Adolf Wurmbach

Adolf Wurmbach (born July 15, 1891 in Littfeld , † January 17, 1968 in Kredenbach ) was a German writer and local poet. The former elementary school in Kreuztal-Krombach bore his name.

Life

Adolf Wurmbach was born the son of a miner . After completing elementary school, he began an apprenticeship as a businessman . This was followed by training as a technical draftsman . Due to his fondness for literature, he began training as a teacher at the Hilchenbacher teachers' seminar in 1911 , which he was only able to complete in 1920 after the end of the First World War , in which he participated.

From 1907 he published his first poems under the pseudonym "Erwin Röslin" in the Siegener newspaper . As a soldier, he wrote propaganda poems under this name for the Liller war newspaper, which were published in the volume Flowers in Brachland in 1919 and two of which ( The Last Farewell , Reiterlied ) were included in a chauvinist-monarchist war memorial book in the same year .

From 1920, Wurmbach taught as an elementary school teacher in Gelsenkirchen to children of industrial workers, whose social environment was shaped by their membership of the proletariat. He addressed this milieu in some of his verses. In Gelsenkirchen he married the teacher Emilie Auguste Katharina born in July 1922. Bollens. Since he did not want "double income" in the family, he persuaded her to give up the school service and limit herself to the role of housewife. In 1925 the only child Annemarie was born.

In the völkisch-nationalist Siegerland Heimatkalender , the organ of the regional Heimat movement, three or four contributions by Wurmbach appeared up to 1922. In 1924 he turned to pacifism. He published his first contribution pacifist content ( war souvenirs ) in the organ of the German Peace Society (DFG), the pacifist . There he announced that he had given a familiar Ludendorff picture to the garbage can. He never wanted to say again that he too was part of the World War “when Lille was on fire”. He acted in a “delusion” when he sang “hymns” to the “Moloch War”. He wants to "forget, forget". Wurmbach's reorientation and the associated journalistic activity resulted in a sharp condemnation by the political and cultural legal forces prevailing in the region. The nationalist Siegener Zeitung commented that he was dragging "everything that previously seemed high and sacred to him in the dirt."

In 1924 there was a scandal in connection with the 700th anniversary of the city of Siegen. Wurmbach's history play Hermann von Wilnsdorf , which was to be performed as part of the festival program, was canceled by the city's art commission under pressure from the “patriotic associations”. The reason was not in the content of the play, but in Wurmbach's person, in his departure from his nationalist-militarist positions. After "great popularity" in "patriotic" circles, he is now defiling the historically unique German World War II acts. In fact, Wurmbach was a resolute opponent of the legal forces in those years, because at the beginning of 1933 he wrote: “Don't let the big hour pass! / We choose freedom! / The enemy is on the right! / Let's beat him!” That likes their organs , the Siegener Zeitung and the Siegerländer National-Zeitung or the neighboring Siegerland home calendar , because there is nothing from him between 1923 and 1935.

Although Wurmbach had come out in school a few weeks after the National Socialists and their German national allies came to power in 1933 at a celebration with a poem "The Day of Potsdam", which glorified this event, he was forced to retire in 1934, but without political justification and under Payment of his retirement pension. In the later denazification proceedings, he claimed that there was also a writing ban against him in 1934. That seems unlikely, because even after his release he successfully applied for admission to the Reichsschrifttumskammer and published poems the following year ( O du Heimatflur. Poems from a small world ), which were written in 1934. Between 1935 and 1942 he published seven books and small texts permanently in periodicals. Since 1938 there have been repeated attempts - for example by the NSDAP, the Gestapo and the NSV - to achieve his reinstatement. The Gestapo asked him to name trustworthy sources for his literary work from the NSDAP. He then named Hans Kruse , Siegerland museum director and editor of the magazines Siegerland and Siegerländer Heimatkalender , and Karl-Friedrich Kolbow , governor, who both valued him.

In 1941 Wurmbach finally got a job in Wadersloh near Beckum and achieved his complete rehabilitation. He was served for life.

From 1935 to the 1940s at the latest, he regularly published fiction texts, primarily in the Siegerländer National-Zeitung , the party newspaper of the NSDAP, but also in the Siegener Zeitung (in which the National-Zeitung appeared in 1943), the Siegerländer Heimatkalender and in the organ of Siegerland home club Siegerland . Wurmbach now changed frequently from the end rhyme to Germanized forms. For this z. For example, his poem Germany 1939 , which was published on the occasion of the beginning of the war and was included in the Siegerland home calendar next to “key sentences” from Adolf Hitler's speech on November 8, 1939 in the Bürgerbräukeller. It says legitimizing and creating mood for the war of aggression that has just begun, which Wurmbach portrays as "defense of the fatherland", including:

O Germany, rich in songs and forest splendor -
But the language of anger is also appropriate for you,
So that you can chastise the wicked who
touches holy peace.

With their bodies the best shield a lot
And with a warm heart brands and home to you,
So that they live or die -
Heaven bless the oath! - for Germany.

At the beginning of 1944 a poem appeared in the Siegerland homeland calendar as an introduction and "foreword for the reader" in which - according to Stalingrad - Wurmbach called "from the battlements" to "a new fight, a new drive / a new car and win". The world, he explained, was "no paradise" and it had to be "right in the darkness / the noble ore of miners". This ore is now "refined in embers". "Let's start it right with God!"

Entitled mine bloom has set to music Georg Hermann Nellius published by Wurmsbach 1942 Bergmann poems .

After the end of National Socialism, Wurmbach initially withheld the National Socialist places of publication in the denazification process, asserted that he had only published “fiction”, but then conceded articles in the National Gazette of the NSDAP. Since the re-appearance of the Siegerland home calendar (1951) he was its editor ("calendar man"). He again took a pacifist stance. He managed to get a job at the elementary school in Kreuztal-Krombach, which was later named after him . There he taught until his retirement in 1957. In that year he was also awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. Two teacher colleagues from the home and trade union movement who had joined the NSDAP during National Socialism and were important influencing factors in these years campaigned for this.

On his 70th birthday in 1961, he received the first anniversary medal ("Siegtaler") of the Siegerland Heimatverein in gold and was awarded the Freiherr vom Stein medal in Münster on the same occasion . The local researcher Lothar Irle honored him by including him in his Siegerland Personalities and Gender Lexicon .

Works

• Walpurgis. Historical tragedy in five acts (1915)
• Flowers in the Barrens. Poems (1919)
• Strings. Songs of a Soul (1921)
• The black city. Images and sounds from the realm of work (1922, new edition 1972)
• Hermann von Wilnsdorf. Festival in five acts to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of the city of Siegen (1924)
• At home there is an old fairy tale. Thirteen sagas from Siegerland (1924)
• The game from the Kripplein of Jesus (1925)
• The Game of the Cross of Jesus (1926)
• About a king, tailor, giant, unicorn and wild pig (1926)
• Francis or the Game of God's Love with Man (1926)
• The man in the Moon. A game in four parts (1927)
• The game of the lost parade. For puppet and other stages (1930)
• We are the three kings with their star. A game of three kings (1932, 4th edition 1950)
• O you home hall. Poems from a small world , Leipzig 1935
• Bi oos d'heim. Poems (together with Wilhelm Schmidt) (1937)
• Poems of Homeland (1938)
• The bible stove. Calendar Stories (1940)
• Who is out of love (1941, extended new edition 1947)
• Sankt Nimmerlein, the other part of the calendar stories (1941)
• Mine must flourish. Siegerland ore stages, mined and processed. Miner's Poems (1942)
• The Duck Peasant War (1947)
• The Krombacher Glockenspiel (1950)
• De Nachtschecht (1950)
• Lights in the tunnel (1952)
• Beyond the Day (1961)
• Siegerland Legends (1966)
• The Willow Flute (1966)

literature

• Erich Schmidt, Adolf Wurmbach as a pacifist. The hushed up decade, Siegen 1993

Web links

• Literature by and about Adolf Wurmbach in the catalog of the German National Library
• Adolf Wurmbach in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Regional personal lexicon on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Adolf Wurmbach

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Traute Fries, The German Peace Society in the Sieg-Lahn-Dill district in the Weimar Republic. A historical reconstruction, Siegen 2013, p. 34.
2. ^ Karl Koch, Siegener War Memorial Book 1914-1919, Siegen 1919, pp. 74, 88.
3. ↑ Herbert Knorr, Between Poetry and Life (= series of publications by the Institute for City History, Vol. 6), Essen 1995, p. 457.
4. ↑ Traute Fries, Life Between Systems. Adolf Wurmbach was born 125 years ago, in: Siegener Zeitung, July 9, 2016. There is erroneously spoken of "until 1924". As early as 1923, however, the home calendars are without Wurmbach amounts.
5. ^ Siegener Zeitung, August 25, 1924, cited above. after: Traute Fries, The German Peace Society in the Sieg-Lahn-Dill district in the Weimar Republic. A historical reconstruction, Siegen 2013, p. 34.
6. ↑ Traute Fries, The German Peace Society in the Sieg-Lahn-Dill district in the Weimar Republic. A historical reconstruction, Siegen 2013, p. 52f.
7. ↑ Herbert Knorr, Between Poetry and Life (= series of publications by the Institute for City History, Vol. 6), Essen 1995, p. 443.
8. ^ ^{A b c} Regional personal lexicon on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, Article Adolf Wurmbach .
9. ^ Herbert Knorr, Between Poetry and Life (= series of publications by the Institute for City History, Vol. 6), Essen 1995, p. 451.
10. ^ Herbert Knorr, Between Poetry and Life (= series of publications by the Institute for City History, Vol. 6), Essen 1995, p. 466.
11. ↑ ^{a b} Herbert Knorr, Between Poetry and Life (= series of publications by the Institute for City History, Vol. 6), Essen 1995, p. 474.
12. ↑ See: Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, NW 1.111 BG. 33-748 on siwiarchiv.de ; Herbert Knorr, Between Poetry and Life (= series of publications by the Institute for City History, Vol. 6), Essen 1995, p. 479.
13. ↑ Adolf Wurmbach, Germany 1939, in: Siegerländer Heimatkalender for 1939, p. 4.
14. ↑ For the entire text, see: Discussion article January 28, 2016, in: HP des Kreisarchivs Siegen-Wittgenstein, [1] .
15. ↑ Lothar Irle, Siegerland Personalities and Gender Lexicon Siegen 1974, p. 378.