Boveri, Margaret b.August 14, 1900;Wurzburg, Bavaria d.July 6, 1975;West Berlin
Prominent German political journalist and expert on the United States from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Boveri wrote for the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily), the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt News), and the Frankfurter All- gemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt General News, or FAZ), as well as for cultural reviews (magazines) and Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels’s highbrow newspaper, Das Reich (The Empire).
Boveri published several books on her extensive travels around the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and India and on political topics: the postwar trials of the German Nazi Foreign Ministry, an analysis of journalism in the Third Reich, and a four-volume study of treason in the twentieth century. Her ties to the United States were twofold, private as well as professional. Her mother was a successful, Harvard-educated American academic who took Boveri for extended stays to the United States and provided extensive personal contacts. The United States became the main topic of her journalistic work during World War II when Boveri was a foreign correspondent in Sweden and the United States (1941—1942). She was briefly interned as an enemy alien after the attack on Pearl Harbor but then returned to her fatherland. During the war, Boveri’s nationalistic leanings led her to reject emphatically the idea of emigration, to comply with Nazi regulations on journalism, and to contemplate a position at the Third Reich’s embassy in Madrid. After the war, Boveri continued to write on political and foreign policy topics relating to the UnitedStates for the FAZ, where she was increasingly marginalized because of her strong opposition to Konrad Adenauer’s integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, which in her view intensified a cold war driven by U.S. motives and solidified German division.
Boveri wrote her Amerikafibel in the fall and winter of 1945.
Published in 1946 and soon censored in the American Occupation Zone, its full title read: America Primer for Grown-up Germans: An Attempt to Explain What Has Not Been Understood. And indeed, the contemporary German reviewers of the widely read America Primer overwhelmingly praised her contribution to German American understanding and reconciliation. The future president of West Germany, Theodor Heuss, lauded in particular her explanation of the questionnaire that Americans used for denazification as “pacifying the German soul.” One lonely contemporary American reviewer recognized the primer for what it was: an anti-American treatise. Under the guise of a value-free presentation, her German readers easily recognized the entire panorama of familiar anti-American cliches. Although the ostensible purpose of Boveri’s Primer was to facilitate understanding between the defeated Germans and their occupiers, her true intent was to help her compatriots to resist any attempts of “Americanization” by strengthening the homegrown and long-standing tradition of superiority to and contempt for American civilization. Her book thus fit into the early postwar literature, together with Ernst von Salomon’s Fragebogen (The Questionnaire) and Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing’s Charakterwasche (Character-washing), denouncing American denazification efforts, although Boveri went about it in a seemingly nonantagonistic manner and, more importantly, as a recognized authority on the United States.Michaela Hoenicke Moore
See also American Occupation Zone; Denazification
References and Further Reading
Boveri, Margret. Amerikafibel fur Erwarchsene Deutsche: Ein Versuch Unverstandenes Zu Erklaren. Berlin: Minerva-Verlag, 1946.
------. Verzweigungen: Eine Autobiographie. Ed. Uwe Johnson. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.
Gortemaker, Heike B. Ein deutsches Leben. Die Geschichte der Margret Boveri 1900—1975. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005.
Streim, Gregor. “Berichterstatterin in den ‘Landschaften des Verrats.’ Margret Boveris Amerika-Darstellung aus der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit. Mit dem Briefwechsel zwischen Margret Boveri und Carl Zuckmayer.” Zuckmayer-Jahrbuch 5 (2002): 475-510.