Eva Siewert
Eva Siewert (11 February 1907 – 3 December 1994) was a German journalist, writer, radio announcer and opera singer, who lived and worked mainly in Berlin.
Her mother Frida Siewert (born Michels, 1880–1953) was an opera and concert singer and a Jew, which is why her daughter later acquired the status of a "first-degree hybrid".
At the age of eight, Siewert later explained, she fled her mother and went to live with her father, who at the time was employed as a Kammersänger for the Grand Duchy of Baden in the city of Karlsruhe.
Her time abroad equipped her with good foreign language skills, and when Siewert returned to Germany a year later, she gave the first radio lectures about her travel experiences.
From 1 July 1932 to 31 March 1938, she held a well-remunerated position as editor-in-chief and trilingual (German, English, French) head spokeswoman for the station.
[3] Siewert later wrote about her work for Radio Luxemburg: "During my time there I influenced almost every department of the broadcaster and was involved with program compilations, musical rehearsals, building up the record archive, library, and card indexes, as well as with the news services, translations, writing lectures on all kinds of topics, and the continuous announcement service in three languages.
According to Siewert, she was perceived by the public as the "voice of Radio Luxembourg", while in Germany she was suspected of being an "enemy" because of her work abroad and alleged "propaganda" against Nazism.
Since Siewert was considered a "half-Jew" in the Nazi terminology, she was banned from working on broadcast radio or in the press and subsequently had to be content with less well-endowed positions as a typist and translator.
Later that same year, after taking up a new position at the German legal publisher, an incident occurred that not only resulted in her immediate dismissal, but also a prison sentence: Siewert was denounced by two work colleagues for the seditious offence of "undermining the military force" (Wehrkraftzersetzung).
After an official medical examination, she was exempted from deployment to work crews outside Berlin because of her already compromised health, but was nevertheless assigned to "easier" jobs such as cable testing for AEG and the so-called "Aschinger taskforce".
This was a work crew in the Aschinger bread factory on the corner of Prenzlauer Allee and Saarbrücker Straße, in which the prisoners were used to clean vegetables, produce canned goods and similar activities.
For the remainder of the Second World War, she was primarily engaged in illegal work, she later reported, because due to her record as a political criminal, no company would keep her on for more than three months at a time.
[4] From her arrest in 1943 (at the latest) onwards, Siewert suffered from severe cardiovascular disease, which escalated to a heart attack in 1949 and necessitated constant medical care.
Siewert regarded many of her fellow Germans as "unreformable", and in her correspondence with Kurt Hiller she fatalistically complained: "It makes no sense as a reasonable person to try to steer this insane ship with a hostile crew, surrounded by the shadows of the costly dead" and "One should let those who neither deserve nor desire anything better simply go under.
In the letters exchanged between Siewert and Kurt Hiller in the year 1950, no working title was mentioned, but the book was repeatedly described as being about "gynephilia in women".
Siewert's second comedy, On Wednesday at Five (Am Mittwoch um fünf, 1955), was immediately accepted by the theatre section of the publishing house S. Fischer Verlag, but was apparently never performed.
For example, on 19 March 1957, to mark the "Day of Brotherhood", the Berlin broadcaster RIAS replayed a radio version of the story "Watchman" (Wächter) written by Siewert.
In the summer of 1947 she enthusiastically joined Hiller's German Socialist Freedom League (Freiheitsbund Deutscher Sozialisten or FDS) and willingly provided a room in her spacious apartment for the Berlin group's meetings.
In a letter to Hiller, she denied "anyone who was not permanently resident in Berlin in the 12 years after the end of the Second World War and was not active there in public (to a greater or lesser extent)" the right to criticize her "reluctance to attend any political party, group or manifestation".
She cynically asked if Hiller really thought it would make sense "in the face of avalanches to stake the little banner of the upright seven (it will hardly be much more) into the ground".
Around 2015, Wolfert increasingly turned his attention to unearthing the biographies of people from the second German homosexual rights movement (1950s) and came across the name Eva Siewert.
In 2018, research into the life and work of Siewert was conducted by a four-person project team based at the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in Berlin.
In cooperation with Wolfert, Sigrid Grajek, Martina Minette Dreier and Christine Olderdissen set up a "digital memorial room", which was completed in January 2019.
