Adolf Stoltze

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Caricature by Adolf Stoltze by Lino Salini Signature Adolf Stoltze.PNG

Carl Adolph Stoltze (born June 10, 1842 in Mainz as Carl Adolph Retting ; † April 19, 1933 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a journalist and writer in Frankfurt am Main.

Life

Adolf Stoltze was the son of the Frankfurt poet and publisher Friedrich Stoltze and his lover Maria Christina Retting (1816 to 1843). Maria Christina Retting was the daughter of a master bookbinder who refused to tolerate her love affair with a democrat. She therefore had to secretly give birth to her child and gave it to foster parents in Enkheim . Adolf Stoltze carried the name Carl Adolph Retting until he was 22 years old.

After the early death of his mother, he was taken into the care of his grandmother Anna Maria Stoltze (1789 to 1868). As a boy he wanted to become a poet and write for the stage. However, after his confirmation, his father gave him an apprenticeship as a watchmaker , and after a year he switched to the master precision mechanic JW Albert. In 1860, through his master, Stoltze was a participant in the first experiments with telephony that Philipp Reis made in the Physikalischer Verein .

During his apprenticeship, Stoltze became a member of the workers' education association. In 1861 he wrote his first Germanias Trost festival for an internal Christmas party for the Frankfurt gymnastics community, which he co-founded .

His first two dramas - King Hiarne from 1861 and Ferdinand Schill (1863) - were well received by the public in public lectures. Then Stoltze decided to work as a freelance writer in the future. In 1864 he married his childhood sweetheart Luise Mannberger (1844 to 1924) and founded the First Frankfurter Annoncenblatt , which was financed by advertisements, similar to today's advertising papers. An official order forced him to discontinue the sheet soon. Stoltze then lived for a few years as a journalist in Munich and Vienna . In 1871, at the urging of his grandmother, he returned to Frankfurt, which had meanwhile been annexed by Prussia . As the editor of the satirical weekly newspaper Die Schnaken (1872–1881), the “young Stoltze” finally had economic success. By 1887 he had around 40 so-called cancer newspapers appear, small commemorative publications on various occasions, e.g. B. for the opening of the new opera house in 1880. In 1878 he published his first volume of poetry Kraut und Rüben .

Despite his success as a journalist, his real goal remained to gain recognition as a stage poet. His play A Good Part , premiered on March 19, 1884, fell through with the audience. It took three years before he was able to place another piece with the Frankfurt artistic director. The Alt-Frankfurt play , a full-length swank in Frankfurt dialect , was enthusiastically celebrated by the audience when it premiered on December 31, 1887. It brought Stoltze the final breakthrough as a playwright. From then on he wrote one piece after the other: The Christmas fairy tale Schönklärchen (1888), the Lokalschwank Neu-Frankfurt (1889, re-performed in 1987 under the title Rendezvous in the Palmengarten by the Frankfurt Volkstheater ) and 17 other pieces between 1890 and 1928.

While his dialect pieces were naturally particularly popular with the Frankfurt audience, he brought his High German dramas a. a. also at theaters in Hamburg , Berlin , Munich and Vienna . In his dramas From the Same Tribe (first performed in Munich in 1895) and The Guilt of the Innocent (1896 in Frankfurt, 1898 in Berlin) he campaigned for the rights of illegitimate children .

Grave of Carl Adolph Stoltze in the main cemetery in Frankfurt am Main

In 1906 Stoltze published his only novel Weltstadtbilder , in which he processed his own experiences from Berlin. In addition to his writing activities, he continued to work as a journalist, including for the Kleine Presse of the Frankfurter Zeitung (1905 to 1925), and later also for the Frankfurter Rundfunk.

In the 1920s Stoltze was the in a survey Frankfurter General-Anzeiger to popular Frankfurter selected. This was mainly due to the sustained success of his most famous piece Alt-Frankfurt , which made him a representative of the old Frankfurt bourgeoisie.

Stoltze lived from 1896 to 1933 in a representative house at Miquelstrasse 1 (today Bockenheimer Landstrasse  92, corner of Siesmayerstrasse) in the Westend . Stoltze died very old on April 19, 1933, shortly after the National Socialist seizure of power . He was buried in the main cemetery with great public sympathy . The National Socialist Lord Mayor Friedrich Krebs tried to use Stoltze's popularity.

After the Second World War , which led to the complete destruction of old Frankfurt in the bombing war in 1944 , Stoltze's play Alt-Frankfurt was performed again by the municipal theaters in 1948 with great success. The so-called "Old Frankfurt Trio", the actors Carl Luley , Anny Hannewald and Else Knott awakened wistful memories in the audience. To this day, Alt-Frankfurt has remained the most popular Frankfurt dialect. Stoltze's grave is maintained as a city grave of honor to this day.

museum

In the Stoltze Museum in Frankfurt am Main ( Töngesgasse 34–36), which is actually dedicated to his famous father Friedrich Stoltze, there are also image documents, texts and furniture from his estate.

Works (selection)

  • Germanias consolation (1861)
  • King Hiarne (1862)
  • Ferdinand Schill (1863)
  • Cabbage and beets (1877) ( 2nd edition from 1878 online  - Internet Archive )
  • Old Frankfurt (1887)
  • Neu-Frankfurt (1889) (today listed under the title Rendezvous in the Palmengarten )
  • Speculated (1892)
  • From the same tribe (1895)
  • The Guilt of the Innocent (1896)
  • The reindeer (1898)
  • Poems in Frankfurt dialect (1902) ( online  - Internet Archive )
  • Dod bullets (1905)
  • Vinzenz Fettmilch (1927)
  • Poems in Volkston , Verlag Heinrich Stoltze successor, Frankfurt am Main approx. 1930

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claudia Schülke: The second cast. FAZ.net, August 1, 2012, accessed on April 29, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Stoltze, Adolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stolze, Carl Adolph (full name); Retting, Carl Adolph (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1842
PLACE OF BIRTH Mainz
DATE OF DEATH April 19, 1933
Place of death Frankfurt am Main