Reichmann, Eva G.

Eva Reichmann, sociologist and historian, was born Eva Jungmann in Lublinitz, Silesia, on January 16, 1897, and died at age 101, on September 16, 1998 in London. She studied in Breslau, Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg and received a social sciences doctorate at Heidelberg before joining the Berlin head office of the "Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbuerger Juedischen Glaubens" in 1924. She also worked as an editor for the influential Jewish journal "Der Morgen, Monatszeitschrift der deutschen Juden". She married the lawyer Hans Reichmann, also a Centralverein functionary, who was one of the initiators of an anti-Nazi propaganda campaign during the last phase of the Weimar Republic. He was arrested after the November Pogrom and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. When he was released the couple fled to Britain. Hans was interned during the war.

Eva Reichmann worked for the BBC. After the war she became director of research at the Wiener Library in London, alerting the British public to the continuing threat of fascism and racism. She worked as author and lecturer for German-Jewish reconciliation, and published many articles. She was one of the founders of the Leo Baeck Institute, set up in London for the study of the history of German Jewry. The book Hostages of Civilization (London, 1950; Boston 1951; German title: 'Flucht in den Hass (1956)) for which she gained a second doctorate from the London School of Economics, is a profound analysis of the Jewish catastrophe in Germany. Hans Reichmann died in 1964. Eva Reichmann was awarded several decorations: the Rosenzweig-Buber medal, the Moses-Mendelssohn-Preiss in 1982, and the Bundesverdienstkreuz' in 1983. Eva's sister Elizabeth Jungmann married Max Beerbohm shortly before he died; she was also secretary to the playwright Gerhard Hauptmann, and a close friend of the poet Rudolf Binding. After the death of Elizabeth, Eva Reichmann became executor of Max Beerbohm's literary estate.