaze and Hitler had Hindenburg give him dictatorial powers, claiming a Communist uprising was imminent. Friends begged Ossietzky not to sleep at home that night, but he was convinced the authorities did not know where he was living as there was no nameplate on the outer door of the building. When he got back to the flat Maud urged him to flee. He replied, “I will wait another three days.” At 3.30 the next morning he was arrested.

“They were romantics…naïve,” said Rosalinda sadly during a break in filming outside the apartment-house on Bayerische Strasse. A Nazi had smashed Jackie, her turtle, with his boot. Rosalinda herself had been away at boarding school in the country at the time of the fire. Next day a passing cyclist shouted as she walked near the village: “I have heard on the radio they have hanged your father.”

Her father was in fact held prisoner in Sonnenburg and then Papenburg-Esterwegen, two concentration camps with particularly evil reputations. Maud, her mother, suffered a nervous breakdown and it was thought better all round for Rosalinda to go to England, out of reach of the Nazis. She went to Bedales School in Hampshire and then Dartington Hall in south Devon. “I had a wonderful Irish house-mother, Elsie Timbey. She was a Communist and had red hair.”

There were no gas chambers at this time. Nazi victims were worked to death, “shot while trying to escape,” goaded to suicide or forced to bow to Adolf Hitler. This was the stark choice. For average Germans the threat of the camps lay always in the background. “You sow!” an SS-man shouted at Ossietzky, “How much longer is it going to take you to die?”

In October 1935, Carl J. Burckhardt of the International Red Cross managed to see Ossietzky in the camp. He had suffered a heart attack at Sonnenburg, then been put to work digging peat at Esterwegen where he contracted tuberculosis. Burckhardt saw “a trembling deathly pale something. A creature seemingly without feelings, a swollen eye, teeth apparently knocked out. He dragged a broken, badly-mended leg. I went towards him and stretched out my hand, which he did not take.”

Given greetings from friends he whispered, “Tell them I am at the end. It will soon be over. It’s better that way.” Then, “I only wanted peace.”

A “Save Ossietzky” campaign began, active in France, Scandinavia and the U. S. In England, a committee of leading writers joined the push for the Nobel Peace Prize. “No person living has a greater claim to the Nobel Peace Prize than Carl von Ossietzky,” said Naomi Mitchison.

Not everyone was co-operative. Shaw said that if they had Wells they couldn’t have him. W. B. Yeats was approached, but wrote back in April 1936 saying he was no longer interested in politics: “I am not callous, every nerve trembles with horror at what is happening in Europe.” He recommended they read his poem “The Second Coming” – which was appropriate, if unhelpful.

I asked Rosalinda how she felt. “I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t cry. I got terrible hatred. I wanted to do something, to demonstrate…I wished I had been a boy and a little older so I could go back and shoot these people really.” 

In early November 1936, Ossietzky was brought face to face with Hermann Goering at Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. For two hours the two men argued. Goering offered money, threatened, even appealed to his visitor’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to have him decline the prize. Ossietzky categorically refused. “I was a pacifist,” he said “and I remain a pacifist.”

Finally, on November 24, the Nobel Peace Prize for the previous year, 1935, was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky. The news reached him in hospital and he was briefly allowed to meet foreign reporters, but not to travel to Oslo to receive the prize in person. Very little of the prize money reached him. The Nazis were outraged and Hitler forbade any German ever to accept a Nobel Prize again.

But Ossietzky was able to spend the remaining months of his life with Maud in the Nordend Hospital in Berlin and to speak just once more by telephone with Rosalinda in Sweden on her eighteenth birthday. 

Ossietzky died from tuberculosis at the hospital on May 4, 1938 aged just 48. He was the youngest man to win the Nobel Peace Prize until Martin Luther King. There is a final message of hope in his story, his spirit remained unbroken and even the most repressive regime had been forced to yield to world opinion.

Roger Howe

Cork Examiner, October 3, 1989