Grete De Francesco | |
---|---|
Born | Margarethe Weissenstein November 5, 1893 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
Died | February/March 1945 probably in Ravensbrück concentration camp |
Occupation | Author |
Subject | Charlatanism |
Notable works | The Power of the Charlatan |
Spouse | Giulio De Francesco |
Grete De Francesco (born Margarethe Weissenstein; 5 November 1893, Vienna, Austria-Hungary – February/March 1945, probably in the Ravensbrück concentration camp) was a German-speaking writer.
Her book Die Macht des Charlatans from 1937 is internationally regarded as a scientific standard and reference work on the topic of charlatanism. It was translated to English (The Power of the Charlatan) in 1939. In the 1930s, De Francesco wrote a large number of cultural studies essays on border areas of medicine for the in-house journal of the Basel-based Ciba Group.
Margarethe Weissenstein was the oldest of three daughters of the Jewish couple Else and Emanuel Weissenstein. Her father was general director of the Vereinigte Jutefabriken in Vienna and Budapest. She studied in Munich, married Giulio De Francesco, an engineer from the South Tyrolean Rovereto, lived with him in Milan, then since the mid-twenties in Berlin, where she became the first female graduate at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik with her diploma thesis "The Face of Italian Fascism" (1931). She wrote features for the Frankfurter Zeitung and was in contact with Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim and Albert Salomon. In 1932 she was a member of the editorial board for a short time, afterwards she wrote as a freelancer, partly also under the pseudonym Anton Pacher and continued to provide contributions to the paper. From 1933, she lived as a permanent border crosser between Vienna, Prague, Paris, Basel, Zurich and Milan, which had been under German occupation since September 1943. She was spied on and sought refuge in Upper Italian mountain villages, and she hid for several months in a madhouse for women, but then returned to her Milan apartment, where she was arrested by the SS in October 1944. Through the Bolzano transit camp she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944, where she was probably killed in February 1945. [1] [2]
Until 2023, there was no public portrait photo of De Francesco. In March 2023, the Italian Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea published photos from a personal correspondence by De Francesco. [3]
A stolperstein will be put in via Renato Fucini 5 in Milan on March 7, 2024. [4]
Grete De Francesco | |
---|---|
Born | Margarethe Weissenstein November 5, 1893 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
Died | February/March 1945 probably in Ravensbrück concentration camp |
Occupation | Author |
Subject | Charlatanism |
Notable works | The Power of the Charlatan |
Spouse | Giulio De Francesco |
Grete De Francesco (born Margarethe Weissenstein; 5 November 1893, Vienna, Austria-Hungary – February/March 1945, probably in the Ravensbrück concentration camp) was a German-speaking writer.
Her book Die Macht des Charlatans from 1937 is internationally regarded as a scientific standard and reference work on the topic of charlatanism. It was translated to English (The Power of the Charlatan) in 1939. In the 1930s, De Francesco wrote a large number of cultural studies essays on border areas of medicine for the in-house journal of the Basel-based Ciba Group.
Margarethe Weissenstein was the oldest of three daughters of the Jewish couple Else and Emanuel Weissenstein. Her father was general director of the Vereinigte Jutefabriken in Vienna and Budapest. She studied in Munich, married Giulio De Francesco, an engineer from the South Tyrolean Rovereto, lived with him in Milan, then since the mid-twenties in Berlin, where she became the first female graduate at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik with her diploma thesis "The Face of Italian Fascism" (1931). She wrote features for the Frankfurter Zeitung and was in contact with Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim and Albert Salomon. In 1932 she was a member of the editorial board for a short time, afterwards she wrote as a freelancer, partly also under the pseudonym Anton Pacher and continued to provide contributions to the paper. From 1933, she lived as a permanent border crosser between Vienna, Prague, Paris, Basel, Zurich and Milan, which had been under German occupation since September 1943. She was spied on and sought refuge in Upper Italian mountain villages, and she hid for several months in a madhouse for women, but then returned to her Milan apartment, where she was arrested by the SS in October 1944. Through the Bolzano transit camp she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944, where she was probably killed in February 1945. [1] [2]
Until 2023, there was no public portrait photo of De Francesco. In March 2023, the Italian Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea published photos from a personal correspondence by De Francesco. [3]
A stolperstein will be put in via Renato Fucini 5 in Milan on March 7, 2024. [4]