Hans Habe

Hans Habe (12 February 1911, Budapest – 29 September 1977, Locarno) was an Austrian writer and newspaper publisher. From 1941, he held US citizenship. Habe used also the pseudonyms Antonio Corte, Frank Richard, Frederick Gert, John Richler, Hans Wolfgang and Alexander Holmes".

Habe was born as János Békessy in then capital of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents, Imre Békessy and Bianca Marton, were of Jewish origin but converted to the Christian (Protestant) faith. After World War I the family moved to Vienna where his father published one of the first daily tabloids, Die Stunde (The Hour), from 1923 to 1926. János was educated at the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium between 1921 and 1929. Afterwards he started to study Law and German Literature at Heidelberg, but returned soon to Vienna because of the growing Anti-Semitism in Germany.

In 1930 he began to work as a reporter for the Wiener Sonn- und Montagspost (Vienna Sunday and Monday Post). In the following year he became Editor of the Österreichische Abendzeitung (Austrian Evening News), one of the youngest newspaper editors ever, at age 20. At this time he married his first wife, Margit Bloch. Early in 1934 he moved to the Wiener Morgen (Vienna Morning News). From 1935 to 1939 he was a Foreign Correspondent for the Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily News), stationed mostly at Geneva, covering the League of Nations. In this capacity he was present at the Evian Conference in 1938, where he met again otolaryngologist Heinrich Neumann von Héthárs who had performed an operation upon Habe 13 years before, and was a friend of his family. Habe described the course of the Conference in his novel The Mission (1965). The focal point of the novel is the infamous offer made by the German government, and transmitted to the Conference by Neumann von Héthárs, to sell the Austrian Jews to foreign countries at a price of $250 per capita, and the Conference delegates' refusal to accept. At this time Habe was married to his second wife, Erika Levy, the heiress of the Tungsram light bulb company.

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