Urban, Thomas

Urban was born on July 20, 1954 in Leipzig. Parents came from Breslau , the capital of the Prussian province of Silesia (today: Wroclaw / Poland). ^[2] When he was 15 months old, the family fled from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany . ^[3]

Urban spent his school years in the West German city of Bergheim near Cologne . He completed military service in the Bundeswehr as an officer in the military reserve .

At the University of Cologne, Urban studied Romance , Slavic, and Eastern European history (with semesters in Tours , Kiev, and the Pushkin Institute in Moscow). Professor Wolfgang Cossack wrote a master's thesis on the topic “The Image of Living in a Foreign Land in the Literature of the First Russian Emigration ”. ^[four]

He became an employee of the Russian dissident Lev Kopelev in Cologne. ^[5] In 1981/82 he was an intern at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University , Oleg Mikhailov was his supervisor. ^[6]

After returning to Germany, he began working as a journalist.

In 1985-1987 Urban was the editor of the news agency Associated Press ( New York ) and DPA ( Hamburg ). ^[7]

In 1987, he became a member of the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung ( Munich ). In 1988-1992. He was a correspondent for this newspaper and the Berlin radio station RIAS in Warsaw . In 1992-1997 he was head of the bureau Zyuddoytche Zeitung in Moscow; at that time he wrote reports about the first Chechen war . In 1997–2012 He worked as a correspondent for the same newspaper in Kiev and again in Warsaw.

In 2012, Urban became its correspondent in Madrid . ^[eight]

Urban is the author of a number of books on Polish-German relations and two books on Russian emigration writers, which are also translated into Russian.

In the book "Katyn 1940" ^[9] about the Katyn massacre, he presented the version that the crime was committed by the NKVD. He stressed that this is also the official version of the President of the Russian Federation , the State Duma and the Orthodox Church , and accused the defenders of innocence of the NKVD and Stalin , M. and. Yuri Mukhin , in ignorance of sources and logical errors in argumentation. ^[ten]

Urban devoted scientific publications to the writers M. Ageyev , ^[11] Gaito Gazdanov ^[12] , Boris Pasternak ^[13] , Vladislav Khodasevich ^[14], and Ilya Ehrenburg . ^[15] He took part in the preparation of the complete works of V. Nabokov in German in 24 volumes. ^[sixteen]

In addition, Urban studied the political history of football in Eastern Europe. He published historiographical essays on the Starostin Brothers , ^[17] on the Death Match , ^[18] on forbidden football in occupied Poland. ^[19] He paid special attention to the fate of the Polish-German striker Ernest Vilimovsky . ^[20]

• Deutsche in Polen. Geschichte und Gegenwart einer Minderheit . Munich, 1993; ISBN 3-406-37402-6
• Polen . Munich, 1998; ISBN 3-406-39875-8
• Vladimir Nabokov - Blaue Abende in Berlin . Berlin 1999; ISBN 3-549-05777-6 (Russian edition: Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin ; Moscow, 2004, ISBN 5-7784-0289-9 )
• Von Krakau bis Danzig. Eine Reise durch die deutsch-polnische Geschichte . Munich, 2000; ISBN 3-406-46766-0
• Russische Schriftsteller im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre ; Berlin, 2003; ISBN 3-89479-097-0 (Russian edition: Russian writers in Berlin in the 20s of the twentieth century ; St. Petersburg 2014, ISBN 978-5-87417-494-1 , ISBN 978-5-87417-494-1 )
• Der Verlust. Die Vertreibung der Deutschen und der Polen im 20. Jahrhundert ; Munich, 2004; ISBN 3-406-52172-X
• Polen ; Munich, 2008 (series: Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn. Publishers: Helmut Schmidt / Richard von Weizsäcker ); ISBN 978-3-406-57852-6
• Schwarze Adler, Weiße Adler. Deutsche und polnische Fußballer im Räderwerk der Politik ; Göttingen, 2011; ISBN 978-3-89533-775-8
• Katyn 1940 . Geschichte eines Verbrechens ; Munich, 2015; ISBN 978-3-406-67366-5 .
• Die Irrtümer des Kremls. Warum wir den Krieg im Osten Europas stoppen müssen ; Munich, 2015; ISBN 978-3-86497-300-0 .