Ruth von Mayenburg

Ruth von Mayenburg (July 1, 1907 – June 26, 1993) was an Austrian journalist, writer and translator. In her earlier years, she was politically active in the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs, or KPÖ). Fleeing the Nazis, she lived in exile in the Soviet Union at Moscow's Hotel Lux, afterwards writing several books about her experiences there.

Ruth von Mayenburg was born in Srbice, then in Bohemia, in the Sudetenland, now in the Czech Republic. She was the younger daughter of a mine director and grew up in a cosmopolitan, aristocratic family in the Bohemian city of Teplitz-Schönau. Her uncle was Ottomar Heinsius von Mayenburg, a pharmacist who became a millionaire with his invention of a brand of toothpaste, Chlorodont. At the age of 13, she became secretly engaged to Hansi von Herder at the wedding of her sister, Fely. Von Herder later became an SA leader and lost his life in the Night of Long Knives.

She began studying architecture at the Dresden technical school. At the age of 23, she had a relationship with Alexander-Edzard von Asseburg-Neindorf, but broke it off on the objection of General Freiherr Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord. She became involved with von Hammerstein-Equord, then head of the Army Command (Heeresleitung). In 1930, she moved to Vienna, Austria and lived with a friend of her mother, Baroness Netka Latscher-Lauendorf, who was the companion of Theodor Körner, later president of Austria. Through them, von Mayenburg was introduced to a circle of young socialists and became friends with intellectuals such as the writer Elias Canetti and Ernst Fischer, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, who influenced her political views. She and Fischer were married in 1932.

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