Hertha Pauli

Hertha Ernestine Pauli was born in Vienna, the daughter of feminist Bertha Schütz and chemist Wolfgang Pauli. Her brother was Wolfgang Pauli, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1945.

From 1927 to 1933 she played different small roles at the Max Reinhardt Theatre in Berlin and was allied with Ödön von Horváth. From 1933 to 1938 she lived in Vienna, edited the "Österreichische Korrespondenz" and published biographical novels, for example about the feminist Bertha von Suttner.[1]

After the Anschluss she emigrated to France. In Paris she belonged to the circle of Joseph Roth, knew the American journalist Eric Sevareid, and wrote for Resistance. In 1940, after the Nazis occupied France, she fled with the writer Walter Mehring through Marseilles, the Pyrenees and Lisbon. With the aid of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, she made her way to the United States.[2]

After her arrival in America she described her flight in the journal Aufbau.[3][4][5] In the following years she wrote books about Alfred Nobel and the Statue of Liberty. Her books for children, in particular, had some success. These books included "Silent Night. The Story of a Song" (1943), in which she explained the origin of the carol. She married Ernst Basch (pen name E.B. Ashton), with whom she had collaborated on I Lift My Lamp. Her last book was autobiographical and described the time after the Nazi's union with France.[6] She died in Long Island, New York.

• Toni. Ein Frauenleben für Ferdinand Raimund, 1936
• Nur eine Frau. Bertha von Suttner, 1937
• Alfred Nobel, Dynamite King, Architect of Peace, 1942
• Silent Night. The Story of a Song", 1943
• Story of the Christmas Tree, 1944
• St. Nicholas Travels, 1946
• I Lift my Lamp, The Way of a Symbol, 1948
• The Golden Door, 1949
• Three Is a Family, 1955
• Bernadette and the Lady, 1956
• Her Name Was Sojourner Truth
• The Secret of Sarajevo: The Story of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, 1966
• Break of Time, 1972

• Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period, edited by Sibylle Quack, David Lazar, Christof Mauch. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Marino, Andy, American Pimpernel: The Man who Saved the Artists on Hitler's Death List. Hutchinson, 1999.
• Pfanner, Helmut F., Exile in New York: German and Austrian Writers After 1933. Wayne State University Press, 1983.
• Stern, Guy, 'Hertha Pauli'. In: Stern, Guy, Literatur im Exil, Bd.2. Ismaning 1989.

Media related to Hertha Pauli at Wikimedia Commons

• "Eine Brücke über den Riss der Zeit...". Das Leben und Wirken der Journalistin und Schriftstellerin Hertha Pauli
• The German and Jewish intellectual émigré collection of the university at Albany: (The German and Jewish intellectual émigré collection)
• Works by or about Hertha Pauli in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Hertha Pauli (in German) from the archive of the Österreichische Mediathek