Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1989 - 10 Pfennig

Important personalities The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic publishes five multicolored special postage stamps with illustrations of important personalities. Special cancellation from 28 February to 27 April 1989 Carl von Ossietzky Carl von Ossietzky was born on 3 October 1889 in Hamburg. He grows up in modest social conditions and receives a free seat at a private school, where he completes eight classes. The subsequent attempt to take a secondary exam fails. Early on, he developed pronounced literary and journalistic inclinations and as a reader of public libraries pursues intensive self-study. To earn a living, he seeks a job in 1907 as assistant writer at the Hamburg judicial administration. One year later he becomes a member of the "Democratic Union"; In 1911, her Berlin weekly "Das frei Volk" published the first text by Ossietzky. In the same journal, his first political essays appear in the following year; For a critical comment on a judgment of unjust judgment of the Erfurt court martial he is sentenced to a criminal complaint by the Prussian Minister of War to a fine. His journalistic field of activity becomes the monistic movement; Convened in 1916 as a reinforcing soldier, in the last year of the war he invokes the spirit of Luther and Hutten to change conditions in Germany after the looming defeat; he dreams of a fundamental change in the intellectual atmosphere in which the war is defeated once and for all. The victory of the counterrevolution reinforces his conviction of the need for a truly combative, political pacifism. In the fall of 1919, he relocates to Berlin with his wife, the Englishwoman Maud Hester Lichfield-Woods, and is there for a year secretary of the "German Peace Society". He is involved in the founding of the "Peace Alliance of the participants in the war", from which the action committee "Never again war!" Emerges in the summer of 1920. Kurt Tucholsky and Albert Einstein are also working there. In the "Berliner Volks-Zeitung", in the left-liberal "Tage-Buch" and in "Monday morning" he writes essays and comments against the rearmament of Germany. Through the agency of Kurt Tucholsky he comes in April 1926 to the "world stage", where he finds his real political-intellectual home and the grandstand for his radical-democratic, consistently antimilitarist and humanist struggle. After the death of the publisher Siegfried Jacobsohn Ossietzky becomes editor in charge and in 1927 - with the collaboration of Kurt Tucholsky - head of the "world stage". In the so-called world stage trial of 1931, the Reichsgericht in Leipzig condemned him for publishing an article in 1929 in the "Weltbühne", which denounced the illegal arming of the Reichswehr, for alleged treason to 18 months in prison. Already in February 1933 he fell into the clutches of the fascist extermination apparatus, the cruel revenge for the fact that Ossietzky earlier and more urgently than most journalists of his time had warned against the rise of fascism and called for the creation of a united anti-fascist defensive front. On the night of the Reichstag fire, he was taken into "protective custody" together with other anti-fascists and democrats and physically and mentally ill-treated in the concentration camps Sonnenburg (now VR Poland) and Esterwegen. A worldwide solidarity movement manages to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935 to Ossietzky. Ossietzky was transferred from the Esterwegen concentration camp to the Berlin State Hospital in May 1936 by the Nazis from the Esterwegen concentration camp. Two years later, on May 4, 1938, Carl von Ossietzky dies.