Clara Leiser

Clara Leiser (c. 1898 – May 11, 1991[1][2]) was an American writer, journalist, and activist. Traveling frequently to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, she documented the situation of family members of political prisoners in Nazi Germany and published one of those accounts, as well as an (anonymous) interview with the director of a Nazi prison. She was affected by the plight of refugee children who were forced to flee fascism, and founded a non-profit that supported them, promoting peace through correspondence programs, which she continued still in the mid-1950s.

Clara Leiser
Bornc. 1898
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died(1991-05-11)May 11, 1991
Manhattan, New York, U.S.
EducationUniversity of Wisconsin
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • Writer
  • Activist
OrganizationsYouth of All Nations

Biography

Leiser was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison[1] in the early 1920s,[3] studying with the linguist and poet William Ellery Leonard, among others.[4] There, she befriended Mildred Harnack, with whom she was friends until Harnack's death.[5] She was a graduate of the class of 1924.[2] Leiser worked as an assistant editor and advertising manager of an education journal in the 1920s, but gave that up to be able to travel to Europe during the rise of the Nazi regime.[4] She worked with young refugees who were displaced by European fascism, and this led her in 1944 to found Youth of All Nations (YOAN),[1] a non-profit that promoted peace through correspondence programs.[6] By 1955, YOAN was active worldwide; then-Senator Hubert Humphrey spoke out for the organization in the Senate in 1955, and entered a plea for support by Leiser, and quotations from letters by young people from various parts of the world who had built correspondence friendships through YOAN, into the Congressional Record.[7]

Leiser died in 1991 in Manhattan of congestive heart failure at age 93.[1][2][8]

Anti-Nazi scholarship and publications

Leiser became friends with Mildred Harnack while studying at the University of Wisconsin, early in the 1920s. Leiser visited Harnack and her husband, Arvid Harnack, in Europe, and Harnack stayed with her in 1937, when Leiser lived in New York.[3]

In 1938, Leiser published an article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,[9] which contained an interview with an anonymous director of a Nazi prison, who described the conditions inside the prison. Leiser noted that "this official does not resign his position or leave Germany because he feels that he can best fight the regime by keeping eyes and ears open as to who is in prison and why, so far as any one person can become so informed, and by treating the people in his charge with as much decency as he can 'get away with.'"[10]

One of Leiser's goals in Nazi Germany was to collect information on the family members of political prisoners;[11] in 1940, she translated, edited, and published Refugee, the autobiographical account by Hilde Koch. The German anti-Nazi activist met Leiser, introduced by a friend, after she had experienced that her husband, F. Koch, was imprisoned in Sonnenburg concentration camp and was released;[11] he later fled to the United States.[9][12] Koch told Leiser with growing trust of her experiences, and later described the act of sharing oppressing secrets as comforting and liberating.[lower-alpha 1][11] Refugee contained an "intense" recollection of the Nazi coup and the events of January 30, 1933, in what scholar Anna Iuso saw as a tragic mood; at that time, such autobiographical accounts were popular, but anonymously, with the origin masked.[13]

When she learned of the execution of her friend Mildred Harnack by the Nazis in 1943, she wrote a poem of 18 pages, "To and from the guillotine", remembering and imagining stations of her life and death in detail.[14][15]

Bibliography
  • Jean de Reszke and the Great Days of Opera (New York: Minton, Balch, and Company, 1934)[16]
  • Lunacy Becomes Us (selections of quotations from Hitler and other Nazis), Liveright, 1939[17]
  • Refugee: The personal account of two "Aryan" Germans whom Nazi brutality failed to crush by Hilde Koch, trans. and edited by Clara Leiser (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940)[9]
  • Skeleton of Justice (with Edith Roper) (E.P. Dutton, 1941; reprinted 1975, New York: AMS Press)[18][19]

Notes
  1. Koch: "Es tat ja so unendlich gut sich einmal aussprechen zu koennen. Einmal etwas herunterzureden von all dem was da in der Brust verschlossen aufgespeichert war." (It did feel so good to be able to talk things out for once. To be able to talk down something from all that was stored in my heart.)[11]

References
  1. Cook, Joan (May 15, 1991). "Clara Leiser, Helper Of Young Refugees In War, Dies at 93". The New York Times. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
  2. "Clara Leiser, author, dies in NYC at 94". The Capital Times. May 14, 1991. p. 10 – via Newspapers.com.
  3. "Honoring Mildred Fish Harnack; Part II. 1929 – 1943". University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
  4. "Clara Leiser Goes to Europe With Ad Party". The Capital Times. Madison, Wisconsin. July 29, 1929. p. 6 – via Newspapers.com.
  5. Brysac, Shareen Blair (2000). Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-19-513269-4. Cast of Characters
  6. Custer, Frank (May 22, 1956). "Youths Become Own 'Voice of America'". The Capital Times. Madison, Wisconsin. p. 27 – via Newspapers.com.
  7. "A Potent Force for Peace" (PDF). Congressional Record. May 13, 1955. pp. 6325–28. Retrieved August 8, 2021.
  8. "Clara Leiser Death". The Guardian. London. May 22, 1991. p. 39 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. Hoefer, Frederick (1945). "The Nazi Penal System II". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 36 (1): 30–38. doi:10.2307/1138879. JSTOR 1138879.
  10. Leiser, Clara (1938). "Director of a Nazi Prison Speaks Out". Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. 29 (3): 345–52.
  11. Meyer, Christian (2020). (K)eine Grenze: Das Private und das Politische im Nationalsozialismus 1933–1940. Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte (in German). Vol. 123. Walter de Gruyter. p. 83. ISBN 978-3-11-063798-4.
  12. Liebersohn, Harry; Schneider, Dorothee (2001). "'My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933': A Guide to a Manuscript Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University". Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. New Series. 91 (3): 1–130. doi:10.2307/3655110. JSTOR 3655110.
  13. Iuso, Anna (2005). "L'exilé et le témoin. Sur une enquête autobiographique et son oubli". Genèses (in French). 4 (61): 5–27. doi:10.3917/gen.061.05. Retrieved August 8, 2021.
  14. Ihde, Jennifer. "Late 1940s, a friend's poem". Honoring Mildred Fish Harnack. University of Wisconsin. Archived from the original on August 14, 2011. Retrieved January 11, 2012.
  15. "To and from the guillotine" (PDF). Retrieved August 10, 2021.
  16. Axley, Katherine (June 10, 1934). "Clara M. Leiser Makes de Reszke Live Once More". Wisconsin State Journal. p. 4 – via Newspapers.com.
  17. "Invite Clubs to hear Speaker". Pottsville Republican. November 10, 1939. p. 13 – via Newspapers.com.
  18. von Hentig, Hans (November 1941). "[Review of] Skeleton of Justice by Edith Roper, Clara Leiser". American Journal of Sociology. 47 (3): 497–98. doi:10.1086/218934.
  19. Ploscowe, Morris (1941). "[Review of] Roper, Edith, and Clara Leiser, Skeleton of Justice". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 217 (1). doi:10.1177/000271624121700177. S2CID 145735752.
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