August Hermann Zeiz

German writer August Hermann Zeiz first worked as a journalist in Berlin for newspapers in the Ullstein publishing house and for the Berliner Tageblatt. During World War I he regularly wrote letters from the Western front to Theodor Wolff, the chief editor of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Wolff made a war diary from the letters and put Zeiz’ impressions directly in his paper. His impressions portrayed the hard-hitting everyday life of front soldiers, including the message to promote humanity instead of the language of war guns. In the 1930s, Zeiz published poems and novels and wrote comedies under the pseudonym Georg Fraser, while from 1941-45 he worked under the pseudonym Jean Barlatier. In 1934, he emigrated to Austria.

As the husband of a Jewess Zeiz was protected until 1943 by the Nazi cultural functionary Hans Hinkel, a German journalist and ministerial official in the Third Reich. Nevertheless, as the head of an Austrian publisher in 1938-39, Zeiz was eventually arrested. When released he led a double life as a playwright and helped Jews with shelter and to escape the Nazis. In early 1943, Zeiz was discovered and transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, while his wife was murdered at the same time at concentration camp Auschwitz. After World War II, his character broken, he had little success, his resistance work remained largely unnoticed, and he suffered from depression and memory loss. At the end of the 1950s he withdrew from active life and died, totally forgotten, in Berlin in 1964. Only in 1977 was Zeiz’s memory rehabilitated by Austrian authorities.