Marion Dönhoff, who died on March 11th aged 92, was the grande dame of postwar German journalism. Her role in the anti-Nazi resistance movement - most significantly, in the famous 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler - qualified her as the personification of the enlightened, moralistic and respectable face of Germany that the world largely failed to see after the war. She has been hailed as a true European patriot.
Her privileged upbringing gave her, she said, a great appreciation of home, dignity and freedom, and her journalistic career was largely fuelled by a desire to write about those who were denied these basic rights, whether in South Africa, the Middle East or eastern Europe. Apart from her role as a founding member of the liberal weekly Die Zeit, she will be best remembered for her work on reconciliation with eastern Europe, particularly her insistence that the Oder-Neisse line between Germany and Poland be erased.
Marion Dönhoff was born at Schloss Friedrichstein, a home that had been in her aristocratic family for centuries, close to Konigsberg, east Prussia (now Kaliningrad, in Russia). Her father was a member of the Prussian upper chamber, and a one-time member of the Reichstag; her mother was in the service of Empress Auguste Viktoria.
In her essay, Childhood In Prussia, she described an enchanted youth amid a stunning landscape of lakes and forests. She recalled the age as one of change - when superstitious farmers covered their horses' heads as automobiles approached, and when she, as a teenager, would argue with her mother's claims that women were "not capable" of having arguments with men.
Decades after she had made her life in Hamburg, she still considered east Prussia her home. "I miss the landscape, the nature, the animals of that lost world."
In 1932, she began studying economics in Frankfurt-am-Main, moving to Basle, Switzerland, after the Nazis came to power the following year. There, she handed out leaflets for the anti-Nazi resistance, earning herself the nickname, "the red countess". Extensive journeys through Europe, Africa and the US followed, before she returned to east Prussia in 1938 to run the family holdings, and become a resistance courier and contact.
In 1944, she helped organise Claus Graf von Stauffenberg's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler, after which she was thoroughly interrogated by the Gestapo, but released. She subsequently lost many of her friends, including von Stauffenberg, who was executed.
With the arrival of the Red Army in east Prussia in 1945, Schloss Friedrichstein went up in flames, and Marion Dönhoff fled westward to Germany on horseback, on a journey that took seven weeks. In 1962, she recounted the escape in her bestselling book, Names That No One Mentions Any More.
She found it hard to accept the loss of her homeland, but that, in itself, convinced many of her sincerity. She famously said: "Perhaps that's the greatest extreme of love: to love without possessing."
It was in Hamburg that, "more or less by accident", she started in journalism. In 1946, she helped to establish Die Zeit, putting into practice a personal credo: "Build a respectable Germany, produce a good newspaper."
She became political editor in 1955, and, in the same year, helped to found the German Council on Foreign Relations. Later, she became editor of Die Zeit, and, in 1972, its publisher, a position she later shared, until her death, with the former Social Democrat chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
During the 1950s, this stern, but creative, warm and much-loved woman, made her name as a harsh critic of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. She was more at home with, though not uncritical of, the Social Democrats.
The author of more than 20 books, she was awarded the German book industry's peace prize for her work on reconciliation between East and West during the Cold War.
Her last book, the bestselling Civilise Capitalism: Limits Of Freedom, warned against the dangers of globalisation. From her historical analyses of her own country to reviews of American foreign policy, her view was always largely influenced by her own experiences in times of upheaval.
Marion Dönhoff was awarded many prizes, but the most poignant was the honorary doctorate she received in 1999 from the University of Kaliningrad, 20 miles from her family's former home. It was a gesture, she pointed out in her acceptance speech, that would have been impossible just a few years earlier.
On her 90th birthday, the Poles and Germans celebrated together by fulfilling one of her greatest wishes, and briefly opening the Oder-Neisse line, established in 1945 to separate the Soviet and Polish zones of Germany. Looking back on her life then, she insisted: "Given the chance, I'd do everything the same again."
Blue-eyed and delicate-looking, she was, in reality, a woman with a strong constitution and a passion for fast cars - she loved driving her trademark Porsche. Known as "the countess" by colleagues at Die Zeit, she was at her desk until just a few months ago. She never married.
Marion Hedda Ilse Grafin Dönhoff: born 1909; died, March 2002