Previously unpublished documents from eight decades – the event of the Dönhoff year! Marion Dönhoff never wrote her autobiography but did write an enormous number of letters, some very personal, which shed light on her life-story. Sensitively edited by two of the people closest to her, they are now published for the first time and illustrated with a quantity of photographs. Marion Dönhoff was not only a great journalist and author, she was also a highly gifted correspondent. The early letters concern life in East Prussia and her ancestral stately home while later ones deal with the war and her impending departure from her homeland. In her ‘second life’ in the West the Countess helped to build up Die Zeit and became a moral authority while always remaining frank and lively. As evidence of this, she wrote friends and family a wide variety of anecdotal descriptions of her everyday life and her travels, she penned encouraging letters to fans great and small and weighty, sometimes furious, expressions of her views to leading figures in politics and society. A compelling journey through a long life. For her centenary on 2 December 2009
About the author:
Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, born in Friedrichstein, East Prussia in 1909, studied economics in Frankfurt und Basle and managed her family property in East Prussia until 1945. After her now famous ‘ride to the West’ she made her mark on the weekly magazine Die Zeit as writer, editor-in- chief and publisher until her death in 2002. She published 25 books. The Editors: Irene Brauer, born in Salzwedel in 1944, was a close colleague of Marion Dönhoff at Die Zeit. Friedrich Dönhoff, born in 1967, lives and works as a writer in Hamburg. Hoffmann und Campe published his bestseller Die Welt ist so, wie man sie sieht. Erinnerungen an Marion Dönhoff (The world is how you look at it. Memories of Marion Dönhoff, 2002) and Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Reisebilder, Fotografien und Texte aus vier Jahrzehnten (Marion Countess Dönhoff: Travel Pictures, Photographs and Writings from four Decades, 2004), edited by Friedrich Dönhoff |
