Jakub Deml

Jakub Deml

Jakub Deml (born August 20, 1878 in Tasov , Austria-Hungary , † February 10, 1961 in Třebíč ) was a Czech priest , poet and writer . With his “dream prose” he is considered to be one of the pioneers of Czech surrealism . At the same time, he was controversial as an eccentric.

Life

After graduating from high school in 1898, Deml went to the Brno seminary at the request of his parents and under the influence of the poet Otokar Březina . He joined the "Catholic Modernism" and made friends with poets such as Sigismund Bouška and Josef Florian . Until the time after the Second World War, Deml was to propagate the line of the Renouveau catholique . After his ordination in 1902, he worked in the church administration. In it he spread his own idea of ​​Christian doctrine and was given unpaid leave in 1909 after several transfers to small parishes . Then he devoted himself only to literature . Between January 1912 and January 1913 he had a short but intense friendship with the writer, painter and graphic artist Josef Váchal .

In 1912 there were further conflicts with his superiors; he retired and moved to Prague . Here he met František Xaver Šalda in 1913 , with whom he had a long friendship. After the outbreak and during the First World War , he lived in Jinošov , Šternberk and Slovakia .

In 1921 Deml joined the Sokol , in which he propagated his vision of a society. In 1922 he settled in his own house in his hometown of Tasov, a self-chosen exile, where he wrote most of his literary work and mostly self-published in bibliophile editions. In 1928 he broke with the Sokol because the latter did not want to take part in the celebrations for the 1000th anniversary of the death of St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia . A memory book written with almost embarrassing openness to his close friend Otokar Březina, who died in 1929, earned him public ostracism. A case of "insulting the head of state" was set in 1930 after personal intervention by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who valued him as a writer . At the same time, Deml was also one of Theodor Lessing's closest friends , who had first visited him in 1926.

Deml often traveled to other European countries in the 1930s and expressed himself increasingly conservative and anti-Semitic. During a love affair with a German countess, Deml also wrote poems in German, his grandfather's mother tongue. But he also condemned the German occupation policy in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and had been prohibited from publishing since 1943.

In 1948 Deml was brought to trial for "Nazi collaboration", anti-Semitism and attacks against President Edvard Beneš . Above all, a statement by Vítězslav Nezval in his favor saved him from conviction.

The original editions of Deml's total of almost 135 works were banned during the 1950s. Bedřich Fučík had been trying to get a reception since the 1960s and, in the early 1980s, put together a thirteen-volume samizdat edition together with Vladimír Binar .

plant

The friendship with the symbolist writer Otokar Březina, who had also conveyed his philosophical and esoteric preferences, had a great influence on Deml's work. Deml's first writings were still Catholic . He is particularly interested in dreams, which he recorded and made the basis of his works. The early novels Hrad smrti (The Castle of Death, 1912) and Tanec smrti (Dance of Death, 1914) deal with feelings of tightness and fear of death in the form of dream books. The prose poems in Moji přátelé (My friends, 1913 and 1917), a dialogue with the plant world and today his most popular book, are a kind of counterpart . The main theme of his books was always his own life, the main scene was his homeland Tasov, which he set as a positive counterpoint to the city of Prague. He put together his correspondence, polemics, reviews, aphorisms, notes, dream recordings and other material in a montage-like manner in diary-like anthologies. In this line, the 26-volume Šlépeje collection (footsteps, 1917–1941) can be seen, in which he was based on the French poet Léon Bloy .

At the time Deml was not particularly valued, to which his penchant for polemical abuse, which he did not stop at friends and fellow writers, played his part. However, his works are counted among the pioneers of surrealism in the Czech Republic . Nezval described Deml in 1934 as a poet who had been a surrealist even before the emergence of surrealism.

Works

• Notantur lumina , poems 1907
• Hrad smrti , volume of short stories 1912
• Domů , 1912
• Moji přátelé , poems 1913
• Pro budoucí poutníky a poutnice , 1913
• Tanec smrti , volume of short stories 1914
• Miriam , poems and prose 1916
• Šlépeje , 1917–1941
• Kořeny naší řeči , 1920
• Česno , 1924
• Tepna , 1926
• Kronika městečka Tasova , 1929
• Mé svědectví o Otokaru Březinovi , 1931
• Pozdrav z Tasova , 1932
• A memorable day in Kukus , in German, Tasov 1933
• Zapomenuté světlo , prose 1934
• Solitudo , in German 1934
• Štědrý den , 1934
• The song of a soldier gone mad , in German, Prague 1935
• Rodný kraj , 1936
• Verše české 1907-1938 , poems 1938
• Pupava , 1939
• Proč bychom se netěšili , 1939
• Podzimní sen , 1951
• Cestou do Betléma , 1955
• Ledové květy , 1959

Translations into German

• The forgotten light ; in: Bohumil Hrabals reading book, Frankfurt am Main 1969
• The eagles ; in: Czech storytellers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Zurich 1990
• Unholy visions from Tasov . Prose and poetry. Klagenfurt 1993
• Pilgrims of the day and night . Prose, poetry, diary texts. Munich 2005 extract

literature

• Alexander Wöll : Jakub Deml. Life and Work (1878-1961). A study of Central European literature . Cologne / Weimar / Vienna: Böhlau, 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-30005-0

Web links

• Literature by and about Jakub Deml in the catalog of the German National Library
• Overview of works by Deml
• Homepage about the writer