Jo Mihaly (1902 – 1989) was a German dancer and writer.

Early years and war diary

Kuhr grew up in Schneidemühl (now Piła), then about 80 miles from the German-Russian border, now in Poland. The town was the site of a World War I prisoner of war

Prisoner of war

A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...

 camp, and Kuhr's rediscovered adolescent diary

Diary

A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...

 was published late in her life as Da gibt's ein Wiedersehn (1982). It has been translated into English by Walter Wright, a pacifist and former conscientious objector

Conscientious objector

A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

, under the title There we'll meet again, a young German girl's diary of the first world war. It gives an unusual insight into German experience of the war: 'The fact that the diary is written by a German teenager does make it unusual. The fact that this teenager went on to oppose war, to dance her anti-war message on the Berlin stage, to marry a Jew, and to be forced to flee Germany in 1933, gives an added poignancy to the diary.'

Expressionist Dancer

Jo Mihaly started as a dancer in 1923. In 1933 she was well known for an anti-war dance she had devised with the World War I war boots sword and helmet. She belonged to the German expressionist dancers of the 30s, along with Mary Wigman

Mary Wigman

Mary Wigman was a German dancer, choreographer, and dance instructor.A pioneer of expressionist dance, her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage...

, Rudolf von Laban, and Gret Palucca

Gret Palucca

Gret Palucca was a German dancer and teacher.Shortly after birth, her family moved to San Francisco, returning with her mother to Dresden in 1909. There she received ballet lessons with Heinrich Kröller from 1914 to 1916...

. She was a courageous opponent of the persecution of Jews, fleeing Germany for Zürich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

 in 1933 to escape being taken to a concentration camp like so many of her activist socialist friends. She continued to dance there from 1934 to 1938.

Novelist

Mihaly started by contributing articles and poems to the magazine of the Brotherhood of Wayfarers around 1925. She then wrote her first novel, Michael Arpad und sein Kind, a novel about a gypsy family. She wrote another novel in 1938, "Gesucht: Stepan Varesku". She wrote other books but unfortunately, only her World War I diary has been translated into English.