NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES
Gerhard Leo with his father Wilhelm Leo in front of the bookshop LIFA (Librairie Française Allemande) located at Rue Meslay, in Paris around 1934.
Carsten Wurm
A YOUTH IN EXILE A SEARCH FOR DOCUMENTS IN THE GERHARD LEO ARCHIVE
Certificate of good performance of the student Léo Gérard from his school in November 1934.
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 18
The itinerary that the later journalist Gerhard Leo took during his exile has been familiar since the publication of his autobiography – Frühzug nach Toulouse (“Early train to Toulouse”) (1988; trans. French 1989) – and the books on family history by his grandson Maxim Leo – Red Love: The Story of an East German Family (2009) and Wo wir zu Hause sind (“Where we are at home”) (2019). It led from the small Brandenburg town of Rheinsberg to Paris and Toulouse and there into the ranks of the French Resistance. Now that the Gerhard Leo Archive has been established, it is possible to document the various milestones. The few but informative papers and photos add important facets to the overall picture of exile in France. First, there is a school report for the pupil Léo Gérard – as spelt in French – testifying to his fine achievements in November 1934. Gerhard Leo was 11 years old and had only been attending the French school for a little over a year. He had come to Paris with his parents in September 1933 without knowing a word of French. At first, he had even rejected the new language because he wanted to return to Rheinsberg, to the beautiful house with its garden by the lake and to his friends. Now he had made so much progress that he was praised for it. Later, as a journalist, Gerhard Leo was equally proficient in French as in German. The family fled to France because the father Wilhelm Leo, a well-known lawyer from an assimilated Jewish family, had made a name for himself as an opponent of National Socialism. In 1927, for example, he had won a legal case against Joseph Goebbels. The then Gauleiter of Berlin claimed to have been tortured by French military personnel during the occupation of the Rhineland in 1920 and had suffered a walking disability. Leo submitted to the court a certified copy of Goebbels’ military papers attesting to his clubfoot-related exemption from service in the First World War. The family assumed that
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