Ossietzky, Carl Von

Ossietzky, Carl von (fən ôsyĕt`skē), 1889–1938, German pacifist. A leader of the peace movement in Germany after World War I, he was editor of the antimilitarist weekly Weltbühne from 1927. Ossietzky was imprisoned (1932) for articles exposing secret rearmament in Germany. After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Ossietzky was sent to a concentration camp. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was removed (1936) to a prison hospital shortly before the announcement that he had been awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize. The German government protested and barred all Germans from future acceptance of a Nobel Prize. Still imprisoned, Ossietzky died two years later. His collected writings were published in an eight-volume German edition in 1995.

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Ossietzky, Carl Von 

Born Oct. 3, 1889, in Hamburg; died May 4, 1938, in Berlin. German journalist of Polish descent.

Ossietzky served in World War I. He organized a pacifist movement in Hamburg and was the founder of the weekly newspaper Die Revolution. In 1919 he became the secretary of the German Peace Society in Berlin. He was the political reviewer and, from 1927, the editor in chief of the journal Weltbühne. Ossietzky’s highly polemical articles were written in the best traditions of German political prose as exemplified by H. Heine and F. Mehring.

For his exposure of German militarism and his sympathy for the USSR, Ossietzky was accused of treason and imprisoned in the Sonnenburg concentration camp in 1933. T. Mann, R. Rolland, and H. Barbusse took part in a campaign to free him. When, in 1936, Ossietzky received the Nobel Prize for peace, the fascists were compelled to transfer the seriously ill writer to a hospital, where he died in 1938.

WORKS

Schriften, vols. 1–2. Berlin-Weimar, 1966.
Rechenschaft: Publizistik aus den Jahren 1913–1933. Berlin-Weimar, 1970.
The Stolen Republic. Berlin [1971].

REFERENCES

Krivulia, B. On nevavidel voinu: O K. Osetskom. Moscow, 1966.
Carl von Ossietzky. Berlin, 1949.
Frei, B. C. von Ossietzky: Ritter ohne Furcht und Tadel. Berlin-Weimar, 1966.
Maud von Ossietzky erzählt: Ein Lebensbild. Berlin, 1966.

B. E. CHISTOVA