Maria Frisé

Maria von Loesch, the second of her parents' three recorded children, was born in Breslau (as Wrocław was known before 1945).[4] Ernst Heinrich von Loesch (1885-1943), her father was a land owner; and she grew up in Schloss Lorzendorf, the crenelated manor house at the heart of the family estates surrounding Lorzendorf, in the flatlands of Lower Silesia.[3] Her mother, born Martha von Boyneburgk (1894-1943), was a member of the aristocratic Zedlitz und Trützschler. Field Marshall Erich von Manstein was married to her father's first cousin, born Jutta-Sibylle von Loesch.[5] Prussian military values ran in the blood, and while her parents had no time either for the post-1918 republican government or for the National Socialists who took power in 1933, she did grow up steeped in the "nationalist patriotism" associated with late nineteenth century imperialism.[1][6]

She passed her "Reifeprüfung" (school final exams) when she was 18, in 1944, by which time there was a growing conviction that Germany would soon end up on the losing side in another World War. She married her cousin, Hans-Conrad Stahlberg (1914-1987), on 18 January 1945. After the civil ceremony at the town hall, one of the guests, Maria's uncle, the recently dismissed former Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, drove in his car to the nearby town to buy some fabric, returning with the grim report received from an army officer he had come across that the rest of German army had evacuated the area and a Soviet "tank spearhead" approximately ten kilometers to the east was likely to "thrust towards the Oder" before the day ended. The celebrants went ahead with the church ceremony, but there was no time for lengthy speeches at the banquet that had been laid out for the evening. After a quick toast as the rattling of moving tanks could be heard echoing in the distance to the east, the message came through on the telephone that there was still time to catch the last train to Breslau. Everything, including the wedding spread was left to be enjoyed by the Soviet soldiers and the wedding party squeezed into and onto the available cars, trucks and sleds, before heading for the local train station. Somehow space was found between the wounded war casualties who filled the carriages. The order for civilians to evacuate Breslau came through four days later, on 22 January 1945, and the westward flight continued.[5] As they started the journey, Stahlberg was an army officer, but they soon became just two among hundreds of anonymous homeless refugees trying to get away from the fighting. They stopped off briefly at Lüneburg Heath and briefly took refuge with "Uncle" Erich von Manstein.[lower-alpha 1] They now detoured north, ending up in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein where the couple made their home for the next twelve years.[1]

It was a time for new beginnings. By 1952 Maria Stahlberg had given birth to the couple's three sons, whom she looked after while her husband built a successful business career.[4] News came through that her father had died of Diphtheria back in 1945 in a refugee camp at Hoyerswerda, in what had become the Soviet occupation zone.[7] After her mother had died Maria had also taken on guardianship responsibilities for her much younger sister Christine .[4] The marriage lasted for twelve years, although from what Maria later wrote of it, it was a somewhat joyless union. In 1957 she married as her second husband the western author-journalist Adolf Frisé (1910-2003),[8][9] who helped her break in to the world of culture. Leaving her first husband meant leaving her sons: she later told an interviewer that she had written to them "almost every day".[1] She now began to contribute pieces of journalism to newspaper publishers and radio broadcasters.[3]

In 1968 Maria Frisé joined the staff of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a contributing editor,[8] working on the "Feuilleton" (arts and review) section.[10] She was operating in a milieu in which women were still rare. There were 152 contributing editors of whom 142 were men.[10] (By 2019 "only" 302 of the paper's 402 contributing editors were men.[10]) The office was nevertheless already familiar to her, since she had been visiting - at times two or three times in a week - to deliver and discuss contributions while working "as a freelancer" since the later 1950s. The staff were housed in a cramped building incongruously located in a commercial district of Frankfurt where used-car show rooms and tyre fitting stations seem to have predominated. The first day she arrived for work there was, initially, nowhere to sit; since the sick colleague, whose desk had temporarily been assigned in the "Feuilleton" department for the new staffer, had unexpectedly returned to work.[10] Nor was the initial salary of 1,000 marks per months generous: she had often earned three times as much as a free-lance journalist.[10] She seems at the time more or less to have accepted that the salary disparity arose because she had no university degree, rather than having to do with her gender. Nevertheless, there was much about the security of the permananent post that suited her, and she remained on the FAZ staff till 1991.[8][11]

• 1991 Hedwig Dohm award from the Association of women journalists. The prize was inauguurated in 1991, so Maria_Frisé was the first of its - till 2020 - 29 recipients. (The prize was not awarded in 1992.)[12]
• 1994 Andreas Gryphius Prize ("Ehrengabe" prize) for authors ... whose work reflects German culture and history in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, and ... contributes to understanding between Germany and its Eastern neighbors.
• 1996 Supplementary special Silesia Arts prize from the State of Lower Saxonuy