Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn

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Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn (1852-1923)

Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn , actually Adam Müller , pseudonyms: Franz Josef Gerhold , Ignotus , Michl Vetter , Figaro , (born October 22, 1852 in Guttenbrunn , Voivodeship of Serbia and the Temesian Banat , Austrian Empire ; †  January 5, 1923 in Vienna ) a German-Austrian writer, journalist, playwright, theater director, critic and national councilor. He is considered a figure of integration and the main representative of Danube Swabian literature ; his work can be seen in the anti-Semitic - German national environment.

Life

Memorial plaque on the house where Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn was born in Zăbrani

Way to Vienna

Müller-Guttenbrunn came from the Banat Swabians , a German-speaking minority in the Banat . As the illegitimate child of a farmer and a Wagner's daughter, and as a member of a linguistic minority, he was socially disadvantaged in many ways. He attended German-speaking schools in Guttenbrunn and Timisoara and worked in various professions.

Müller-Guttenbrunn attributed his failure at the Piarist High School in Timisoara to the introduction of Hungarian as the language of instruction in the course of the increased Magyarization in the years of the Austro-Hungarian reconciliation :

In the mid-1960s, the sudden introduction of the Magyar lecture language at the Timisoara high school caused unexpected difficulties for my graduate studies. In one fell swoop, the lesson turned into a mechanical training, we babbled misunderstood Magyar sentences, we even prayed Magyar and sang in this language in church. As a result of these events, the school lost all attraction for me, it had a demoralizing effect on me. (The novel of my life, 1927)

1865-68 made Müller-Guttenbrunn an apprenticeship with his uncle Johann Guthier as a field clerk and barber . In 1870 he came to Vienna for further training in military medicine at the Josephinum , but attended a business school there from 1871–73 and took a course as a telegraph operator . From 1873 to 1879 he worked as a telegraph operator in Linz and Bad Ischl , trained as an autodidact at the philosophical faculty and wrote plays that were applauded by the Burgtheater director Heinrich Laube , who sponsored him. In 1879 Müller-Guttenbrunn was finally able to move to Vienna.

The December constitution not only made national independence of Hungarians possible, but also made Jews de jure citizens with equal rights. Members of German-speaking minorities from the periphery of the Danube Monarchy and Jews who had easier access to German via Yiddish than to Hungarian or the Slavic languages ​​came to Vienna in large numbers. In view of the rapid changes, the wishful image of a bygone, intact old Vienna and the fear of some Viennese of foreign infiltration emerged , which Müller-Guttenbrunn gave an expression to the public.

In his book Wien was a theater city (1884), which polemicized against the Viennese operetta and countered it with the Viennese folk piece by Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy , Müller-Guttenbrunn conjured up an apparently lost time of the folk in the vortex of urbanization : “... the noble Raimund , the Viennese Aristophanes Nestroy and others raised the Volksbühne in Vienna to an unimagined height. [...] But now this proud Vienna is in danger of being decapitalized ”. To remedy this, he called for a division and specialization of the Viennese theaters along the lines of Paris and Berlin, which, in his opinion, would avoid destructive competition and create "stability of conditions" in the theater world:

Divide yourselves into the work! Playing in the Carl Theater antics , pranks and petty-bourgeois comedy , meinethalber build a theater for French sensation dramas , but do not forget to a popular theater for the best and noblest that the popular play was created and the Theater an der Wien let, as they now For once, the operetta cannot be beaten to death !

In 1883 he began his journalistic activity in the Deutsche Wochenschrift , from 1886 he headed the features section of the Wiener Deutsche Zeitung . In 1886 he married his wife Adele, with whom he had three sons, Herbert , Manfred and Roderich , and a daughter, Eva.

During his time in Vienna he joined the Masonic Lodge Zukunft in what was then the Hungarian Pressburg .

Theater directors

The Vienna Volksoper , formerly the Kaiserjubiläums-Stadttheater

1893-1896 Müller-Guttenbrunn was director of the newly founded Raimund Theater . He and his artistic adviser Hermann Bahr saw the theater as a speaking stage with classic folk plays that were intended to counterbalance the upper-class “operetta decadence”. Alexander Girardi , Eleonora Duse , Max Reinhardt , Louise Dumont and Adele Sandrock performed here. Müller-Guttenbrunn tried to put his conservative ideas into practice and endeavored to “renew the Viennese stage in the national spirit” ( Deutsches Theater-Lexikon , 1953). Since many successful pieces and authors could not be played due to this program, the management ended in commercial failure.

From 1898–1903, Müller-Guttenbrunn ran the newly founded Kaiserjubiläums-Stadttheater . This second directorate, like the first, ended in an economic fiasco; the theater went bankrupt in 1902 .

In a “memorandum” to Mayor Karl Lueger in 1903, Müller-Guttenbrunn boasted of his anti-Semitic schedule, assured him “We only have Christian actors, we only perform works by Christian writers”, and wrote:

“The founding of this theater was intended to prove that German literature is rich enough to supply the German theater and that we, the international fashion literature and the French bad habits, mostly brought in by Jewish translators, have the healthy feeling of ours To contaminate the people, to be able to betray them; This theater was intended to reawaken the domestic production, which had been completely overgrown and discouraged by Jewish journalism, and which had almost dried up for three decades; on this stage the way was to pave the way for the Aryan talents in the field of literature and the art of acting, through the existence of this theater a breach should be made in the ring that subjugated the entire German artistic life and made it his business domain. "

The Lieutenancy of Lower Austria prohibited the performance of strongly anti-Semitic plays such as Söhne Israels by Litwin Kriloff from Russian or Hard Hands by Roman Bozykowski from Polish, as Müller-Guttenbrunn describes in the foreword of his book series Verbotene Bühnenwerke . Felix Salten called Müller-Gutenbrunn's theater an "anti-Semitic hate theater".

In 1903 Karl Kraus wrote in Der Fackel about Müller-Guttenbrunn's failure at the Kaiserjubiläums-Stadttheater : “It speaks in his favor that he did not blindly walk into calamity, but informed the relevant people about the economic situation of the anti-Semitic theater. To his disadvantage that he, the man of letters - and this will certainly not be conducive to his fresh reputation in the liberal press - has made a stage serve political propaganda, used Shakespeare as an anti-Semitic house poet and worn the party fetters as jewelry. "

Political activity

From then on, Müller-Guttenbrunn wrote under the pseudonym "Ignotus". In 1897 he became president of the German-Austrian writers' cooperative, which was classified as national and anti-Semitic . The German scholar Horst Fassel explained: "In Vienna itself, his reputation had suffered because he had joined a theater association whose statutes contained anti-Semitic objectives."

Under the pseudonym Franz Josef Gerhold, Müller-Guttenbrunn published the novel Fermentations - Clarifications in 1903 . “In this work he speaks of the Jews as nomads and alludes to the Christian legend of Ahasver . For the protagonist of the book, the 'Jewish spirit' is the worst enemy of the German people, he regards emancipation as a 'world historical error'. The Enlightenment, social democracy and generally all liberal views are the work of the Jews, it continues. ”The Viennese writer and university librarian Karl Wache praised it in 1930 as“ one of the strongest anti-Semitic pamphlets […] ever written ”.

1919 joined Müller-Guttenbrunn for a short time as a member of the Greater German unification as scorekeepers for the constituency I in the National Council of the new Republic of German Austria one.

The Swabian poet

After early retirement as a journalist and his retirement from public life, Müller-Guttenbrunn devoted himself more to writing and wrote mainly local novels in the last fifteen years of his life . A trip to his Banat homeland in 1907 provided the inspiration for these late works, which deal primarily with the German minority in the Kingdom of Hungary .

The anthology Schwaben im Osten , which Müller-Guttenbrunn published in Heilbronn in 1911, brought together works by Banat Swabian authors for the first time. The bells of the homeland , a settler novel that shaped the fate of the German community Rudolfsgnad , was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize . The novella Der kleine Schwab became textbook reading in the interwar period .

The main work is the novel The Great Swabian Train (1913), which deals with the Danube countries that immigrated from southwest Germany in the 18th century and for which the name Danube Swabia has become common. Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn was subsequently referred to as the "Swabian poet par excellence". Swabian dialect is not to be found in it: The Danube Swabians were not Swabians in the true sense of the word, although they were called that. The dialect of the Banat Swabians belongs to the Franconian languages , which can be easily recognized from Müller-Guttenbrunn's poems.

The (state tolerated) Timisoara German literary circle of the local writers' association was named Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn from 1968 . The members of the literary circle included u. a. Herta Müller, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as the former members of the Banat Action Group Rolf Bossert , Richard Wagner , Johann Lippet and William Totok as well as the writers Joachim Wittstock , Horst Samson (secretary of the AMG circle from 1981 until the forced dissolution of the circle in October 1984), Balthasar Waitz , Hellmut Seiler , Eduard Schneider (Secretary of the AMG group until 1981), Honorary Chairman Franz Liebhard (alias Róbert Reiter, member of the Expressionist group around Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian magazine Ma , which is published in Budapest ), Stefan Heinz (alias Hans Kehrer ), Ludwig Schwarz and Nikolaus Berwanger , the head of the literary circle from 1968 to 1984.

Aftermath

Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn's grave site
Theoretical Lyceum Adam-Müller-Guttenbrunn in Arad, 2011

Müller-Guttenbrunn was given a grave of honor in Vienna's central cemetery (group 0, row 1, number 38).

In 1935, Müller-Guttenbrunn-Strasse in Vienna's 14th district ( Penzing ) was named after him. Since 1953 there has also been a Müller-Guttenbrunn-Strasse in Linz , as well as in Salzburg. In Rhineland-Palatinate Frankenthal Eppstein is located Adam-Müller Guttenbrunn Street .

The Adam-Müller-Guttenbrunn-Haus in Timisoara is the seat of the Democratic Forum of Germans in the Banat , the German Cultural Center and houses a home for the elderly.

The Timisoara Literature Circle awards an Adam Müller Guttenbrunn Literature Prize .

In Arad , the Theoretical Lyceum Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn teaches in German, and in Zăbrani the Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn Memorial Museum has been set up in the house where he was born.

In Baden-Württemberg, in Mosbach -Masseldorn, there are two memorials and a Müller-Guttenbrunn school . Another Müller-Guttenbrunn school is located in Fürth (Odenwald) .

A Caritas Stuttgart nursing home is called Haus Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn .

Awards

Works

Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn on a Romanian postage stamp from 1998
  • Under the spell of duty (drama), 1876
  • End of the House of Fourchambault . Acting in 5 acts. Breslau: Schottlaender, 1881
  • Vienna was a theater city . Vienna: Graeser, 1885
  • Viennese theater life . Leipzig / Vienna: Spamer, 1890 ( full text in the Google book search - USA )
  • Irma . Play in 4 acts. Dresden: Pierson, 1891
  • Dramaturgical corridors . Dresden: Pierson, 1892
  • The bound imagination . Occasional publication for the opening of the Raimund Theater. Vienna: Konegen, 1893
  • In Grillparzer's century . Images of literature and life from Austria. Vienna: Kirchner & Schmidt, 1893
  • German cultural images from Hungary . Leipzig: Meyer, 1896
  • The Magyarin . Story from the Hungarian robber life. Leipzig, 1896
  • The Raimund Theater. Passion story of a German Volksbühne . Vienna: New Review, 1897
  • Fermentations-clarifications . Viennese novel. Vienna: Austrian Publishing House, 1903
  • Streber & Comp . Play in 4 acts. Dresden: Pierson, 1906
  • The lady in white . A Viennese novel. Vienna: Konegen, 1907
  • Twilight of the Idols. A cultural image from Hungary . With book decorations by Alfred Keller . Vienna: Akademie Verlag, 1908
  • Curort Baden near Vienna . Vienna: Reisser, 1909
  • Little Schwab '. A boy's adventure . Leipzig: Staackmann, 1910
  • The bells of home . Novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1911
  • Once upon a time there was a bishop . Novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1912
  • Poor comedians. A story book . Leipzig: Staackmann, 1912, online
  • The great Swabian train . Novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1913, online
  • The Gleaner . Narrative. Temesvar, 1913
  • The idyllic year . A summer book. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1914
  • Old Viennese walks and descriptions . Vienna: School books publisher, 1915
  • War of nations! Austrian impressions and moods. Graz: Moser, 1915
  • Austria's book of complaints . Some entries. Constance, 1915
  • Merciful Emperor! Novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1916
  • German life in Hungary . Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1916 ( Austrian Library 18)
  • War diary of someone who stayed at home . Impressions and moods from Austria-Hungary. Graz: Moser, 1916
  • Viennese histories . Constance, 1916
  • Joseph the German . A state novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1917
  • Master Jacob and his children . Novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1918
  • The domestic happiness . A family picture in 3 acts. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1918
  • German worries in Hungary . Studies and Confessions. Vienna: Strache, 1918
  • Austria's literature and theater life . Verlag Carl Fromme, Vienna and Leipzig, undated [1918] ( Österreichische Bücherei 5 / 1A)
  • His father's house . Novel. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1919
  • Demonic years. A Lenau novel . Leipzig: Staackmann, 1920
  • The beautiful Lotti and other ladies . A story book. Vienna: Viennese literary institution, 1920
  • At the height. A Lenau novel . Leipzig: Staackmann, 1921
  • From the autumn garden . 5 novellas. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1922
  • Old Austria (novel), 1922
  • Memories of a theater director , Ed. Roderich Müller-Guttenbrunn. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1924
  • The novel of my life . Compiled from the estate by Roderich Müller-Guttenbrunn. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1927
  • Hikes through old Austria . Ed. Roderich Müller-Guttenbrunn. ÖBV, Vienna / Leipzig, 1928

literature

Web links

Commons : Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vienna was a theater city , p. 7
  2. ^ Vienna was a theater city , p. 16
  3. ↑ printed in: Die Fackel No. 146, Nov. 11, 1903
  4. ↑ A. Müller-Guttenbrunn (Ed.): Verbotene Bühnenwerke, 2 vol., Schalk, Vienna 1901/1902.
  5. ^ Street names in Vienna since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 72ff, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
  6. ↑ The Torch No. 146, Nov. 11, 1903
  7. ↑ Horst Fassel : Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn . In: East German Biography (Kulturportal West-Ost)
  8. ^ Christian Pape in Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Anti-Semitism in Past and Present , Ed. Wolfgang Benz, Vol. 2/2, Berlin 2009, pp. 567-568.
  9. ^ Karl Wache: The Austrian novel since the neo-baroque , Leipzig: Staackmann 1930, p. 72
  10. ↑ a b c d pointernet.pds.hu , Hans Dama : Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn and Hungary
  11. ^ Anton Peter Petri : Biographisches Lexikon des Banater Deutschtums , Marquartstein, 1992, ISBN 3-922046-76-2
personal data
SURNAME Müller-Guttenbrunn, Adam
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müller, Adam (real name); Gerhold, Franz Josef (pseudonym); Ignotus (pseudonym); Vetter, Michl (pseudonym); Figaro (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and cultural politician, member of the National Council
DATE OF BIRTH October 22, 1852
PLACE OF BIRTH Guttenbrunn , Voivodeship of Serbia and the Temesian Banat , Austrian Empire
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 1923
Place of death Vienna