Bodo Uhse (12 March 1904 – 2 July 1963) was a German writer, journalist and communist political activist. He was recognised as one of the most prominent authors in East Germany.Josie McLellan, Antifascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades, 1945-1989, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 68
Early years Uhse came from a Prussian Junker family with a long tradition of military service.McLellan, Antifascism and Memory in East Germany, p. 32 In his early years Uhse was associated with the agrarian movement and was considered to be on the far-right of this group.Ruth Liepman, Maybe luck isn't just chance, Northwestern University Press, 1997, p. 29 This was evidenced by his involvement with the extremist Landvolkbewegung of Schleswig-Holstein.Timothy Scott Brown, Weimar radicals: Nazis and communists between authenticity and performance, Berghahn Books, 2009, p. 179 He took part in the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920. In 1927 he became a member of the Nazi Party as a protege of Gregor Strasser. He remained a member until 1930, when he joined the Communist Party of Germany under the influence of Bruno von Salomon (the elder brother of writer Ernst von Salomon). During his Nazi membership he became editor to the Nazi party newspaper in Ingolstadt.Jean Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, Verso, 2006, p. 52
Communism After the Reichstag fire in 1933 he fled to Paris, where he was in contact with Ernst Niekisch. At the first International Writers Congress in Paris in 1935 he met Bertolt Brecht and Johannes R. Becher (both of whom would also later become prominent East German writers). Uhse spent the rest of the 1930s in exile in Prague where he wrote for Neue Deutsche Blätter, a German language journal that was sympathetic to communismPhilip Payne, Graham Bartram, Galin Tikhanov, A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil, Camden House, 2007, p. 83 as well as in Paris with Bruno von Salomon.Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 697 During this time he was involved in the establishment of the Free German University, a Paris-based body that involved both the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany.Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 211 In 1936 Uhse was one of a number of exiled dissidents to be declared ausgebürgert (deprived of German citizenship) by the Nazi regime.Palmier, Weimar in exile, p. 235
During the Spanish Civil War, he served as an officer in the International Brigades and wrote regularly about the conflict, with some of his work even smuggled into Nazi Germany.James MacPherson Ritchie, German Literature under National Socialism, pp. 176-177 His experiences in Spain and as a former member of the Nazi Party led him to write the 1944 novel Leutnant Bertram, which dealt with a Condor Legion pilot switching sides to the Republicans. The novel was a success and was translated into several languages.MacPherson Ritchie, German Literature under National Socialism, Taylor & Francis, 1983, p. 184
Mexico In 1939, he accepted an invitation from the League of American Writers to join some other German dissidents in the United States but, despite settling there briefly, Uhse and other communist writers soon left, feeling uncomfortable in the United States due to the prevalence of anti-communist attitudes.Palmier, Weimar in Exile, pp. 574-575 Uhse finally settled in Mexico in 1940, becoming part of a large group of emigrant German writers and thinkers who made their home in the capital Mexico City.Conrad Kent, Thomas Wolber, Cameron M. K. Hewitt, The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on German-Spanish Relations over the Centuries, Berghahn Books, 2000, p. 32 During this time, his brother, pilot Hans-Jürgen Uhse (1908-1944) married Beate Uhse-Rotermund, test pilot and later sex shop pioneer.
Within Mexico City Uhse found a number of like-minded exiles including Alexander Abusch, Ludwig Renn and Egon Erwin Kisch.Kristin Ruggiero, The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, Sussex Academic Press, 2010, p. 10 Here he co-founded the influential exile journal Freies Deutschland along with Renn, Kisch and André Simone, and served as co-editor of this review from its 1942 foundation.Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 373 His time in Mexico was chronicled in his diary, Mexicanische Erzahlungen, published in 1957.
East Germany
After marrying the Jewish Lithuanian-American divorcee Alma Agee (second wife of James Agee) in 1945, Uhse left Mexico in 1948 to settle in East Germany, where he immediately joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.Stephen Parker & Matthew Philpotts, Sinn und Form: The Anatomy of a Literary Journal, Walter de Gruyter, 2009, p. 180 He became the editor in chief of the East German monthly cultural journal Aufbau in 1949, holding the position until 1958 when he was sacked as part of a wider purge of East German cultural life.Parker & Philpotts, Sinn und Form, p. 160 His stepson Joel Agee later wrote a memoir about his family life, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (1981).
Uhso was a member of the People's Chamber and became the first chairman of the German Writers' Association, a position that he held from 1950 to 1952.
In 1954 Uhse joined the Literature Section of the German Academy of Arts, the most influential cultural body in the East.Parker & Philpotts, Sinn und Form, p. 146 In 1963 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the influential literary magazine Sinn und Form.Parker & Philpotts, Sinn und Form, p. 168 Uhse, who was suffering from severe ill health due to a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking, died after only a few months in the post.Parker & Philpotts, Sinn und Form, p. 181
Selected works Söldner und Soldat, 1935 (Mercenary and Soldier; novel) Leutnant Bertram, 1944 (Lieutenant Bertram, a Novel of the Nazi Luftwaffe, 1944) The Shadow Thrower, 1945 Wir Söhne, 1948 (We Sons; novel) Die heilige Kunigunde im Schnee und andere Erzählungen, 1949 (Saint Kunigunde in the Snow and Other Stories) Landung in Australien: Reisebericht, 1950 (Arrival in Australian: A Travelogue) Die Brücke: 3 Erzählungen, 1952 (The Bridge: 3 Stories) Die Patrioten, 1954 (The Patriots; novel) Tagebuch aus China, 1956 (Diary from China) Mexikanische Erzählungen, 1957 (Mexican Stories) Die Aufgabe: Eine Kollwitz-Erzählung, 1958 (The Task: A Kollwitz Story) Gestalten und Probleme, 1959 (Figures and Problems) Reise in einem blauen Schwan: Erzählungen, 1959 (Trip Inside a Blue Swan: Stories) Sonntagsträumerei in der Alameda, 1961 (Sunday Dreamings in the Alameda) Im Rhythmus der Conga: Ein kubanischer Sommer, 1962 (To the Beat of the Conga: A Cuban Summer)
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