Erich Kuby

Erich Kuby (28 June 1910 – 10 September 2005) was a German journalist, publisher and screenwriter.

Kuby's father had bought in 1901 an estate in West Prussia, but after one year he had to give up working it. He then moved to Munich and met his future wife Dora Süßkind. Their son Erich was born in 1910 in Baden-Baden.

In 1913, the family moved to the Alpine foothills in Upper Bavaria where the father again took over a farm. There the child grew up while his father served in World War I as a reserve officer. After the end of the war the family moved to Weilheim where Kuby was enrolled in the "Gymnasium" (preparatory school for university). Due to his father's long absence, he seemed to Kuby to be "a rather strange man."

"[…] from him I learned that we had not lost the war, although I (even though only eight years old) didn't believe him. On the contrary, I had already begun to turn into the family's black sheep, a son who showed only minimal interest when the father, shortly after the move to the nearest county town where he bought and operated a small farm, and built up a paramilitary organization called Citizen Defense. At the nearby firing range its members held family gatherings which were actually firing exercises. Once, shortly before the Hitler-Putsch of 1923, Ludendorff even visited my father, and I remember them walking back and forth in our fruit orchard […]"

In Munich Kuby took violin lessens. At school he was influenced politically by, among other people, a critical Jewish professor. In Munich he received his diploma as external student. He then studied Economics at the universities of Erlangen and Hamburg and completed his studies in 1933. During his semester breaks he worked as a longshoreman at the Blohm & Voss company in Hamburg.

In 1933 he emigrated, traveling by bicycle, together with his Jewish girlfriend Ruth, to Yugoslavia. However, he returned from there to Germany, alone, after a few months because he reportedly wanted to analyze from a close distance, but nevertheless intellectually from afar, the "process of decay" of the country.

He moved from Munich to Berlin and worked in the picture archive of the Scherl Publishing House. In 1938 he married the sculptress Edith Schumacher, the daughter of the National Economist Hermann Schumacher of Berlin. Together they had five children. His wife's sister was married to the atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg. They were "Absolute Patriots" (title of his history of the family which was published in 1996). During the Second World War Kuby served in the Wehrmacht (German army) in France and on the eastern front.

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