Margret Boveri (1900–1975), »Tage des Überlebens. Berlin 1945« und Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971), »Deutschland, April 1945«. Doppelporträts und exemplarische Texte

In the organizer's words:

They were both children of the 1900s, they were both thoroughbred journalists and successful at a time when journalism was still largely a male domain. But that's where the similarities between Margret Boveri and Margaret Bourke-White end. Or to put it another way: both were witnesses to the end of the war in Germany in 1945, both wrote about it, but with completely different perspectives and assessments!

Margret Boveri, born in Würzburg in 1900, came from a highly educated family: her father was the biologist Theodor Boveri (1862-1915), one of the leading zoologists of his time. Her mother Marcella Boveri, née O'Grady (1863-1950), was herself a biologist and a scientific authority. Before she came to Germany for scientific reasons and met her future husband, O'Grady was the first woman ever to graduate from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The family home was intellectually networked in very different directions, so that daughter Margret, as the couple's only child, received a wide range of stimuli early on. As her mother returned to the USA a few years after Theodor Boveri's death, Margret Boveri also gained a great deal of experience in her mother's homeland. Gifted in music and languages, she completed a wide range of studies in the 1920s. In 1932, she obtained her doctorate in Berlin with a thesis on history. From 1933, she worked as a journalist, including for the "Frankfurter Zeitung" (FZ). Boveri undertook numerous trips abroad as a correspondent. She worked as a correspondent in New York until the USA entered the war against Nazi Germany in December 1941, then returned to Europe and worked from Lisbon and Madrid. After FC was banned, she returned to Berlin in the spring of 1944, where she wrote for the pro-regime newspaper "Das Reich", among others. Most of her diary from the end of the war was also written there.

Born in New York, Margaret Bourke-White was given the life motto "be unafraid" by her mother, to which she remained true throughout her life. She attended college, which was still unusual for young women in the USA at the time. After separating from her first husband, Bourke-White set up her own business at the end of the 1920s, initially as an architectural photographer. Increasingly successful, she began working for the newly founded magazine "Life" in 1936 and gained further renown with her socially critical photo reportages. She also traveled abroad frequently, which she also documented in photographs and texts. In 1942, she became the first woman to be officially authorized as a war correspondent for the US armed forces, continuing to work for "Life". Margaret Bourke-White arrived in Germany with the US troops in the spring of 1945. Her reports, including those from the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp, were later published as a book.

As part of the event series "80 years since the end of the war in Europe"

UNEQUAL WORDS. Victors and vanquished, liberators and liberated in Germany in 1945 - double portraits and exemplary texts

With Dr. Katja Schlenker and Prof. Dr. Winfrid Halder

When in the first months of 1945 the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition, led by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, completely conquered the territory of the then German Reich, finally defeated the German Wehrmacht and crushed the criminal Nazi regime, their soldiers and war correspondents encountered members of a nation at the political and moral low point of its entire history. Conversely, the Germans were confronted with the victors and liberators, most of whom seemed foreign to them after twelve years of dictatorship and widespread isolation. Initial impressions were recorded from both sides, the unfiltered directness of which is still impressive today. They also show that the subsequent path of "Western integration" of at least part of Germany, which was embarked upon with significant help from the USA and which opened the way to democracy and self-determination, was neither self-evident nor easy.

The series presents two people who met each other indirectly, less often directly, and recorded their experiences of the supposed "zero hour".