Elizabeth Wiskemann
Encyclopedia
Elizabeth Wiskemann was an English
journalist
and historian
of Anglo-German ancestry.
, Kent
, on 13 August 1899, the youngest child of Heinrich Odomar Hugo Wiskemann (who had emigrated to England
in the 1860s) and his wife Emily Burton. She was educated at Notting Hill High School
and at Newnham College, Cambridge
. She obtained a first in History
in 1921 and thereafter worked for a PhD
, only to be disappointed when her thesis
on Napoleon III and the Roman Question gained only an MLitt (a disappointment which she ascribed to the prejudice of one of her examiners).
She first visited Berlin
in 1930 and was fascinated by what she saw of German
life in the last years of the Weimar Republic
, so different from the sedate and insular academic life of Cambridge
. Thereafter she spent roughly six months of each year in Germany
until 1936, dividing her time between teaching history at Cambridge and her journalistic career. In Berlin she made many friends with many Germans but also with the leading British journalists in the German capital, among them Frederick Voigt and Norman Ebbutt
. She became involved in German politics
and became an ardent opponent of National Socialism, and was soon writing articles on German affairs for a number of periodicals, including the New Statesman
. Although her warnings about the nature of the Nazis went apparently unheeded by British officialdom, Wiskemann gained a reputation as an outspoken critic of Nazism, not least among the Nazis and she was arrested by the Gestapo
and expelled from Germany in July 1936.
After her expulsion from the Third Reich Wiskemann continued to devote her energies to writing and journalism and was commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1937 to make a study of the ethnic Germans living within the borders of Czechoslovakia
. The fruits of this study appeared as Czechs and Germans in 1938 and was followed a year later by her second book, Undeclared War (1939).
Wiskemann spent the Second World War in Switzerland
, officially as the assistant press attaché to the British legation
in Bern, but in reality responsible for gathering non-military intelligence from inside Germany and the occupied territories. During the war, she took a bold step that, through an unexpected series of events, led to a temporary halt to Jewish deportations from Hungary. Knowing it would be passed to Hungarian intelligence, she deliberately sent an unencrypted telegram to the Foreign Office in London that contained the addresses of the offices and homes of those in the Hungarian government who were best positioned to halt the deportations and suggesting that they should be targeted. Historian Martin Gilbert described what happened next that led the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to halt to the deportations:
After the War, Wiskemann returned to journalism and spent some time as The Economist
's correspondent in Rome
but in the 1950s she increasingly attracted attention as an academic historian
. In 1949 she published a pioneering study of relations between Hitler and Mussolini, The Rome-Berlin Axis, which was followed by Germany's Eastern Neighbours (1956) which analysed Germany's relations with the nations on her eastern frontier in the 1930s.
In this work she rejected post-war German demands to its former territories now being part of Poland, and concluded that in the past territorial gains brought out the "worst elements" in Germany, she wrote that nobody wanted German minorities back in Eastern Europe, considering their record in the past
She continued to publish throughout the 1950s and 1960s including a volume of memoirs, The Europe I Saw (1968). From 1958 to 1961 she was Montague Burton professor of international relations
at Edinburgh University and was a tutor in Modern History
at the University of Sussex
from 1961 until 1964. In 1965 she received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford
.
Wiskemann never married, but had a wide circle of friends which at one time another included Leonard Woolf
and F. A. Voigt
. Her later years were blighted by failing eyesight and she took her life rather than lose her independence and be unable to read. She committed suicide at her London home on 5 July 1971.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
and historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
of Anglo-German ancestry.
Life and work
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was born in SidcupSidcup
Sidcup is a district in South East London in the London Borough of Bexley and small parts of the district in the London Borough of Greenwich.Located south east of Charing Cross, Sidcup is bordered by the London Boroughs of Greenwich and Bromley and Kent County Council, and whilst now part of...
, Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
, on 13 August 1899, the youngest child of Heinrich Odomar Hugo Wiskemann (who had emigrated to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in the 1860s) and his wife Emily Burton. She was educated at Notting Hill High School
Notting Hill & Ealing High School
Notting Hill and Ealing High School is an independent school for girls aged 4 - 18, located in West Ealing, a suburb of London. Founded in 1873 it is one of the 26 schools that make up the Girls' Day School Trust...
and at Newnham College, Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
. She obtained a first in History
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
in 1921 and thereafter worked for a PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
, only to be disappointed when her thesis
Thesis
A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...
on Napoleon III and the Roman Question gained only an MLitt (a disappointment which she ascribed to the prejudice of one of her examiners).
She first visited Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
in 1930 and was fascinated by what she saw of German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
life in the last years of the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
, so different from the sedate and insular academic life of Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
. Thereafter she spent roughly six months of each year in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
until 1936, dividing her time between teaching history at Cambridge and her journalistic career. In Berlin she made many friends with many Germans but also with the leading British journalists in the German capital, among them Frederick Voigt and Norman Ebbutt
Norman Ebbutt
Norman Ebbutt was a British journalist. In 1925 he was sent to Berlin where he became chief correspondent for The Times, remaining in Germany until his expulsion by the Nazis in August 1937, following accusations of espionage.- Biography :...
. She became involved in German politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
and became an ardent opponent of National Socialism, and was soon writing articles on German affairs for a number of periodicals, including the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
. Although her warnings about the nature of the Nazis went apparently unheeded by British officialdom, Wiskemann gained a reputation as an outspoken critic of Nazism, not least among the Nazis and she was arrested by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
and expelled from Germany in July 1936.
After her expulsion from the Third Reich Wiskemann continued to devote her energies to writing and journalism and was commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1937 to make a study of the ethnic Germans living within the borders of Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
. The fruits of this study appeared as Czechs and Germans in 1938 and was followed a year later by her second book, Undeclared War (1939).
Wiskemann spent the Second World War in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, officially as the assistant press attaché to the British legation
Legation
A legation was the term used in diplomacy to denote a diplomatic representative office lower than an embassy. Where an embassy was headed by an Ambassador, a legation was headed by a Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary....
in Bern, but in reality responsible for gathering non-military intelligence from inside Germany and the occupied territories. During the war, she took a bold step that, through an unexpected series of events, led to a temporary halt to Jewish deportations from Hungary. Knowing it would be passed to Hungarian intelligence, she deliberately sent an unencrypted telegram to the Foreign Office in London that contained the addresses of the offices and homes of those in the Hungarian government who were best positioned to halt the deportations and suggesting that they should be targeted. Historian Martin Gilbert described what happened next that led the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to halt to the deportations:
- The immediate cause of Horthy's intervention was an American daylight bombing raid on Budapest on 2 July. This raid had nothing to do with the appeal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz; it was part of a long-established pattern of bombing German fuel depots and railway marshalling yards. But the raid had gone wrong, as many did, and several government buildings in Budapest, as well as the private homes of several senior Hungarian Government officials, had been hit. [Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 212.]
After the War, Wiskemann returned to journalism and spent some time as The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
's correspondent in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
but in the 1950s she increasingly attracted attention as an academic historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
. In 1949 she published a pioneering study of relations between Hitler and Mussolini, The Rome-Berlin Axis, which was followed by Germany's Eastern Neighbours (1956) which analysed Germany's relations with the nations on her eastern frontier in the 1930s.
In this work she rejected post-war German demands to its former territories now being part of Poland, and concluded that in the past territorial gains brought out the "worst elements" in Germany, she wrote that nobody wanted German minorities back in Eastern Europe, considering their record in the past
She continued to publish throughout the 1950s and 1960s including a volume of memoirs, The Europe I Saw (1968). From 1958 to 1961 she was Montague Burton professor of international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
at Edinburgh University and was a tutor in Modern History
Modern history
Modern history, or the modern era, describes the historical timeline after the Middle Ages. Modern history can be further broken down into the early modern period and the late modern period after the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution...
at the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
from 1961 until 1964. In 1965 she received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
.
Wiskemann never married, but had a wide circle of friends which at one time another included Leonard Woolf
Leonard Woolf
Leonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.-Early life:...
and F. A. Voigt
F. A. Voigt
Frederick Augustus Voigt , British journalist and author of German descent, most famous for his work with the Manchester Guardian and his opposition to dictatorship and totalitarianism on the European Continent.-Life:...
. Her later years were blighted by failing eyesight and she took her life rather than lose her independence and be unable to read. She committed suicide at her London home on 5 July 1971.
Major publications
- Czechs and Germans (1938)
- Undeclared War (1939)
- Italy (1947)
- The Rome-Berlin AxisThe Rome-Berlin AxisThe Rome-Berlin Axis is a 1949 book by British historian Elizabeth Wiskemann. It is a study of the Axis alliance of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany with particular emphasis on the relationship between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler....
(1949) - Germany's Eastern Neighbours (1956)
- A Great Swiss Newspaper: the Story of the 'Neue Züricher Zeitung (1959)
- The Europe of the Dictators (1966)
- The Europe I Saw (1968)
- Fascism in Italy (1969)
- Italy Since 1945 (published posthumously, 1971)
Further reading
- James Joll, "Wiskemann, Elizabeth Meta", The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 59 (2004) OUP
- Anne Seeba, Battling for News: the Rise of the Woman Reporter (1994) Hodder & Stoughton
- Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw (1968) Collins
- Mark Cornwall, 'Elizabeth Wiskemann and the Sudeten Question: A Woman at the "Essential Hinge" of Europe', Central Europe, 1/1 (May 2003)
- Peter Kamber, 'Geheime Agentin', Berlin 2010