Hermynia zur Mühlen(Hermynia Zur Mühlen, born Hermine Isabelle Maria Folliot de Crenneville¸ Franziska Maria Rautenberg, Franziska Maria Tenberg, Traugott Lehmann and Lawrence H. Desberry)
Hermynia zur Mühlen(Hermynia Zur Mühlen, born Hermine Isabelle Maria Folliot de Crenneville¸ Franziska Maria Rautenberg, Franziska Maria Tenberg, Traugott Lehmann and Lawrence H. Desberry)
Sie können sich denken, wie schön es ist, „draussen“ zu sein, wenngleich man mit schwerem Herzen an die vielen Zurückgelassenen (…) denkt (…).
[You can imagine how wonderful it is to be "outside", even though my heart is heavy when I think of the many people left behind (...) (ed. trans.)]
Hermynia zur Mühlen after her onward flight from Czechoslovakia to Britain, letter to the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, 1 July 1939
Austrian writer Hermynia zur Mühlen had been living in Germany since 1919. She was known as the "Red Countess" because of her commitment to Communism, from which she subsequently dissociated herself while in exile. She published novels, short prose works, children's books, juvenile literature and radio plays besides translating from English, French and Russian into German. In April 1933, her Austrian homeland became her first place of refuge.
From Vienna, zur Mühlen continued her journalistic denunciation of National Socialism and played an active part in various writers' organisations. When her German publisher advised her to stop her political activism in order to avoid being seen as a traitor in Germany, she publicly refused to do so. The major exile publishers rejected her novel Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen [Our Daughters, the Nazis] (Gsur-Verlag, 1935), written in 1934, on political grounds.
Shortly after the annexation of Austria, zur Mühlen fled to Czechoslovakia. Since book sales in Germany and Austria were no longer possible, she was forced to rely on newspaper commissions. In January 1939, the aid organisation American Guild for German Cultural Freedom granted her a three-month fellowship so that she could continue working on a fiction project that was to encompass multiple volumes.
From April to June 1939, zur Mühlen fled through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy and France to Britain, where she continued her writing and anti-Nazi activism despite poor health and difficult financial circumstances. A permanent return to Austria was out of the question.
Selected works:
Reise durch ein Leben (Roman, 1933)
Ein Jahr im Schatten (Roman, 1935)
Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen (Roman, 1935)
Als der Fremde kam (Roman, 1947)
Further reading:
Manfred Altner: Hermynia zur Mühlen. Eine Biographie, Bern 1997
Hermynia zur Mühlen: Werke. Im Auftrag der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung und der Wüstenrot Stiftung ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Ulrich Weinzierl; mit einem Essay von Felicitas Hoppe, Wien: Zsolnay, 2019. (4 Bände)
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