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Olga Benario
Benario-Prestes, Olga ; Biographie
456 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
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63 people want to read
About the author
Ruth Werner
24 books3 followersPseudonym von Ursula Maria Kuczynski; weitere Namen (nach Heirat): Ursula Hamburger, Ursula Beurton
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 17, 2022
This is a novel about the life of the German communist Olga Benario (1908-1942). Today she is almost unknown in Germany, but well known in Brazil.
The author was a former Soviet secret agent named Ursula Kuczynski. When she retired in East Berlin, she wrote books under the pseudonym Ruth Werner. This book was incredibly popular in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), kind of like Stalinist YA fiction.
This is a novel and not a scientific work, but it is nonetheless based on interviews with like 60 people who knew Benario. Kuczynski / Werner even managed to interview Benario's husband Luis Carlos Prestes and her daughter Anita Leocádia Prestes when they visited East Berlin.
Olga Benario's life, which took her from Munich to Berlin to Moscow to Rio de Janeiro and back to Berlin, is fascinating. At 20, she was part of a spectacular armed action to free her boyfriend from a Berlin courtroom. Later she was assigned to Luis Carlos Prestes as a bodyguard to help prepare an uprising in Brazil. After that failed, she was deported to Nazi Germany and murdered in a gas chamber. (You can read more about her biography in my anticapitalist Berlin guide book.)
As a historian, I enjoyed the details from Berlin-Neukölln in the 1920s. When Olga first visits the communist bar at Zietenstraße 29, a few years after the Communist Youth International was founded in the back room, she excitedly asks barkeep Wilhelm Müller where Karl Liebknecht used to sit. "On a chair," he tells her.
That said, the book is very much a product of the Ulbricht Era in the GDR. Like the barely unwatchable films about Ernst Thälmann, Benario is presented as a communist saint. A lot of the book is dedicated to the author and other characters commenting how smart, brave, hardworking, and humble Olga is. We don't get very complex characters. One member of the Neukölln Communist Youth is even referred to by the nickname "the complainer" — and what do you think he does?
The social conservatism is annoying, like when Olga reprimands a young girl for kissing too many boys. But the worst part is the Stalinist-reformist program. Olga bemoans, for example, that Communists in Germany had not been sufficiently patriotic. When she gets to Brazil, the plan for the insurrection depends entirely on the support of the patriotic sector of the bourgeoisie. The abject failure of this plan is not explained politically — rather, it's just a case of individual betrayal.
Parts of the book are very annoying. But the last 100 pages, covering the five years Benario spent in Nazi prisons and concentration camps, are profoundly moving. In this hopeless situation, it is impossible to be perfect. Instead, Olga suffers endlessly from the separation from her husband and daughter. Faced with the increasing certainly of death, she tries to keep her head up — she is always reminding people that even small acts of humanity are acts of antifascist resistance.
In our current moment, when national chauvinism is on the rise, I liked reading about a Czech communist in the camp who told new prisoners how important it was to share some of their rations with German communist prisoners. Otherwise, she said, the Nazis would accomplish their goal by breaking links of international solidarity.
If I'm seeing right, this book has been published in German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, but never in English.
The author was a former Soviet secret agent named Ursula Kuczynski. When she retired in East Berlin, she wrote books under the pseudonym Ruth Werner. This book was incredibly popular in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), kind of like Stalinist YA fiction.
This is a novel and not a scientific work, but it is nonetheless based on interviews with like 60 people who knew Benario. Kuczynski / Werner even managed to interview Benario's husband Luis Carlos Prestes and her daughter Anita Leocádia Prestes when they visited East Berlin.
Olga Benario's life, which took her from Munich to Berlin to Moscow to Rio de Janeiro and back to Berlin, is fascinating. At 20, she was part of a spectacular armed action to free her boyfriend from a Berlin courtroom. Later she was assigned to Luis Carlos Prestes as a bodyguard to help prepare an uprising in Brazil. After that failed, she was deported to Nazi Germany and murdered in a gas chamber. (You can read more about her biography in my anticapitalist Berlin guide book.)
As a historian, I enjoyed the details from Berlin-Neukölln in the 1920s. When Olga first visits the communist bar at Zietenstraße 29, a few years after the Communist Youth International was founded in the back room, she excitedly asks barkeep Wilhelm Müller where Karl Liebknecht used to sit. "On a chair," he tells her.
That said, the book is very much a product of the Ulbricht Era in the GDR. Like the barely unwatchable films about Ernst Thälmann, Benario is presented as a communist saint. A lot of the book is dedicated to the author and other characters commenting how smart, brave, hardworking, and humble Olga is. We don't get very complex characters. One member of the Neukölln Communist Youth is even referred to by the nickname "the complainer" — and what do you think he does?
The social conservatism is annoying, like when Olga reprimands a young girl for kissing too many boys. But the worst part is the Stalinist-reformist program. Olga bemoans, for example, that Communists in Germany had not been sufficiently patriotic. When she gets to Brazil, the plan for the insurrection depends entirely on the support of the patriotic sector of the bourgeoisie. The abject failure of this plan is not explained politically — rather, it's just a case of individual betrayal.
Parts of the book are very annoying. But the last 100 pages, covering the five years Benario spent in Nazi prisons and concentration camps, are profoundly moving. In this hopeless situation, it is impossible to be perfect. Instead, Olga suffers endlessly from the separation from her husband and daughter. Faced with the increasing certainly of death, she tries to keep her head up — she is always reminding people that even small acts of humanity are acts of antifascist resistance.
In our current moment, when national chauvinism is on the rise, I liked reading about a Czech communist in the camp who told new prisoners how important it was to share some of their rations with German communist prisoners. Otherwise, she said, the Nazis would accomplish their goal by breaking links of international solidarity.
If I'm seeing right, this book has been published in German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, but never in English.
November 30, 2022
Qué importantes son estos libros que recuerdan a figuras como Olga Benario, militante comunista alemana.
Olga luchó y practicó el internacionalismo en Alemania, Unión Soviética y Brasil, donde finalmente fue detenida. Extraditada a la Alemania nazi, murió asesinada en un campo de concentración.
Olga luchó y practicó el internacionalismo en Alemania, Unión Soviética y Brasil, donde finalmente fue detenida. Extraditada a la Alemania nazi, murió asesinada en un campo de concentración.
October 14, 2024
Was für eine revolutionäre Geschichte. Ich lerne nicht aus, was die kommunistische Bewegung betrifft. Absolut empfehlenswert trotz vieler Druckfehler, aber das liegt wohl an der Ausgabe.
° Olga Benario, 1908 als Tochter eines jüdischen Rechtsanwalt in München geboren, tritt mit Fünfzehn in die Kommunistische Jugend ein. 1927 in Berlin verhaftet, flieht sie nach Moskau und später nach Brasilien, um die Revolution vorzubereiten. An die Gestapo ausgeliefert, wird Olga Benario 1942 vergast. Ruth Werners Romanbiographie erzählt das bewegende Schicksal einer Frau, die ihren politischen Idealen bis zu ihrem Tod treu blieb.°
° Olga Benario, 1908 als Tochter eines jüdischen Rechtsanwalt in München geboren, tritt mit Fünfzehn in die Kommunistische Jugend ein. 1927 in Berlin verhaftet, flieht sie nach Moskau und später nach Brasilien, um die Revolution vorzubereiten. An die Gestapo ausgeliefert, wird Olga Benario 1942 vergast. Ruth Werners Romanbiographie erzählt das bewegende Schicksal einer Frau, die ihren politischen Idealen bis zu ihrem Tod treu blieb.°
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews