Alfred Wolfenstein

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Alfred Wolfenstein (born December 28, 1883 in Halle , † January 22, 1945 in Paris ) was an expressionist poet , playwright and translator .

Life

Wolfenstein was born as the son of the Jewish businessman Heymann Wolfenstein († 1890) and his wife Klara Wolfenstein, b. Latz († 1943) was born in Halle (Saale) and grew up there and from 1889 in Dessau . His uncle was Moses Wolfenstein . After losing his father at an early age, he had to briefly interrupt his school career for financial reasons to train in the timber trade, but continued it from 1901 at the Askanisches Gymnasium in Berlin .

From 1905 Wolfenstein studied law in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich and Halle, was appointed court trainee in Berlin in 1915 and received his doctorate in 1916. In the same year he married the poet Henriette Hardenberg , with whom he had a son, Frank Thomas (1916–1993) . The marriage was divorced in 1930.

Wolfenstein's first poem appeared in 1912 in the journal “ Die Aktion ” published by Franz Pfemfert . With this publication Wolfenstein took a position not only literarily but also politically, because this magazine offered the time-critical writers of the young, expressionist avant-garde left of the SPD a well-known forum. With the support of Robert Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke , Wolfenstein's first volume of poetry, The Godless Years , was published in May 1914 . After falling out with the Berlin Expressionists around Kurt Hiller and Franz Pfemfert, he moved to Munich in 1916, where he worked in the “Council of Intellectual Workers” under Ernst Toller in 1919 during the Munich Soviet Republic . During this time he associated with Johannes R. Becher , Oskar Maria Graf and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others . , Edited by Wolfenstein magazine The survey (1919/1920) applies in addition to the human Dawn (1919) by Kurt Pinthus as one of the most important collections of literary expressionism .

In 1922 Wolfenstein moved back to Berlin, where he mainly appeared as a playwright and narrator, but also worked as a translator, and joined the circle around the editor of the Weltbühne , Carl von Ossietzky . In 1930 he received the first German translation award from the Goethe University in Frankfurt / Main for his Rimbaud translations. Wolfenstein also translated Paul Verlaine , Gérard de Nerval and works by the French socially critical writer Victor Hugo . Wolfenstein has translated poems by Percy B. Shelley and works by Emily Brontës from English .

During the years of the Weimar Republic , Wolfenstein wrote a play directed against the death penalty, The Night Before the Ax (1929). The piece was seen by contemporary critics as politically ambitious, but stylistically weak. Günther Rühle sees it in a row with other judicial dramas of the contemporary theater like Ferdinand Bruckner's Die Verbrecher (1928), Friedrich Wolf's Cyankali and Erich Mühsams Sacco and Vanzetti (both 1929). As at the beginning of his literary career around 1914, Wolfenstein professed pacifism . After the seizure of power of the Nazis Wolfenstein was organized by the League for Human Rights warned that he was on a "black list" of the new rulers. Wolfenstein first emigrated to Prague in March 1933, like many other Germans who were politically and religiously persecuted. There he published his last independent publication The dangerous angels in 1936 . Two years later he fled to Paris, where he was surprised by the invasion of German troops in 1940. While trying to escape the occupation troops by fleeing to the south of France, he was run over by the front in Donzy : Since the bridge over the Loire there had already been blown up, Wolfenstein returned to Paris, where he was arrested soon after and imprisoned in Paris La Santé was arrested. After his surprise release, Wolfenstein tried to get an American visa from Carcassonne and Nice , which Thomas Mann , Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig arranged for him only in November 1942, when it was practically impossible to leave France. In February 1944 Wolfenstein returned to Paris, where he lived under the code name Albert Worlin.

In the years in the French underground from 1940 onwards, Wolfenstein's heart disease, due to which he had been postponed from military service in 1914, had worsened. Because of this, increasingly physically impaired and also depressed, Wolfenstein committed suicide on January 22, 1945 in a Paris hospital. Wolfenstein was buried on the Cimetière Parisien de Pantin. The series of poems Der Gefangene , written in the war years, did not appear until the 1970s.

Works

Volumes of poetry

  • The godless years. S. Fischer, Berlin 1914. (including townspeople )
  • Friendship. New poems. S. Fischer, Berlin 1917
  • Human fighter. A book of selected poems. S. Fischer, Berlin 1919.
  • The good fight. A seal. Kaemmerer, Dresden 1920.
  • Movements. A selection of seals. R. Fechner, Berlin 1928.

prose

  • The living one. Novellas. Mundt, Munich 1918.
  • Under the stars. Novella. Rauch, Dessau 1924.
  • Dangerous angels. Thirty stories. Mährisch-Ostrau, Kittl, Leipzig 1936.

Dramas

  • The naked. Wolff, Leipzig 1917.
  • The man. Scenic seals. Heinrich, Freiburg 1922.
  • Murderers and dreamers. Three scenic seals. The forge, Berlin 1923.
  • The wingman. A seal. Rauch, Dessau 1924.
  • The fool of the island. Drama in eight pictures. The forge, Berlin 1925.
  • Trees in the sky. Drama in three acts. The forge, Berlin 1926.
  • The night before the hatchet. Drama in nine pictures. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart et al. 1929.
  • Celestina. Acting in two parts. Stuttgart et al .: Chronos, 1929.

Others

  • (as editor): The survey. Yearbook for new poetry and evaluation. 2 volumes. S. Fischer, Berlin 1919 f.
  • Jewish being and new poetry. E. Reiss, Berlin 1922.
  • (as editor): Paris writes here. A collection of today. International Library, Berlin 1931.
  • (as editor): Voices of the peoples. The most beautiful poems of all times and peoples. Querido, Amsterdam 1938.

Translations

  • Fanny (by Ernst Feydeau, 1911).
  • Stories in three volumes (by Gérard de Nerval, 1921).
  • Seals (by Percy B. Shelley, 1922).
  • AG Pym's adventurous experiences (by Edgar Allan Poe, 1922).
  • The Cenci (by Percy B. Shelley, 1924).
  • Memories of the Sanson Executioner Family (by Henry Sanson, 1924).
  • Ninety-three (by Victor Hugo, 1925).
  • The Last Day of a Condemned Man (by Victor Hugo, 1925).
  • All God's children have wings (by Eugene O'Neill, 1925).
  • Poems (by Paul Verlaine, 1925).
  • The Imaginary Sick (by Molière, 1927).
  • Madame Bovary (by Gustave Flaubert, 1929).
  • Life, work, letters (by Arthur Rimbaud, 1930).
  • Cloudy Heights (by Emily Brontë, 1941).

Honors

In honor of Wolfenstein, a street in Halle (Saale) was named after him.

literature

Work editions

  • Hermann Haarmann , Günter Holtz (Ed.): Alfred Wolfenstein: Works. 5th volumes, Verlag Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1982-1993.
  • Bernhard Spring (Ed.): Alfred Wolfenstein: Reading book. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2011, ISBN 978-3-89812-825-4 (= literature from Central Germany. Volume 3).

Secondary literature

  • Carl Mumm (Ed.): Alfred Wolfenstein: An introduction to his work. Wiesbaden 1955.
  • Peter Fischer: Alfred Wolfenstein. Expressionism and the dying art. Munich 1968.
  • Günter Holtz: Alfred Wolfenstein's lyrical poetry: subject matter, style and text development. Berlin 1970.
  • Bernhard Spring: A Central German youth. For Alfred Wolfenstein from Halle on his 125th birthday. In: Yearbook for the history of the city of Halle. Halle 2009. pp. 193–198.
  • Bernhard Spring: A lonely piper. The poet Alfred Wolfenstein (1883–1945) as a playwright. In: Saxony-Anhalt. Journal for nature and homeland friends. Volume 21, No. 1, pp. 31-32.
  • Annette Riemer : The known stranger. Alfred Wolfenstein and the way to humanity. In: Junge Welt. July 20, 2012, p. 12.
  • Bernhard Spring: A bloody mountain of suffering never imagined. Alfred Wolfenstein's turn to political literature during the First World War. In: Yearbook for the history of the city of Halle. Hall 2014. pp. 89–104.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Bernhard Spring (Ed.): Alfred Wolfenstein. Reading book. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2011.
  2. ↑ a b The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Oxford 2005.
  3. ↑ Wolfenstein's translation of the story The Last Day of a Condemned Man. Anaconda Verlag, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-938484-52-7 .
  4. ↑ Alfred Kerr : The night before the hatchet. In: Berliner Tageblatt, April 8, 1929
  5. ^ Günther Rühle: Theater in Germany 1887-1945. Its events - its people. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 544.
  6. ↑ Hans Sahl: Memoirs of a Moralist and Life in Exile. Munich 2008.
  7. ↑ Alfred Wolfenstein. In: Walther Killy (Ed.): Literature Lexicon. Authors and works of German language. Munich 1988–1993.
personal data
SURNAME Wolfenstein, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Worlin, Albert (code name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION expressionist poet, playwright and translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Halle (Saale)
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1945
Place of death Paris