Jo Mihaly
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Jo Mihaly, born Piete Kuhr (1902-1989) was a German dancer and writer.
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[edit] Early years and war diary
Piete Kuhr grew up in Schneidemuhl (now Pila), then about 80 miles from the German-Russian frontier, now in Poland. The town was the site of a World War One Prisoner of War camp, and Kuhr's rediscovered adolescent diary was published late in her life asDa Gibt’s ein Wiedersehn (1982). It has been translated into English by Walter Wright, a pacifist and former conscientious objector, 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.'[1]
Kuhr's writing and perspective on the war changed as she wrote about it. Her mother, who had encouraged her to write this diary as a patriotic act, became increasingly uneasy about the tone of the diary which she could no longer proudly show to her military friends. Nevertheless, Piete carried on with it. Though never herself in serious personal danger, she lived close to the Eastern front, and for a child had an unusual insight into the war. Regular transports of soldiers, prisoners, wounded and refugees through the train station, where Piete helped her grandmother ran the Red Cross canteen. At first she was caught up with patriotism, the days off school for each victory, the pleasure of winning – but doubt crept in. She suffered from thinking of those who were being killed, for example after hearing of a German victory which left thousands of Russian soldiers drowning in the marshes. She went out of her way to find the local prisoner of war camp to make sure the 'enemy' were being properly looked after, as well as the Russian cemetery where they were buried.
Her insights sometimes have a child's clarity: ‘Even the Emperor Franz Joseph has called upon God to give victory to his forces. On how many nations exactly is God to bestow victory?’ And on 12th November 1918 she wrote ‘I didn’t like to ask whether we were now well and truly beaten. We have clearly perished from a surfeit of victories.’
She comes alive through these pages – this is not a long catalogue of war news but a lively vivid account interspersed with the ‘normal’ activities, thoughts and dreams of a child growing up in very abnormal times. There is much to learn about the way the whole population was caught up in the war preparations, including school children, the privations of the war as they have less and less food, the way she deals with what is happening by playing fantasy soldiers games, the way anti-Semitism was rife, the spread of disease during the war, the deaths of children severely weakened by hunger (with a particularly gruesome and vivid account of babies who died in an infants home she was helping in), the horror of the phrase ‘The ‘flu is said to have broken out there too’ as the fully laden hospital trains come back from the eastern front to mid-Germany after the war is ‘over’.
The diary ends, after the war is over, with Piete climbing over barbed wire into the prisoners of war cemetery to lay a green fir wreath on a Frenchman’s grave.
[edit] 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 WWI war boots sword and helmet. She belonged to the German expressionist dancers of the 30s, along with Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Gret Palucca. She was a courageous opponent of the persecution of Jews, fleeing Germany for Zürich 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.
[edit] 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 first wold war diary has been translated in English.
[edit] References
- Biographical notes in There we'll meet again
- L'espace qui crie en moi - Hommage à la danse expressionniste allemande, a 1991 documentary.
- Petra Josting: ‚Zigeuner‘ in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Weimarer Republik am Beispiel von Jo Mihalys ‚Michael Arpad und sein Kind. Ein Kinderschicksal auf der Landstraße’ (1930). In: Petra Josting/Walter Fähnders (Ed.): „Laboratorium Vielseitigkeit“. Zur Literatur der Weimarer Republik. Festschrift für Helga Karrenbrock zum 60. Geburtstag. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005 ISBN 3-89528-546-3 (D)
