Adam Scharrer

Adam Scharrer, GDR postage stamp 1989

Adam Scharrer (born July 13, 1889 in Kleinschwarzenlohe (Middle Franconia) today municipality of Wendelstein ; † March 2, 1948 in Schwerin ) was a German writer .

Life

Birthplace in Kleinschwarzenlohe

The Scharrer family moved to Speikern around 1893 , today part of Neunkirchen am Sand , where his father got a job as a community shepherd. Shortly afterwards, in 1894, Adam Scharrer's mother died, whereupon the father married her sister.

Adam Scharrer attended elementary school in Ottensoos from 1895 , while he also had to look after the geese. He then completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith in Lauf and, according to his own statements, worked as a locksmith in many cities in Germany until he was forty years old. a. in Nuremberg , Pirmasens, Stettin, Braunschweig, Hamburg, Dessau, Wandsbek and Kiel. The job seeker also came to Austria, Switzerland and Italy. In 1915 he married Sophie Dorothea Berlin, who died in 1923. He tried to escape the First World War , which had since ignited , but was sent to the Russian front as an artilleryman in January 1916. In the meantime he had made contact with revolutionary opponents of the war; he was disappointed by the Social Democratic approval of the war credits , which for him meant a betrayal of the international labor movement .

In between he found work as an armaments worker in Essen, then in Berlin.

In line with his political stance, he joined the “ Spartakusbund ”, a left-wing split from the SPD under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg , towards the end of the war , took part in the ammunition workers' strike in Berlin , and finally joined the KAPD there in 1920, where he was a strong one Position. Like many other people, Scharrer learned to deal with unemployment and changing jobs during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic. His first, anonymously published story Weintrauben led in 1925 to a trial for "literary high treason".

After January 30, 1933, his political commitment led to the Nazis looking for him on a wanted list. He first had to go into hiding in Berlin and emigrate to Czechoslovakia that same year . A year later he came to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Writers' Union of the USSR. He stayed in the Ukraine for a short time, but soon returned to the vicinity of Moscow, where he lived in an author colony. Among other things, he got to know the Bavarian writer Oskar Maria Graf during this time . After the end of the war, Scharrer moved to Schwerin in the east of occupied Germany, where he temporarily found a job as a department head in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania administration , and together with others he founded the cultural association there , whose head of the literature section he eventually became.

Scharrer died of a heart attack in Schwerin in 1948. The trigger was a dispute at a Kulturbund event. In the context of a literary debate it was, among other things, dealing with the Nazi past (source: "Der KZ-Zug von Sülstorf", publisher: Verein Politische Memoriale Mecklenburg-Vorpommern eV)

Position as a writer

Many realistic works, mostly autobiographical and popularly written from the point of view of the lower social classes, were published in the GDR , which was founded a year later (first complete edition by Aufbau-Verlag in East Berlin). Scharrer is considered to be one of the first "working-class writers" in Germany. His work “Patriotic Journeyman” is seen as a proletarian response to Remarque's “ Nothing new in the West ”, a settlement with the Wilhelmine system and the imperialist war that it started.

Works

• Beaten out of style. Worker's travelogue. The book circle, Berlin 1930.
• Patriotic fellows . A worker's first war book. Vienna, Berlin: Agis-Verlag, 1930.
• The big scam. Story of a proletarian family. Vienna, Berlin: Agis-Verlag, 1931.
• Moles. A German farmer's novel. Malik, Prague 1934.
• Shepherd boy adventures and other village stories. Moscow ; Leningrad: Foreign Publishing Cooperative. Workers in d. USSR, 1935.
• The peasants by the grace of God. Engels: Dt. State Publishing House, 1935.
• Penn brothers, rebels, marauders. Zurich: Globus-Verlag, 1937.
• Two stories from the life of German farmers. Moscow: Meshdunarodnaja kniga - The international book, 1938.
• The Krummhof farmer and other village stories. Kiev: State Extension d. National minorities d. USSR, 1939.
• Schuhmann family. A Berlin novel. Moscow, The International Book, 1939.
• The honeymoon. Moscow: Meshdunarodnaja Kniga, 1940.
• Wandering Kiev: Staatsverl. d. National minorities d. USSR, 1940.
• The country postman Ignatz Zwinkerer from Eichendorf near Bamberg in Bavaria tells what he heard and experienced in his village and on his corridors. Moscow: Meshdunarodnaja Kniga, 1941.
• The shepherd of Rauhweiler. Novel. Moscow, The International Book, 1942.
• How the SA man Lakner became an hereditary farmer. Moscow: Izd. literaturna inostrannych jazykach, 1943.
• The Landsknecht. Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House, 1943.
• The country postman winking and other stories. Moscow: Verl. F. Foreign language literature, 1944.
• At a young age. Adventure novel by a German worker. Berlin, construction, 1946.
• Village stories, once different. Berlin, Verlag Lied der Zeit, 1946.
• The last word . Berlin: Verl. “Lied d. Time ”, 1948.
• The man with the bullet in his back. Fragment of a novel, short stories and essays. Edited by Fritz Hofmann, assembly, Berlin / Weimar 1979.
• Heiner, the shepherd boy. Berlin: Kinderbuchverlag, 1979.

Collected Works

• German Academy d. Künste zu Berlin (ed.): Collected works in individual editions. Construction publishing house, Berlin.
  • The shepherd of Rauhweiler: Roman. 1961.
  • Village stories with a difference. 1961.
  • The big fraud. The story e. Working class family. 1962.
  • Schuhmann family. Novel. 1962.
  • Moles. A German farmer's novel. 1963.
  • Heimat- und Geschichtsverein Neunkirchen (ed.): Wandering - an adventure novel . (New edition).

literature

• Deborah Vietor-English :  Scharrer, Adam. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 582 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Adam Scharrer, Erwin Strittmatter. Berlin: Verl. Volk u. Knowledge, 1959
• Walter Fähnders, Martin Rector: Left radicalism and literature. 2 volumes. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1974. In particular, Volume 2, pp. 243-263.
• Hans J. Schütz, I was once a German poet. Forgotten and misunderstood authors of the 20th century. Beck, Munich 1988, pp. 240-245
• Scharrer, Adam . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945. 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Günter Helmes : The First World War in Film and Literature. Developments, tendencies and examples (Adam Scharrer, “Fatherlandslose Gesellen” and GW Pabst, “Western Front 1918”). In: Waltraud Wende (ed.): War and memory - a state of emergency in the field of tension between cultural constructions of meaning. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, pp. 121–149. ISBN 978-3-8260-3142-7 .
• Günter Helmes: "Some are happy about the rain, they still have grain from last year, they don't need any." Country life, agriculture and capitalism in Adam Scharrer's peasant novel "Moles" (1933). With introductory references to Anna Seghers' “Der Kopflohn” (1933) . In: Yearbook on Culture and Literature of the Weimar Republic , Vol. 15, 2011/12, pp. 147–176. ISSN  1618-2464 .
• Christian Volkmann: History or Stories? Literary historiography using the example of Adam Scharrer's “Patriotic Journeyman” and Uwe Timm's “Morenga” . Igel-Verlag, Hamburg 2013. ISBN 978-3-86815-575-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Adam Scharrer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Adam Scharrer in the state bibliography MV
• Short biography
• Adam Scharrer Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ^ Proletarians, KAPD monthly. Born 1925, issue 5 a. 6th