Obituary – Peggy Parnass is dead for everyone

Peggy Parnass has told many stories in the course of their lives. Including some about their childhood in National Socialist Germany, where they grew up in poor conditions in Hamburg. “Every day” was “a fear of fear”, she wrote decades later, in 1979, in an autobiographical story. In 1937, when she was ten years old, neighboring children had dragged her into a stairwell. They “pushed me against the wall and kept screaming in the choir what’s injecting from the knife”. Her then two -year -old little brother Gady »Throughout the other children on the street and jumped around on him. As a punishment because he is a Jew «.

But the role of the victim for whom she was intended displeased Peggy early, obviously already stimulated in childhood a considerable spirit of resistance in her: »Everywhere it was on describes what we were not allowed to do, and we did it anyway. Set a bank in the park, although ‘forbidden for Jews’. And then eat it as if the butt was baked. “

Peggy’s mother ignored the Nazi laws at that time, went to eat ice cream or to the swimming pool with the children, although this was strictly forbidden and, in the event of her discovery, she had to expect serious consequences. Finally, in 1939, the parents ensured that their eleven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, Peggy and Gady, were able to escape the Nazi extermination machine with the last children’s transport after Sweden. “Mutti took us to the train, Hamburg Central Station. Since then I hate the train station even more than other train stations. I can’t see any trains either without getting sick. ”When the parents were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, the neighbors divided the family possession of the family among themselves.

Until the military defeat of Hitler Germany, Peggy and her brother, who were sometimes separated from each other and were sometimes also exposed to psychological abuse, were smuggled through various foster families and orphan houses in Sweden and England. Her parents were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942 – as Jews, foreigners and leftists – as Parented Sarcastic.

Peggy Parnass, who, born, accepted the Swedish citizenship after the end of the war, decided to live in her hometown of Hamburg in the early 1950s and moved to the St. Georg station district, where she lived for many decades. At times she lived in a shared apartment with the writer and “student courier” founder Peter Rühmkorf and “specifically” founder Klaus Rainer Röhl. “With them she lived in this country as if it were different, one away from its truth and its unbearable population,” writes one of her confidants, the former RAF militant and today’s publisher Karl-Heinz Dellwo, in a guest post on “Zeit Online”.

“The processes I wanted to see were not managed.”

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Parneass, who felt like that of the city’s left -wing boheme (“Lauter fragrant people”) early, was a lot: writer, columnist, court reporter for “concrete”, translator, singer on cabarets, actress, but above all feminist, human rightsist, anti -fascist, cosmopolitan, war opponent, pacifist for The Queere Community of Hamburg as well as for the grubs of the city, which were nominated and sorted out of capitalism. She, who was naturally with everyone, was of course “you”, as she once wrote in a foreword to one of her books, “longing for a society that is a bit softer. So that you don’t need the thick fur that I don’t have. “

The experiences that Parseass had to have in Hamburg in the post -war period were sobering. One exemplary scene is described here: When the died of exile, which she returned from exile, the milk shop she knew from the time of her childhood, intention to confront the owner of the business, who once had Peggy mother with the words that she “did not sell to Jewish pigs”, waited the milk lady until all customers had left her shop. “Then she said: ‘Oh, your dear mother, this love, dear woman, how often I thought of her.’ I couldn’t say a word, I was just bad.”

From the mid-1960s, Peggy Parnass worked as an actress in television and film productions. Former than others, before the social departure of 1968, when numerous National Socialists were still in office in the FRG and were still in office and dignity, she also urged to deal with the Nazi past and the Holocaust. The journalist Sharon Adler announced her in a conversation last year what reasons she had to neglect her acting career: »I was always concerned with the Nazi criminals. I thought I could get the perpetrators. My girlfriend Ulrike Meinhof and I agreed and I tried to persuade her to go to court to write about it. At that time she was at the ›Frankfurter Rundschau‹. But she said: ›Peggy, if that’s so important to you, then go.‹ She had a lot to do. The next day I was in court. “

In the period that followed, as a court reporter in the 1970s and 80s, she had to have the bitter experience that peak criminals were punished as former Nazis that had tortured and murdered numerous people (which should not be surprised in view of the fact that many Nazi jurists were still active), and finally drew a summary that was shaped by disillusioning: “The processes that I wanted are not led. made. To date, most Nazis have not been convicted and have been able to live in Germany for decades. «

In an interview with the “taz”, she commented on the occasion of the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean in 2019: “People said: ‘You have never experienced anything like this.’ We as Jews wrote down everywhere, please let us come, we will otherwise be murdered, every child knew that. No. No country wanted us. All the Jews who were murdered could live if the countries hadn’t closed. It’s not that new. “

For Parneass, which had a “permanent ambiguity relationship with Germany”, as the “FAZ” put it in its obituary, a nationality was something “into which you are born into born”. In 1986 she wrote in an autobiographical text: »I feel at home in friends. For me, people are most likely. So far, the word home was not a concept for me, not at all. “

In January 1990, following this credo, she criticized the “German-German drunkness” and the “damn nationalism, which is repeatedly spilled” and which was a “juicy swamp for radical right-wing”. Back then, she also wrote: »What do I want? That the GDR remains autonomous. A European unity. A world unit. But not a capitalist. Solidarity with the weak, solidarity with the environment. Everyone for everyone. I want socialism that has never existed until today. “

The right -wing radicals are sitting in parliament today, and the utopia of the “world unit” and socialism are likely to have moved far away. However, which makes the formulated wishes no less up -to -date.

Ruth Peggy Sophie Parnass, who was “equipped with a lot of compassion” (“FAZ”), died last Wednesday in Hamburg at the age of 97. On the occasion of her death, Karl-Heinz Dellwo announced: »Peggy Parnass leaves an extensive, autobiographical literary work. When ›Little Radical Minority‹, as she saw herself, she often stood unplure for a radical emancipation of humans and for socially outlawed minorities, especially for the gay movement. «