Biography
Ossietzky was born in Hamburg, the son of Carl Ignatius von Ossietzky (1848–1891), a Protestant from Upper Silesia, and Rosalie (née Pratzka), a devout Catholic who wished for Carl to become a monk. His father worked as a stenographer in the office of a lawyer and senator, but died when Carl was two years old. Ossietzky was baptized in the Catholic Church Kleine Michel in Hamburg on 10 November 1889, and confirmed in the Lutheran Hauptkirche St. Michaelis on 23 March 1904.
The "von" in Ossietzky's name, which would generally suggest noble ancestry, is of unknown origin. Ossietzky himself explained, perhaps half in jest, that it derived from an ancestor's service in a Polish lancer cavalry regiment; the Elector of Brandenburg was unable to pay his two regiments of lancers at one point due to an empty war chest so he instead conferred nobility upon the entirety of the two regiments.
Despite his failure to finish Realschule (a form of German secondary school), Ossietzky succeeded in embarking on a career in journalism, with the topics of his articles ranging from theatre criticism to feminism and the problems of early motorization. He later said that his opposition to German militarism during the final years of the German Empire under William II led him, as early as 1913, to become a pacifist. That year, he married Maud Lichfield-Wood, a Mancunian suffragette, born a British colonial officer's daughter and the great grand-daughter of an Indian princess in Hyderabad. They had one daughter, Rosalinde. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 – 1933), his political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. In 1921, the German government founded the Arbeits-Kommandos (work squads) led by Major Bruno Ernst Buchrucker. Officially a labour group intended to assist with civilian projects, in reality they were used by Germany to exceed the limits on troop strength set by the Treaty of Versailles. Buchrucker's Black Reichswehr took its orders from a secret group in the German Army known as Sondergruppe R comprising Kurt von Schleicher, Eugen Ott, Fedor von Bock and Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord. Buchrucker's Black Reichswehr became infamous for its practice of murdering Germans suspected of working as informers for the Allied Control Commission. The killings perpetrated by the Black Reichswehr were justified under the so-called Femegerichte (secret court) system. These killings were ordered by the officers from Sondergruppe R. Regarding the Femegerichte murders, Ossietzky wrote:
"Lieutenant Schulz (charged with the murder of informers against the Black Reichswehr) did nothing but carry out the orders given him, and that certainly Colonel von Bock, and probably Colonel von Schleicher and General Seeckt, should be sitting in the dock beside him".
Also, he became secretary of the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft). In 1927, he succeeded Kurt Tucholsky as editor-in-chief of the periodical Die Weltbühne. In 1932, he supported Ernst Thälmann's candidacy for the German presidency, though still a critic of the actual policy of the German Communist Party and the Soviet Union.
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