Contents - Hoffmann und Campe Verlag

Dispatch: October 2009
384 pages
Marion Gräfin Dönhoff
Ein Leben in Briefen
A Life in Letters
Edited by Irene Brauer
and Friedrich Dönhoff
Non-Fiction
Previously unpublished documents from eight decades – the event of the Dönhoff year!
Marion Dönhoff never wrote her autobiography but did write an enormous number of letters,
some very personal, which shed light on her life-story. Sensitively edited by two of the people
closest to her, they are now published for the first time and illustrated with a quantity of
photographs.
Marion Dönhoff was not only a great journalist and author, she was also a highly gifted
correspondent. The early letters concern life in East Prussia and her ancestral stately home
while later ones deal with the war and her impending departure from her homeland. In her
‘second life’ in the West the Countess helped to build up Die Zeit and became a moral
authority while always remaining frank and lively. As evidence of this, she wrote friends and
family a wide variety of anecdotal descriptions of her everyday life and her travels, she
penned encouraging letters to fans great and small and weighty, sometimes furious,
expressions of her views to leading figures in politics and society. A compelling journey
through a long life.
For her centenary on 2 December 2009
Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, born in Friedrichstein, East Prussia in 1909,
studied economics in Frankfurt und Basle and managed her family
property in East Prussia until 1945. After her now famous ‘ride to the
West’ she made her mark on the weekly magazine Die Zeit as writer,
editor-in- chief and publisher until her death in 2002. She published 25
books.
The Editors:
Irene Brauer, born in Salzwedel in 1944, was a close colleague of
Marion Dönhoff at Die Zeit.
Friedrich Dönhoff, born in 1967, lives and works as a writer in
Hamburg. Hoffmann und Campe published his bestseller Die Welt ist so,
wie man sie sieht. Erinnerungen an Marion Dönhoff (The world is how
you look at it. Memories of Marion Dönhoff, 2002) and Marion Gräfin
Dönhoff, Reisebilder, Fotografien und Texte aus vier Jahrzehnten
(Marion Countess Dönhoff: Travel Pictures, Photographs and Writings
from four Decades, 2004), edited by Friedrich Dönhoff
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