Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Germany, biography

Summary

Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz was born in 1906 in Breslau (then Germany, now Wrocław, Poland). The son of an estate manager, Edgar Kupfer- Koberwitz started work as an agricultural apprentice, later becoming a bank employee. He was already writing poems and newspaper articles during this period. In 1934 he fled Germany for France following the Nazi Machtergreifung. Beginning in 1937 he worked as a tour guide on the Italian island of Ischia. In 1940, following a denunciation, he was deported from Italy and handed over to the Gestapo for allegedly criticizing the regime, although he had never been politically active. He was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau (prisoner number 24,814) from a prison in Innsbruck, transferred to the concentration camp at Neuengamme, then sent back to Dachau. It was here that he wrote his two poem cycles, Sonne hinter Stacheldraht and Kette der Tage. Kupfer- Koberwitz was assigned to the offices of the screw manufacturer Präfix as a clerk, where he managed to keep a diary from 1942 to the liberation in 1945. He described his secret writing place: “I'd looked around and selected a dark corner to work in. It was surrounded by a mountain of files and boxes….” Journal entries mostly had to be made at night, and Kupfer-Koberwitz found a special hiding place to avoid the risk of his diaries falling into the hands of the SS: “One of his fellow prisoners, Otto Höfer, was in charge of the factory warehouse. The manuscript bundles were wrapped in waxed paper, aluminium foil and cloth rags […], after which Höfer buried them in the warehouse floor and cemented them over. In the spring of 1945, after liberation, it transpired that the cement floor had been flooded by groundwater rising from the marshy soil….” Luckily for Kupfer-Koberwitz, however, the manuscripts were not destroyed, and “American soldiers helped him to dry out the 1800 pages of manuscript. Only a few had become illegible….”

After his liberation, Kupfer-Koberwitz transcribed his journal, which was published in 1957 as Die Mächtigen und die Hilflosen: Als Häftling in Dachau (The Powerful and the Helpless: As a Prisoner in Dachau). He emigrated to the United States in 1953, but found it very difficult to make his way there, having to support himself with casual work.