Angela Rohr became a Soviet citizen out of conviction and denied all allegations during interrogations.
Photo: Archive
She was born in 1890 in Lower Austria as Angela Müller. In 1985 she died as Angela Rohr in Moscow at the age of 95. In between lies a cruel life of a century. The literature-loving girl loves Karl Kraus and literature and, after the family moved to Vienna, prefers to sit in Café Central, where the bohemians meet. Here she met the unsuccessful poet Leopold Hubermann, whom she married at the age of 19 – the time of hunger and deprivation that would last until the end of her long life began here.
Rainer Maria Rilke met her in a bookstore in Locarno on December 30, 1919; he has just come to Switzerland from Munich. She is now called Angela Guttmann after her second husband. Rilke is immediately fascinated by the “Russian” he thinks she is. She has no money and is seriously ill. They are a couple for a few months, but the young woman is more of a care case than a lover. In the spring of 1920 he left her behind in Locarno, not wanting to burden himself with her. For a long time, Rilke research believed that she died shortly after their separation.
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But no, she lived on for another 65 difficult years, went to Moscow with her third husband and was now called Angela Rohr. She had studied some medicine, so she worked as an assistant at the Tirmirjasev Institute and wrote feature articles for the “Frankfurter Zeitung” from 1928 to 1936. She was always looking for a strong faith; from Catholicism she came to Judaism, then to communism. She became a Soviet citizen out of conviction.
Then the double catastrophe: Stalinism no longer allowed anything cosmopolitan, but she described herself as a cosmopolitan. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, she was arrested in July 1941 and sentenced to five years in a prison camp and lifelong banishment for espionage as an enemy element (there was no distinction between Germans and Austrians, after all, Hitler was also Austrian). Two of the seven stories collected in the volume “Blood Feud” tell of the odyssey of transporting prisoners in the chaos of war to Siberia, which are supplemented by a biographical essay by editor Gesine Bey. Bey has already published “The Camp,” Rohr’s report on the years in the Gulag, at Aufbau-Verlag.
They are reports like those from Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from a House of the Dead.” The prisoners are crammed into railway carriages and driven around the country for days. Because of the cramped conditions they cannot sit, let alone lie down, and are almost completely without food or drink. Long walks from train stations to ever new prisons follow. They have to wait in front of these for hours until they are let in, as if these were saving hostels. But here they end up in showers where there is only cold water, are given lukewarm water soups, and are crammed into dark cellars with their clothes wet from disinfection.
Many die, but those still alive are so numb that they only marginally notice it. Looking back, the astonishment of this can be heard in “The Journey to the Promised Land”: “People died quietly and imperceptibly, they wasted away, and it had almost become a matter of course for us to acknowledge their deaths.”
How could this petite woman, only 1.50 meters tall, survive this never-ending period of horror? Maybe because she had already experienced hunger and hardship before. In the story “Encounter,” which is set in Paris, it says: “The time was tough, it made it difficult to breathe, it placed all of its burden on you.” Angela Rohr never overcomes this time, but she resists it with all her will to live.
During the interrogations, where everything revolved around her work for a German newspaper, she admitted nothing and, despite martial threats, did not sign a confession. That’s why she got “only” five years, which seemed ridiculously short to her fellow prisoners. Otherwise you could get 20 years in prison for trifles, like a farmer’s wife who heard that Hitler was a “beautiful man” and naively told people about it.
The “politicals”, mostly foreigners who don’t know why they are here, are treated worse by the guards than the criminals with whom they are on transport. The people from the population that the prisoner trek encounters insult them as traitors and saboteurs for whom every bite of bread is too good. They tend to show compassion for criminals, thieves and murderers.
In the 60s and 70s – Angela Rohr was released from “eternal exile” in 1957 and returned to Moscow – now living in a tiny room full of books in a Kommunalka, a communal apartment, she wrote down with astonishing meticulousness about the transport the Gulag: “Only in insane asylums do people find themselves so separated from the rest of the world, and it was clear to me that we were already insane, some less so, others more so.”
The stroke of luck: Since she had studied medicine, she was employed as a camp doctor, which increased her chances of survival. She reports about this in her book “The Camp”. How easily the trace of her life could have been lost if she had not started writing down her memories in the course of de-Stalinization, none of which she was able to publish in the Soviet Union. After all, in 1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” about the Gulag system was published there, which no one could now claim had never existed.
Angela Rohr does not remain unknown in Moscow artistic circles. Her Moscow acquaintances include the writer Konstantin Fedin and Sophie Liebknecht, Karl Liebknecht’s widow (she too had been a close friend of Rilke in Munich). Hans Martes from the Austrian embassy supplies them with coffee and medicine – and he also smuggles their manuscripts, which are now finally printed, out of the country.
Even though she is over 90, she still has a stethoscope at hand and treats residents for 10 rubles, thus improving her 45 ruble pension. She is not a broken person – a kind of inner prophecy keeps her going. And a candlestick that Rilke gave her and which has survived the test of time in obscure ways. This is her relic from a time long past, which she proudly shows off to visitors. Which doesn’t cloud her clear view of the poet who once left her behind in Locarno as an unwelcome burden, whom she describes in retrospect as a “snob” and “restless spirit” who had the “great going.” It sounds like a diagnosis of illness.
Angela Rohr: Blood revenge. Late stories. Ed. Gesine Bey. Basisdruck-Verlag, 210 pages, br., 22 €
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