Adam Karrillon

Adam Karrillon (born May 12, 1853 in Wald-Michelbach ; † September 14, 1938 in Wiesbaden ), descendant of a Huguenot family, was a German doctor and writer who became known through local novels from the Odenwald and travel stories. He lived for a long time in Weinheim an der Bergstrasse , where he became an honorary citizen in 1923, and was the first recipient of the Georg Büchner Prize in the same year . His wife Bertha Laisé, also a descendant of a Huguenot family, was born in Ibersheim near Worms. At 107 she was at times the oldest woman in Germany.

Life

youth

Adam Karrillon was born in 1853 as the tenth child of the village schoolmaster Franz Karl Karrillon (1808-1891), descendant of a Huguenot family, and his wife Eva Margarete, née. Bangert (1811–1863) was born in Wald-Michelbach. When he was born, only his two older sisters Maria (* 1835) and Elisabeth (* 1847) as well as the mentally retarded brother Nikolaus (* 1849) lived in his parents' house. Three siblings had died young, the brothers Karl (* 1839) and Jakob (* 1841) had already moved out as apprentices and the oldest brother Heinrich (* 1834) had emigrated to America. Karl and Jakob followed Heinrich later to America, after their mother's death in 1863 also Maria, Elisabeth and Nikolaus, so that Adam was the last remaining child in the household of the father and his second wife Marie Kellermann (* 1825) from 1864 to 1867.

In 1867 Adam Karrillon left Wald-Michelbach to attend high school in Mainz . Here he exchanged the problems with his stepmother, because of whom the other three siblings had even emigrated, with the strict regulations of the school attached to the Konvikt , from which he was expelled in 1872 after he had expressed in an essay his worldly desire to practice as a doctor . Until he graduated from high school in 1873, he lived in various private quarters.

Study of medicine

He then returned shortly to Wald-Michelbach, then went on a trip to Bavaria and Austria and studied medicine in Gießen between 1873 and 1878 , where he became a member of the Alemannia Gießen fraternity in 1874 , and Würzburg . He did his doctorate in Freiburg in 1879 . Due to the poor and barren conditions at home, Karrillon had an urge to travel far away as a child. As a young doctor in Freiburg, he therefore tried to be accepted as a medical supervisor on some expedition, but his efforts were in vain. Nevertheless, he prepared for a possible expedition participation with riding lessons.

family

During his medical work in Eich in 1878 , Karrillon was also responsible for Ibersheim, now Worms-Ibersheim . He got to know his future wife Bertha Laisé (born September 27, 1854 in Ibersheim, † March 22, 1962 in Weinheim), whom he married on October 13, 1880 (church in Worms Cathedral, civil in Ibersheim). The wealthy father-in-law Jean Laisé, V. (* 1828) and his wife Elisabeth Büttel (1829–1865) ensured the economic consolidation of the situation. Bertha came from a large farming Mennonite family with Huguenot origins and is honored with a street name in Ibersheim. Adam Karrillon had two children with her: Hans (* May 13, 1883; † July 2, 1915 in the Baltic Sea) and Ella (* July 26, 1881), who was later married to Hans Eppelsheimer and had a daughter Lilo.

Country and ship doctor

Until 1883 Karrillon practiced in Rockenhausen with little success and then moved to Weinheim , where his father and stepmother had moved before. In Weinheim, Karrillon quickly gained a reputation as a good doctor. He was socially and professionally involved in the local club life and got to know the characters and inns that formed a familiar environment for him over the next two decades and to which he would later set a literary monument. Karrillon himself is described as a good-drinking "original" who liked to sleep through the mornings, practice in the afternoons and feel at home in the confines of the local dining rooms in the evenings, but who nevertheless always moved into the distance. In 1885 he took a long trip to northern Germany, in 1891 he traveled with his wife and her cousin to Switzerland and northern Italy. Spontaneously he recorded an episode on the trip to Switzerland in writing and sent it to a newspaper publisher, which promptly printed it and paid him 20 marks. However, a misprint crept in and the Monte Prosa , which had actually been climbed , was erroneously reproduced as " Monte Rosa ", so that Karrillon was mocked as a boor on his return home and the now almost 40-year-old's literary career was not yet apparent.

At the beginning of 1891 Karrillon took over the medical care of the Kneipp sanatorium "Stahlbad" in Weinheim, but quickly withdrew after its success, because he feared that otherwise he would have to give up his own practice for lack of time. In the same year 1891 a trip with his wife took him again to Switzerland; a missed meeting due to a misunderstanding should, however, be the reason why Bertha would no longer travel with her husband in the future. He went on further trips with friends or as a ship's doctor , and he often had a distant relationship with his wife.

writer

In 1894 Karrillon undertook an extensive journey, which initially led to the world exhibition in Antwerp , from there by ship further along the French, Portuguese and Spanish coasts to the Mediterranean Sea to Genoa and from there via Switzerland back home. Karrillon recorded the experiences of this trip in a detailed and humorous way and later presented the episodes to members' meetings of Weinheim associations. In 1896 Karrillon went on a trip to the Middle East and initially worked on his experiences in three lectures, which he held until 1897 and which were published in 1898 as a book under the title "A Modern Cruise". The author describes his experiences in a simple, humorous, sometimes crude way. With this work, Karrillon received encouragement from Ludwig Büchner , also a doctor and author and also brother of Georg Büchner . The press also received “Moderne Kreuzfahrt” positively, although the debut publication by an unknown author did not yet establish fame.

In 1898, several friends of Karrillon's association died, and Karrillons had also lost a large part of his fortune through a speculative stake in a malt factory. After his daily work as a doctor, Karrillon increasingly sought refuge in the evening by writing novels. During this time work began on "Michael Hely", a biographical novel about a journeyman carpenter from Wald-Michelbach, who spends a time in the Foreign Legion, works unsuccessfully back home as a coffin maker and bell ringer and ultimately kills himself. Despite the sad story, he draws his characters in a cheerful manner. At the beginning of October 1899 he sent the finished manuscript to the "Neue Pfälzischer Kurier" (later the " Pfälzische Rundschau "), which published the novel from January to May 1900 as a sequel in the feature pages. The poor quality first edition of the book, which followed shortly afterwards, did not reach the market due to the bankruptcy of the publisher and was used by Karrillon after unsuccessful marketing attempts - even waste paper dealers did not want to buy the books - as fuel for a Bismarck bonfire on the Weinheimer Bubenstein Provided. Since the books packed in a box did not burn, but only remained charred, they were distributed by boys from Weinheim in the village and one copy ended up in the hands of Jenny Fröhlich (* 1864), wife of an Aschaffenburg court advisor and doctor who worked for the renowned Berlin publisher Grote was able to win over the book and would be Karrillon's editor in the future. After a revision requested by the publisher, the book appeared again in July 1904 and was a success, so that a second edition was necessary in September 1904. Gustav Frenssen and Hermann Hesse praised the book after its publication.

Between 1900 and 1904 Karrillon made three trips to Paris , Italy and Norway. On the trip to Italy in September 1901, the volume of poems "Greetings from afar" was written. From September 1904 to May 1905 Karrillon worked on another work about the Odenwald and its inhabitants: “The mill at Husterloh” was published again in spring 1906 by the publisher Grote. At the latest, this second novel, which received national attention, turned the doctor Adam Karrillon into a well-known writer, who was visited by the literary editor of the Berliner Tagblatt, Wilhelm Bornemann, in Weinheim and then portrayed in the Tagblatt, which also included data on himself and his lifestyle Public.

From 1907 to 1909 he wrote the third novel “O domina mea”, in which Karrillon incorporated experiences from his Würzburg student days and his first unsuccessful years as a young doctor. The novel was again a hit with critics and audiences. However, in the year of publication, Karrillon was also the victim of fraud in helping an elderly patient publish a manuscript allegedly written by her deceased husband for a fee in a literary magazine. The manuscript later turned out to be copied from a work by the author Babette von Bülow published in 1891, but had already appeared as a Karrillonian adaptation.

The success of his first three novels brought Karrillon the acquaintance of Ernst von Wolehmen , Hermann Wette , Helene Christaller , Rudolf Herzog and other literary contemporaries.

In 1909 Karrillon undertook a trip to Africa, where he made his experiences in Cameroon the subject of lectures that he gave in Darmstadt, Mannheim, Weinheim and elsewhere after his return and which in turn formed the basis for the book “In the land of our great-grandchildren “Formed. The book sees the German colonies in Cameroon and Togo, where he also met and accompanied the officer Hans Dominik , as part of an up-and-coming German colonial empire. What is also astonishing in the book is that Karrillon, who was born in the Odenwald, regards himself as a “ Swabian ”.

In 1912, Karrillon handed over his medical practice to his son Hans and wanted to retire from the profession in order to devote himself to traveling and writing. In 1913, his son-in-law, Hans Eppelsheimer, fell ill and died in the spring of 1914, which inhibited his literary work and planned trips. In 1914 the volume "Bauerngeselchtes" appeared, which contained poems and stories dating back to 1910. The village stories contained are crude and bizarre, which is why the critics sometimes considered the work, which was perceived as too realistic, negative.

After the outbreak of World War I , Adam Karrillon returned to work in 1914 and became a hospital doctor. Soon after the death of his son Hans in a naval operation, the city of Weinheim took over the hospital in 1916 and Karrillon found a job in a sanatorium in Schliersee , where he completed the novel "Adam's Grandfather", in which he told both his grandfather and his fallen son Hans set a literary monument.

In the summer of 1917 Karrillon took over a practice in Witten and returned to Weinheim in August 1918, only to move to Wiesbaden with his wife in October 1918 . This is where the novel “Six Swabians and a Half” was created, a travel story from a trip to the Middle East. In 1920 Karrillon managed to find another job as a ship's doctor. On board the steamer “Regina” he traveled between Swinoujscie and Pillau for three months and published the ten-part serial series “Letters from Swinoujscie” in the “ Karlsruher Tagblatt ”. On the steamer he also wrote the novel "Am Stammtisch zum lazy Hobel", which portrays his former regulars' table friends in Weinheim in a humorous way in 20 episodes. Pastor Viljo Ronimus, whom Karrillon met during these trips on the Finnish island of Börkö , was named after the eponymous hero of the novel "Viljo Ronimus", which was completed in 1921 and published in 1925 and which deals with the fate of a health insurance doctor in Groß-Gerau is based on Karrillon's biography.

Late years and death

In 1921 Karrillon was made an honorary citizen of his place of birth Wald-Michelbach. In March 1923 he received the honorary award of the German Schiller Society and on April 3, 1923 he became an honorary citizen of Weinheim. Despite numerous honors that he received on his 70th birthday, the long-time publisher Grote had doubts about Karrillon's latest work, so that the volume of short stories “Windschiefe Gestalten” was only published in 1927 by Gutsch-Verlag in Karlsruhe.

From 1923 the stays with his friend Dr. Joseph Klüber, the head of the asylum in Klingenmünster / Pfalz, where he sometimes spent whole summers. On his 75th birthday in 1928, he was described as “mentally fresh and creative”. In 1929 Karrillon revised the "Letters from Swinoujscie", which have now been published in book form by Grote.

In 1931 daughter Ella dissolved her Freiburg household and moved to Wiesbaden with her parents. For Adam Karrillon's 80th birthday on May 12, 1933, the " Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur " ( Combat League for German Culture ), which is close to the NSDAP , held an Adam Karrillon Evening in the Electoral Palace in Mainz, which was attended by over 400 visitors, guests of honor and government representatives. President Ferdinand Werner (NSDAP), the Nazi governor of Hesse enthroned on March 13, 1933 in the course of the "Gleichschaltung", a personal friend of the poet, personally congratulated. On the occasion of the birthday, three volumes of short stories were also published.

Until 1935 the poet still spent the summer months with Joseph Klüber, then he died and from the winter of 1935/36 Karrillon's strength began to wane as the illness increased. He died in Wiesbaden on September 14, 1938 at the age of 85 and is buried in the Weinheim Old Cemetery in honorary grave no. 75 near the Peterskirche . The apartment in Wiesbaden was bombed out in 1944, and Karrillon's widow Bertha then moved to Weinheim with her daughter Ella. Bertha became the oldest woman in Germany and died in 1962 at the age of 107.

Literary work

Karrillon's work includes travelogues from his many extended journeys, local novels from the Odenwald, some of which are based on his own biography, as well as volumes of poetry and short stories. At the time his first book was published, he was already 45 years old, but his literary creative period would span another four decades.

His work is shaped by his subjective view of the things and experiences surrounding him in his circle of friends, at home and in the distance. His sometimes crude, but mostly humorous portrayal was favorably received by contemporary critics as a lively and realistic rendering of the sensory world of simple Odenwald forests. He describes the female inhabitants of Smyrna in his first book A Modern Cruise (1898) as follows: "They are so fat that they could model a Murillo, and their clothing is only slightly more extensive than those of our ancestral mother Eva before Fall. They are the pride of their husbands, for the Oriental loves fat in women, and he feeds them out until they are as fat and round as a Pomeranian goose breast. "

Some of Karrillon's works have strong autobiographical references. His novel "Adam's Grandfather" (1917) is about the life of his grandfather, the great farmer Bangert, who is called Baumgarten in the novel and who has to watch his son lose his family's extensive possessions through gambling, risky business interests and a loose lifestyle before he finds solace in his grandson's (the author's) professional career. Karrillon expressed the hardships of life as a country doctor in the novel “Viljo Ronimus” (1925), in whose eponymous hero the author can easily be identified, who with the new health insurance law, which he perceived as disadvantageous, the ingratitude of the Odenwald rural population and various injustices struggles in other places and ultimately gives up.

Michael Hely

His first homeland novel Michael Hely (1900) is characterized by an unobstructed view of realistic living conditions in southwest Germany in the middle of the 19th century and is based on real people. The title character comes from a woodworking family from Wald-Michelbach who have been addicted to alcohol for generations, and is shown by the author as an "honest character rascal": Even as a boy he earned the nickname "village devil", fell for a fraud as a young man, who had given him the prospect of emigrating to America, then he was temporarily imprisoned in the context of the 1848 revolution, then returned home to his parents to watch his father die of alcohol and his mother pull away with a scissors grinder. Then he goes on a hike himself, completes an apprenticeship as a carpenter in the Black Forest and wants to settle there with the daughter of a farmer who is pregnant by him, but is driven away by her father, who wants to marry his daughter to a widowed local drinker, the hero of the title seeks his life out of revenge, but then spares him for moral reasons. Hely then joined the Foreign Legion for many years and returned to his home village at a ripe old age, where he worked as a coffin carpenter, funeral grave and bell ringer and lived in the old fortress tower. Although he meets his former lover and the now grown-up son again, he does not reveal himself to them out of shame about his miserable existence. When his place of residence, the fortress tower, is to be demolished, he throws himself desperately from it to his death. Hermann Hesse judged the work: In “Hely” we have a creation of love and the inner necessity, something mature and healthy, and one not only likes to read books like this, one also likes to learn from them and incorporate them into one's experience and also gratefully accepts details that one does not agree with at all.

The Husterloh mill

In the novel Die Mühle von Husterloh , published in 1906 , the economic and social decline of the Höhrle family in the remote Odenwald village of Husterloh (= Wald-Michelbach) is told against the background of industrialization in the 19th century. Their traditional brook mill is not competitive with the steam mill of the company "Groß und Moos" in Ulfenbachtal and is increasingly losing its customers. On the other hand, the high demands of the miller's wife and the expenses for studying his son Hans, whose parents hope for a career as a pastor or doctor, accelerate the crisis. So the savings are used up, the forest is sold piece by piece, and in the end, after the bankruptcy, the assistant Sebastian sets the mill on fire to support his former employer with the sum of the furniture insurance, and is killed in the process. Inserted into the Odenwaldhandlung, the reader accompanies Hans Höhle - with some similarities to Karrillon's biography - during his high school education in Mainz and his medical studies in Marburg: After a fraternity life that was too expensive for him, he discovers his father's financial hardship too late and wants his last Financing the academic year as a piano teacher in the house of the Lerée Commerce Council. There he is seduced by his attractive wife Helene and flees with her to America after the affair is discovered. For his sick father, this news is the final impetus for his death. On the Orinoco, Hans works as a respected surgeon, starts a family with Helene and takes in the unmarried sister Suse. In many of the episodes woven into the main plot, the author vividly depicts individual village characters and the life of the population, such as the rural festivals and the pilgrimage to Walldürn, in a realistic style and in original language, in conjunction with pictorial descriptions of the landscape as the seasons change.

reception

Criticism and contemporaries were mostly positive about Karrillon's work. His travel descriptions and homeland novels in particular enjoyed great popularity, with the direct and detailed approach and Karrillon's humor repeatedly being praised. Hermann Eris Busse praised Karillons rich treasure of his peculiar narrative art and described his work "Windschiefe Gestalten" as a collection of incredibly true-to-life and captivatingly presented reports about people who are destined to fall out of bourgeois equilibrium in a tragicomic way . Since Karrillon's autobiographical writings tend to convey a pessimistic attitude and they usually lack the otherwise highly praised humor, they were not as well received by the critics as the rest of his work.

Awarded prizes in his time and loved and well known as an “Odenwald poet”, his literary work has largely been forgotten today.

Awards, honors, commemorations

• 1921 honorary citizen of Wald-Michelbach
• 1923 honorary citizen of Weinheim
• 1923 Georg Büchner Prize (together with the composer Arnold Mendelssohn )
• 1923 Honorary Prize from the German Schiller Society

In 1934, the typographer Christian Heinrich Kleukens , who also received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1926 , created a new typeface for the Mainz press and named it Adam Karrillon typeface .

In Wald-Michelbach and Weinheim a school is named after Adam Karrillon, in Mainz the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium was named after him until 1953. Streets in Mainz , Weinheim and Eich (Rheinhessen) bear his name. In Worms-Ibersheim there is a Bertha-Karrillon-Strasse in honor of Adam Karrillon’s wife who was born there.

In the old town hall (local history museum) in Wald-Michelbach and in the local Hotel Kreidacher Höhe there is a Karrillon room with exhibits on the life and work of the poet. The book fountain in Wald-Michelbach has been located since 2006 where the city tower was located until the late 19th century. It was the home of the hero from Karrillon's novel "Michael Hely".

Works

• A Modern Cruise (1898)
• Michael Hely (1900/1904)
• The mill in Husterloh (1906)
• O domina mea (1908)
• In the land of our great-grandchildren (1912)
• Peasant Smoked: Sixteen Novellas from the Chattenlande (1914)
• Adam's grandfather (1917)
• Six Swabians and a Half (1919)
• At the regulars' table to the lazy planer (1922)
• Experiences of a Wanderer (1923)
• Viljo Ronimus: The Fate of a Statutory Health Insurance Physician (1925)
• Crooked figures (1927)
• My Argonaut Voyage (1929)
• Once upon a time there were three journeymen (1933)
• Two that shouldn't be together, Two that rolled apart, Two that didn't hate each other for no reason, Finally two that fit together (1933)
• The rose bush (1935)
• Balthasar Ibn Knierem (1936)
• The first flight from the nest (1937)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hermann Eris Busse: Literary Book Show in: Mein Heimatland, Badische Blätter zur Volkskunde , 15th year, Karlsruhe 1928

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , pp. 381–383.
• Ralph Deschler: Karrillon biography. 305 pages, Stadt Weinheim, Weinheim 1978, (= Weinheimer Geschichtsblatt; 29).
• Karl Esselborn: Adam Karrillon, Old and New (biography and selection of works), Darmstadt 1923.
• Karl Hesselbacher: Silhouettes of recent Baden poets. Salzer, Heilbronn 1910.

Web links

• Karrillon, Adam. Hessian biography. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
• Literature by and about Adam Karrillon in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Adam Karrillon in the Gutenberg-DE project