Alfons Paquet

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Alfons Paquet (portrait drawing by Emil Stumpp , 1931)

Alfons Paquet (born January 26, 1881 in Wiesbaden , † February 8, 1944 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German journalist and writer .

Life

Youth and years of study

Alfons Paquet was born as the son of a strictly Baptist Wiesbaden glove maker, who did not fulfill his wish to finish school with the Abitur. So he had to complete an apprenticeship as a glove maker, then he did a commercial apprenticeship in Mainz.

In 1900 he won an award for a story and decided to move to Berlin and become a journalist. As early as 1901 he published his first volume of short stories and in the following year a book with poems and songs. Soon afterwards he became editor of the cultural magazine Die Rheinlande, published in Düsseldorf, and was able to finance his studies with various activities from 1902, which he completed in 1907 at the University of Jena with a dissertation in business history. During his studies he became a member of the Ghibellinia gymnastics club in Heidelberg .

Travel writer

As early as 1903 Paquet began a travel activity that determined his whole later life. He drove through Siberia on the newly opened Trans-Siberian Railway . The next year he made a trip to the USA for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition . This year also marks the start of his work for the Frankfurter Zeitung .

In the years up to the First World War , Paquet made several trips to Mongolia and China, a trip on the Baghdad Railway to Syria and various other destinations. He was also a witness to the Ferrer riots in Paris. They formed the background for his first novel, Comrade Fleming .

Another volume of poetry appeared in 1906, and in 1909 a volume of travel reports containing his correspondent's reports for the Frankfurter Zeitung.

On October 18, 1910, he married the Frankfurt painter Marie Henriette Steinhausen and moved with her to Dresden- Hellerau , where Paquet now worked for the German Werkbund . The couple had six children by 1919. In Hellerau Paquet published Kamerad Fleming , the travel book Li or in the New East , as well as a volume of poetry and a book with short stories .

But even this period of starting a family and intensive literary activity did not prevent him from traveling. In the spring of 1913 he made a trip to Jerusalem , which he interrupted because of the death of his father and continued in the autumn of 1913. From 1914 he lived with his family in Oberursel until they moved to Frankfurt's bank of the Main (1936) . In 1915 he published In Palestine . Paquet thus became a committed Christian supporter of Zionism .

Newspaper correspondent and playwright

In 1915 Paquet became a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in neutral Stockholm . From here he observed what was happening in Russia and in 1918 undertook an exploration in the civil war area of ​​Finland. In the summer of the same year he went to Moscow to become an eyewitness and reporter of the Bolshevik revolution . He made various contacts with leading communists before returning to Germany, which was currently in upheaval, in November. In the following period he developed a lively publication activity in order to inform the German bourgeoisie about the events in Russia.

After longing for a pact between Germany and Russia to prevent American supremacy during the war, Paquet became a supporter of the Weimar Republic and was intensively concerned with the idea of ​​a “Rhenish” renewal of Europe with Germany as a mediator between East and West. He envisioned a pacifist Germany in a European Union.

In the 1920s Paquet wrote more and more for the theater. Erwin Piscator performed his plays at the Volksbühne in Berlin . In 1925 he founded the “Bund Rheinischer Dichter” with Jakob Kneip and remained its chairman until 1933. In 1929 Paquet designed the concept for Walter Ruttmann's film Melodie der Welt , which strings together a large number of impressions from a trip around the world. The film is considered to be one of the first German sound films.

Pacifist in the Nazi state

Memorial plaque of the Academy of the Arts, Berlin

In 1932 Alfons Paquet was accepted into the Prussian Academy of the Arts . In Frankfurt, as a representative of the city, he was Secretary of the Foundation's Board of Trustees and presented the Goethe Prize for several years . After the handover of power to the National Socialists, he resigned from the academy because he did not want to participate in their submission to the new rulers; his post on the Frankfurt board of trustees was dismissed. At least he managed to secure his income as a journalist, and so he made extensive air trips through Europe in 1934, about which he published a travel book. In 1935 he was briefly arrested in Berlin because he was considered a communist.

As a staunch pacifist, he had become a permanent member of the Quakers in 1933 . Through this religious community he kept in close contact with England and the USA and received visits from foreign co-religionists who wanted to get an idea of ​​the situation in Germany. In 1938 he took the opportunity to travel to a Quaker congress in the USA, which he used to explore the country extensively. An extremely US-friendly book was published in which he praised America's civil achievements in the highest tones. The book also contains detailed descriptions of everyday American life and is therefore - just like his flight travel book - of great interest to today's reader.

Paquet was a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer .

In 1943 his youngest son fell in Russia. Paquet, who also witnessed the deportation of the Jews from Frankfurt - the murderous consequences of which he was well aware - as a helpless observer, sank into deep dejection. During a bombing raid in February 1944 , Alfons Paquet died of a heart attack in the basement of his house .

His grave is in the Frankfurt main cemetery (Gewann A 276a). Streets were named after him in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt am Main.

Works

Original editions (selection)

  • Songs and chants . With a preliminary remark by Carl Busse . Grote, Berlin 1902, online  - Internet Archive
  • The exhibition problem in economics . Fischer, Jena 1908 (= treatises of the political science seminar to Jena, volume 5, issue 2)
  • Southern Siberia and northwestern Mongolia. Political-geographical study and travel report for the Geographical Society of Jena . Fischer, Jena 1909
  • Comrade Fleming . Rütten & Loening, Frankfurt am Main 1911; New edition: Edition AV, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-936049-32-7
  • Li or in the new east . Rütten & Loening, Frankfurt am Main 1912
  • Tales on board . Rütten & Loening, Frankfurt am Main 1914
  • In Palestine . Diederichs, Jena 1915
  • In communist Russia. Letters from Moscow . Diederichs, Jena 1919
  • The spirit of the Russian revolution . Wolff, Leipzig 1919; Reprint: BiblioBazaar, Charleston SC 2009, ISBN 978-1-116-45489-5
  • The Rhine as fate or the problem of the peoples . Wolff, Munich 1920
  • The Rhine, a journey . Societäts-Druckerei, Frankfurt am Main 1923
  • America. Hymns / poems . The wolves, Leipzig 1925
  • Lusika's voice, novella . 1925, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt Stuttgart, Berlin and Leipzig
  • Answer of the Rhine. An ideology . Filser, Augsburg 1928
  • The Neckar. A picture of life , with drawings by Joachim Lutz , J.Horning / Heidelberg 1928
  • The Rhine. In Fritz Taeuber, Grieben Grenzlandführer for the wandering youth: Rheinische Grenzlande. From Eupen to the Saar. Grieben-Verlag Albert Goldschmidt, Berlin 1931
  • Passenger over Europe. A long distance novel . Knorr & Hirth, Munich 1920–1933
  • America under the rainbow. Colors - contours - perspectives . Societät, Frankfurt 1938
  • The Rhine. Vision and reality . Photos by Paul Wolff . Bagel, Düsseldorf 1940
  • The message of the Rhine. Experience and poem . Henn, Ratingen 1941
  • The woman from Frankfurt . Kramer, Frankfurt 1947; 2nd ext. A. 1970
  • Gaswelt and four other essays , Cologne 1940, 2nd edition
  • Poems . Edited by Alexander of Bernus . Wallstein, Göttingen 1956, ISBN 3-89244-157-X

Work edition

literature

Web links

Commons : Alfons Paquet  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Federal Archives Berlin, BA DO 1 vol. 32642
  2. ↑ Kürschner's German Literature Calendar 1943 , s. 819.
  3. ↑ Guide to the graves of well-known personalities in Frankfurt cemeteries . Frankfurt 1985, p. 7
personal data
SURNAME Paquet, Alfons
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 26, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1944
Place of death Frankfurt am Main