Marion studied economics at Frankfurt, where National Socialist sympathizers were said to have called her the "red countess" for her defiance once they gained power in 1933. She left Germany soon after, moving to Basel, Switzerland, where she earned her doctorate. But she later returned to her family home at Quittainen in 1938, and joined the resistance movement, which led to questioning by the Gestapo after a failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. Although many of her fellow resistance activists were executed, she was released reportedly because her name was not found in any of the documents seized by the Nazis.[4]
In January 1945, as Soviet troops rolled into the region, Dönhoff fled East Prussia, travelling seven weeks on horseback before reaching Hamburg. She recounted her journey in a 1962 book of essays called Names No One Mentions Anymore.[5][6] The castle in which she grew up and which was destroyed by the Red Army in January 1945, is within the borders of what is now part of Russia (Kaliningrad oblast), yet she was one of the first public figures to endorse the finality of the border between Germany and Poland, which had been established after the Second World War.[citation needed]
In 1946, Dönhoff joined the fledgling, Hamburg-based intellectual weekly Die Zeit as political editor. In August 1954, she temporarily left the newspaper in protest against articles by Richard Tüngel, who had published, inter alia, a text of Nazi constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt and went to London to work for The Observer. Soon afterwards, however, she returned to Hamburg, and was promoted to deputy editor-in-chief in 1955, then editor-in-chief in 1968, and publisher in 1972. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.[7]
She was involved in helping refugees settle in West Germany from East Germany and other parts of Europe.[6]
At the time of her death on 11 March 2002, aged 92, Dönhoff was still co-publisher of the influential newspaper. She was the author of more than twenty books, including political and historical analyses of Germany as well as commentary on U.S. foreign policy. Among many international distinctions, Dönhoff was awarded honorary doctorates by Columbia University[8] and Georgetown University.[citation needed]
Published works
English
Foe into Friend: The Makers of the New Germany from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Schmidt, translated by Gabriele Annan, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982; ISBN0-312-29692-4
"A UN Volunteer Force: The Prospects", New York Review of Books, 15 July 1993 (contributor)
Before the Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia, translated by Jean Steinberg (original title: Kindheit in Ostpreußen), with a foreword by George F. Kennan (1990); ISBN0394582551
German
Namen die keiner mehr nennt, Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Köln 1962
Amerikanische Wechselbäder : Beobachtungen und Kommentare aus vier Jahrzehnten, Stuttgart, 1983
Weit ist der Weg nach Osten: Berichte und Betrachtungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten
^ Kilian Heck / Christian Thielemann (eds.): Friedrichstein. The castle of the Counts of Dönhoff in East Prussia . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich and Berlin 2006 and 2019, ISBN 978-3-422-07361-6
^Kindheit in Ostpreußen (Before the Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia), translated by Jean Steinberg, with a foreword by George F. Kennan (1990); ISBN0-394-58255-1.
Dönhoff, Marion Gräfin. 'Um der Ehre willen', Erinnerungen an die Freunde vom 20 Juli. Berlin (1994), Bundesrepublik, ISBN978-3886805327
Heck, Kilian & Christian Thielemann (Hrsg.): Friedrichstein. Das Schloß der Grafen von Dönhoff in Ostpreußen. Deutscher Kunstverlag, München/Berlin 2006; ISBN3-422-06593-8
Von Schlabrendorff, Fabian. Offiziere gegen Hitler, a.a. O., 1945/1990 Bundesrepublik, ISBN978-3886800964