Maria Leitner (1892–1942)

Maria Leitner was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Varaždin, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and grew up in Budapest. She studied art history in Vienna and Berlin, and completed an internship at the Berlin gallery of the influential art dealer and editor Paul Cassirer. From 1913, she worked as a reporter for Budapest newspapers. Towards the end of World War I, she was a co-founder of the Young Communist League of Hungary and a member of the Communist Party. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, she and her brothers, who were all politically active, went into exile. She worked at the publishing house of the Communist Youth International in Berlin as a translator. In 1923, she published a translation into Hungarian of Jack London's novel The Iron Heel. From 1925 to 1930, she traveled through the USA, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, reporting on the working conditions of the people. She published her first novel, Hotel Amerika, in 1930; it was a success and appeared in Spanish and Polish translation. Her reportage was collected into a volume called Eine Frau reist durch die Welt (A Woman Travels the World, 1932). That year, she traveled through Germany and reported on the social and political conditions in small towns and villages, where she observed Nazi activities. In 1932-33, she published a series of articles as Women in the Storm of Time, on the life of eight Berliners "between workplace and dole," as the subtitle describes. After the Nazis rose to power in January 1933, she lived illegally in Germany for some time before leaving for Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then for Paris. However, she repeatedly sneaked back into Nazi Germany to report on, among other things, Hitler's secret preparations for war. These articles appeared from 1936 to 1939 in various Russian, French, and Czech publications. In 1937, she published her novel Elisabeth, ein Hitlermädchen, which revealed methods by which the Nazi Party manipulated young people. After the start of World War II, she was sent by the French authorities, together with other German refugees, to the Gurs internment camp in the French Pyrenees. She managed to escape to Marseille, where she lived clandestinely in extremely poor conditions. The International Rescue Committee and American Guild for Cultural Freedom attempted get her a visa for the USA, but she died in March 1942, before it could be obtained.