Marion Dönhoff was a German journalist and author. She was a best-selling author whose essays and commentary were respected well beyond Germany.
Background
Marion Dönhoff was born on December 2, 1909 in Friedrichstein, East Prussia. She was the daughter of August Graf Donhoff and Ria (von Lepel) Dönhoff, lady-in-waiting to Empress Augusta Victoria. Dönhoff was the youngest of seven children born to an aristocratic East Prussian family traceable to the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Donhoff’s father, who died when she was ten, had served as a sergeant in the Royal Hussars in the Austrian War of 1866. He later held posts with the foreign service in Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna, London, and Washington, D.C.
Education
Marion Dönhoff attended the University of Frankfurt, where she found both socialist and communist friends. After Hitler attained power in January 1933, the students were forced out of the university. Donhoff left to study with the economist Edgar Salin. In 1935 she graduated from the University of Basel.
Upon receiving her degree, Marion Dönhoff was called home to manage the family estates because of the surety that the male members would be joining the war that was to come. When Hitler declared war Donhoff and her cousin Heini Lehndorff were assigned to recruit opposition and leaders who would head a future East Prussian government. On July 20, 1944, when an effort to assassinate Hitler failed, people marked for the new leadership, including Heini, were arrested and executed. Donhoff was questioned and released to return home to Friedrichstein, where, as the Red Army drew near she had to contend with the deluge of refugees from the east. This, and her ensuing departure for the West is the focus of her book "Names Which No One Remembers".
Settling in Hamburg, then under British occupation, she became a journalist when she was invited to join the staff of the fledgling liberal paper "Die Zeit". The first edition of the weekly went to press in February 1946, just nine months after the end of the war. Some of the staff slept in the building where they worked. Writing about politics and foreign policy, and working 12 to 15 hours a day, Marion Dönhoff, known to colleagues as "The Countess", quickly established her authority as the paper's political editor.
In 1972, aged 63, she retired from the editorship and became Die Zeit's publisher until her death in 2002. She continued to write energetically, producing articles as well as books - including ones about South Africa, America, German politics and her childhood in East Prussia. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 she travelled several times to Russia and Poland.
Marion Dönhoff was a liberal in the European tradition, a conservative who believed that capitalism needed to be ''civilized'' by a social conscience. She was a force for German reunification and, as someone with roots in the German lands to the east lost after 1945, a strong supporter of Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik of rapprochement with the country's neighbors to the east. Yet she raised an early voice for Germany's acceptance of its truncated eastern borders when most Germans had yet to reconcile themselves to them.
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1990
Personality
Marion Dönhoff could be severe, unforgiving and reserved, but when she got to know people well, she was capable of genuine warmth and unselfishness.