Hertha Kräftner

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Hertha Kräftner (born April 26, 1928 in Vienna ; † November 13, 1951 there ) was an Austrian writer .

Life

Hertha Kräftner grew up in Mattersburg, Burgenland , and made her first poetic attempts during her school days. When soldiers of the Red Army broke into the family home in 1945 , the life of the sensitive woman was deeply shaken. His father, Viktor Kräftner, was injured in an argument with a Soviet soldier, of which he died in September of the same year.

Of these events deeply affected concluded Kräftner the Bundesrealgymnasium Mattersburg and moved in 1947 to her aunt Wilhelmine Karger to attend the University of Vienna , the teacher training of German and English studies take. Here she also attended lectures on psychology , in which she came into contact with Sartre's existentialism . She met the librarian Otto Hirss and gave him the nickname Anatol, based on Arthur Schnitzler 's play of the same name . The difficult relationship between the two, which in the following years was additionally burdened by numerous affairs by Kräftner, was not only expressed in this name, but also revealed in Kräftner's letters and diary entries.

It soon gained recognition in the literary circles of the Austrian capital and was first printed in October 1948: Hermann Hakel , Kräftner's first literary sponsor, published her poem "Eine Straßengeiger" in his magazine Lynkeus . Soon afterwards she changed her course of study and henceforth dealt with psychology , philosophy and aesthetics .

Kräftner, who had previously only written poetry, began writing prose for the first time in 1949 . In the summer of 1949 she traveled to Norway for a few weeks through a youth organization that offered work and vacation . Her travel diary shows how lonely and lost she felt, how much she wavered between resignation and hope. She began an affair with a Dane, but it ended quickly. This was again an act of alienation from her friend, Otto Hirss, who, however, continued to stand by her, although he found it difficult to deal with Kräftner's deepening depression and her suicidal thoughts.

After her return, Kräftner made friends with the neurologist and founder of logotherapy and existential analysis Viktor E. Frankl , whose lectures she attended. On his advice, she joined in 1950 with the literary circle around Hans Weigel in Café Raimund in conjunction spoke and corresponded with writers such as René Altmann , HC Artmann , Gerhard Fritsch , Friederike Mayröcker , Jeannie Ebner and Andreas Okopenko , published in the journal New Ways published . Kräftner's works also appeared there and in other papers, e.g. B. Voices of the present , were presented in the Vienna Volksbildungshaus Urania as well as on the radio .

Despite these first successes as a writer, Kräftner continued to feel lonely and sad. In August 1950 she fled to Paris to meet Marguerite Rebois, whom she had met in Norway. She managed to disperse a little, so that, according to her own statements, she spent a very happy time there. It was under this impression that the "Paris Diary" was created, which was honored with the prose prize in 1951 by the magazine Neue Wege . In addition, at Frankl's suggestion, she began to work on her "Notes on a novel in first-person form" . However, this novel remained a fragment. She also failed to complete her dissertation on "The stylistic principles of Surrealism , proven by Franz Kafka " , which she began in 1949 .

The texts written in 1951 tended more and more towards resignation and death. Kräftner repeatedly considered killing himself. At the same time, she toyed with the idea of ​​following her former lover Harry Redl, who had emigrated to Canada a few months earlier, there and starting a new life with him. But it didn't come to that. Even the short but intense love affair with the photographer Wolfgang Kudrnofsky in summer , with whom she drove a moped, read Kafka and wrote a detective novel , no longer gave her any new courage to face life. On the night of November 12th to 13th, 1951, the " suicide on vacation", as Hans Weigel called her, took her own life with an overdose of veronal . She was 23 years old.

Hertha Kräftner was buried at the Atzgersdorfer Friedhof (department 1, number 98).

In 2001 the Hertha-Kräftner-Gasse in Vienna- Floridsdorf (21st district) was named after her.

plant

As a result of her short life, Kräftner's work is limited to barely more than a hundred poems, a draft novel, a few short prose texts and diary entries. Its literary importance results primarily from the lyrical productions, while the prose largely does not come close to their quality.

The autobiographical reference of her poetics is evident, the central starting point of which was her own psychological state and direct individual experience. For this subjective poetry, Kräftner also advocated literary theoretical debates. She wrote to the writer Herbert Eisenreich : "Every mental picture is also a world picture. Even the most realistic world picture is also a soul picture."

The reader looks for allusions to the social and political upheavals of that time in vain in Kräftner's poems as well as in her letters and diary entries. Not a word about grocery cards, black market shops and bombed-out houses, not a word about the Austrian self-image that was broken after the "Anschluss" in 1938 and the devastation of the war , not a line about the looming political fragmentation. Kräftner wrote her poems, as she once put it, without thinking about the "situation in Europe".

In the early, d. H. The poems written in 1946 and 1947 can still be clearly identified by Kräftner's role models: Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Conrad Ferdinand Meyer , Josef Weinheber and Anton Wildgans , but above all Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke . Although these first poetic attempts, as Okopenko put it, are still strongly characterized by "young girl sentimentality", they already show the subjects Kräftner will deal with in the following years. They tell of the longing for touch and the saving "you", but at the same time also of farewell and transience, melancholy and longing for death.

And that means being a girl:
standing by the window and waiting
and being as full of longing
as
the red roses are outside in the garden
when they feel at night:
we will bloom. -
And you're no longer a child.
(from "Mädchen", December 1, 1946, first datable poem)

The motif of death runs like a red thread through her oeuvre. The early death of her father, the horrors of the occupation and the tormenting love affairs have left deep marks on the fragile woman and led to an entrenched distress.

The face of my dead father,
which looks like mine,
wanders
back and forth in the cemetery trees.
(from "The Face of My Dead Father", October 22, 1950)

Oh, death will
smell of pepper and marjoram
because he was previously in the shop with the grocer
who was
choking on the silver tail of a salted herring.
(from "Whoever believes yet", May 11, 1951)

The encounter with Viktor Frankl had a great influence on her, and she was deeply impressed by his conceptual model of an existential analysis based on the search for meaning as a basic psychological state of human beings. Other points of orientation were existential philosophers such as Sören Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre - see the prose cycle "Conjuring an Angel" from early 1950: "Perhaps you are the nothing that is everything?" - as well as the young Paul Celan , of whom she first read in an issue of the magazine Der Plan by Otto Basil . The prose texts created from 1949 were heavily based on Franz Kafka .

In her poetry, Kräftner apperceived fear as a basic metaphysical condition, her attitude was based on absolute futility and existential despair, death was recorded as an integral part of life.

Face of the contradiction of dense and loose,
scattered in moments that it loves,
and as if it were narrowing into the hopeless,
of which it knows that it will conquer.
(from "Self-Portrait", April 26, 1949)

And at the same time,
when the dead
are turning in their graves ,
the young women ask
their husbands for a child.
(from "The Parents in Autumn", November 23, 1950)

From mid-1950 onwards, the highest quality as well as the most extensive part of her work began. Kräftner now processed sensory perceptions and moved small scenes from everyday life into the focus of her poetry. The tone became succinct and sneering, surreal elements created disharmony and showed a fundamentally disturbed human being. In her last works, Kräftner met the aesthetic zeitgeist: "The neorealism of ' rubble literature ', existentialism and surrealism merge in the illusion-free self-portrayal of the lyrical self, in which the external collapse and resigned mood of the times after the end of the war are reflected." (Dr. Cornelia Fischer in " Kindler's New Literature Lexicon ")

In the early evening,
blue advertising lights fell from the department store across the street into the office.
The typewriter clinked softly, softly ...
(from "Im Büro", June 3, 1951)

The gin tastes good at eleven and three,
the soda just gets stale.
Whoever wants can have me
for an old thaler.
(from "Drunk Night", June 29, 1951)

For Bernhard Fetz her work stands in the tradition of a " psychogrammatic " literature: "The dissolution of the ego in constant linguistic images of dream, death, love and strangeness superimposes the reality of the external world." (Killy Literature Lexicon)

reception

During Kräftner's lifetime, only a few poems by her had appeared in newspapers and magazines. In 1963, twelve years after her death, Andreas Okopenko published the book "Why here? Why today?" and for the first time presented a collection of poems and texts by Kräftner to the public. However, the issue met with enormous disinterest, not even 100 copies could be sold.

It was only through the editions published in 1977 (by Otto Breicha and Andreas Okopenko ) and 1981 that the poet was gradually rediscovered. Feminist literary studies in particular discovered their autobiographical texts as examples of female identity and drew comparison with authors such as Sylvia Plath and Unica Zürn . Günter Unger founded the Hertha-Kräftner-Gesellschaft in Mattersburg in 1988, which has taken on the care of Kräftner's estate. Peter Härtling and Hans J. Schütz see her as the most important Austrian poet after 1945, alongside Ingeborg Bachmann , and also the majority of the literary world, which for a long time only assigned her the place of failed young hopes, today recognizes her essential contribution to post-war literature. Her poems have also found their way into well-known anthologies such as Conrady and Reich-Ranicki's Der Kanon .

Various artists were inspired by her for further work: Ernst Kölz ("The cruel mornings - songs based on poems by Hertha Kräftner"), Gerhard Rühm ("two hertha-strengner-lieder") and Stefan Heucke ("Seven songs from death") op. 52 based on poems by Hertha Kräftner for voice and piano, 2007) set her poems to music, Hans Staudacher and Felix Dieckmann put them into drawings. Directed by Friederike Füllgrabe , a play about Kräftner's life was created with the title "The flap of the butterfly". Jürg Amann created the 18-stanza monologue "Because the sea is always before love" from her texts.

literature

Work editions

further reading

  • Sabine Grossi: The psychogrammatic structure of poetry HK's dissertation Salzburg 1973
  • F. Haas: A thing from dream and time. HK's poems, prose and letters. In: NZZ , October 4, 1997
  • Martin A. Hainz : nuances - two quiet poetry. In: Studia austriaca , No. XI, 2003, pp. 9-27
  • Ders .: To write quietly - two poems: Rose Ausländer and Hertha Kräftner. In: "Always back to the Prut". Documentation of the Chernivtsi Symposium 100 Years of Rose Ausländer, ed. v. Michael Gans u. Harald Vogel. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren 2002, pp. 115–124
  • Veronika Leskovar: The fabulous world of Hertha Kräftner. Edition Praesens, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-7069-0330-X
  • Dine Petrik : The hills after the flood. What really happened to Hertha K.? Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg / Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-7013-0941-8
  • Evelyne Polt-Heinzl (Ed.): “Poetry requires restrictions”. Hertha Kräftner - a literary cosmos in the context of the early post-war period. Edition Praesens, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-7069-0263-X
  • Hans J. Schütz: Hertha Kräftner. In: I was once a German poet. CH Beck Verlag April 1997, ISBN 3-406-33308-7
  • Clemens K. Stepina (Ed.): “Everything is in me”. Notes on Hertha Kräftner. Edition Art & Science, Vienna 2007. ISBN 978-3-902157-21-8 . With contributions by CK Stepina, Anton Bürger & Friedrich Szmudits, Marietta Böning, Sabine Grossi, Martin A. Hainz, Veronika Hofeneder, Helmuth A. Niederle, Dine Petrik, Evelyne Polt-Heinzl.
  • Helga Strommer: Hertha Kräftner's "Litany". Structure - subject matter - language. Burgenland State Museum (= scientific work from Burgenland; 109), Eisenstadt 2003, ISBN 3-85405-148-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.weltexpresso.de/index.php/buecher/1884-selbstmoerderin-auf-urlaub
  2. ↑ Hertha Kräftner. Cut in wood: https://www.lovelybooks.de/autor/Felix-Dieckmann/Hertha-Kr%C3%A4ftner-1347446920-w/

swell

personal data
SURNAME Kräftner, Hertha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1951
Place of death Vienna