Armin T. Wegner

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Wegner in the 1910s

Armin Theophil Wegner (born October 16, 1886 in Elberfeld (today in Wuppertal ), † May 17, 1978 in Rome ) was a German pacifist and writer. He wrote expressionist poetry and numerous travelogues.

Life

Birthplace in Elberfeld
Memorial plaque on the house at Kaiserdamm 16 in Berlin-Charlottenburg

In 1904/1905 Wegner initially received an agricultural training in Silesia . In 1908 he finished the grammar school he had attended in Striegau . He then studied at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelms University , the University of Zurich and the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin , among others . In 1914 he received his doctorate in law , summa cum laude, in Breslau . He then traveled to Europe , North Africa and the Middle East .

During the First World War he first served as a nurse on the Eastern Front . In 1915 he came to the Ottoman Empire on a German medical expedition . In 1916 he worked under Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz in Eastern Anatolia . He witnessed and witnessed the expulsion and genocide of the Armenians by the Turks. It is still significant today that Armin T. Wegner was not only an eyewitness, but also captured the events photographically and literarily. He also intervened in this matter with the German government and the US President ( open letter to the President of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson, on the expulsion of the Armenian people into the Mesopotamian desert ). His hope that imperial diplomacy would influence the allies on the Bosporus was disappointed, as was the expectation after 1918 that the victors would stand up for the Armenian people. Nevertheless, Wegner's photographs are still considered to be the most important visual evidence of the genocide of the Armenian people. “But the unimaginable extent and the political will behind the genocide of the Armenians in the crumbling Ottoman Empire make these documents treasures of unique value,” writes the photo journalist Ralf Hanselle. "Wegner [...] was about collecting and recording evidence. In his pictures, everything that the 20th century has burned into the photographic memory of posterity stands out: the inferior body and the speaking looks, the order of power and the powerlessness of the individual ”. Wegner gave a slide lecture in Berlin's Urania in 1919 , in which he also showed his own pictures; he later gave the lecture in Breslau and in 1924 in Vienna . His plan to write a novel about the event got stuck in drafts, also due to the publication of parts from Franz Werfel's novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in 1932.

After the First World War, Wegner resumed his work as a travel writer. He was also an active pacifist . In 1919 he was actively involved in founding the Association of War Resisters (BdK), which later organized itself internationally with other pacifists in the War Resisters' International (WRI).

In November 1920 Wegner married the Jewish writer Lola Landau and lived with her in Neuglobsow am Stechlin . In April 1923 the daughter Sibylle Anusch was born. The marriage ended in divorce after Lola Landau's decision to embrace Zionism and move to Palestine in 1939.

In 1927/28 Wegner made a trip to the Soviet Union. His book Five Fingers over You , which was published afterwards, is a document of the struggle for an appropriate attitude towards communism and political violence.

Wegner and his wife took another trip from the Caspian Sea to the Nile in the winter and spring of 1928/29 . “After exploring the first stretch of Persia with a Junkers plane and crossing the Sea of ​​Galilee and Jordan with a folding folding boat , he reached Beth Sera on his sidecar motorcycle around Easter 1929. ” Beth Sera was a kibbutz in the city founded by German Jews Jordan Valley, to which Wegner dedicated a chapter in his book On the Way of the Cross of the Worlds . The chapter is entitled The Seed of the Earth and thus refers to the name of the kibbutz; Beth Sera translates as the seed house .

In April 1933 Wegner wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler in which he protested against the persecution of the Jews . With astonishingly prophetic foresight he warned him of the later consequences: “... but the shame and misfortune that Germany suffered as a result will not be forgotten for a long time ... once the cities are shattered, the sexes bled to death ... With shame and contempt they will tell of the generations who not only put the luck of the country at stake lightly, but also have desecrated its memory forever! "

In August 1933 he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured in the Columbiahaus in Berlin-Tempelhof . He spent four months in prisons and the concentration camps in Oranienburg , Börgermoor and the Lichtenburg . After his release at the end of December 1933, he emigrated. Via Great Britain and Palestine he reached Italy , where he settled in Positano in 1936 . In 1938 all of Wegner's writings were put on the list of harmful and undesirable literature in Germany .

From 1940 he lived in Italy with the artist Irene Kowaliska , whom he was not able to marry until 1945 due to persecution. The son Michael was born in 1941. Between 1941 and 1943 Wegner was employed as a teacher for German language and literature at the university in Padua . He then lived as a freelance writer alternately in Rome and on the island of Stromboli .

At the first German writers' congress in Berlin after the war in 1947, the supposedly missing Wegner was counted among the writers who perished during National Socialism .

"Wegner's truth, which he never tired of writing down, was the apodictic sentence: Disasters in human coexistence are the result of a lack of situation - the lack of communication, affection, love."

- Jürgen Serke : The burned poets , p. 45

Awards

Memorial plaque on the house
where he was born (Von-der-Tann-Str. 10 in Wuppertal)

Wegner's awards include the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1956) and the Eduard von der Heydt Prize in his hometown of Wuppertal (1962). In 1968 Wegner was accepted into the ranks of the Righteous Among the Nations and - invited to Israel by the Association of Gentile Martyrs and Heroes Yad Vashem - planted a tree in the Forest of the Righteous.

Societies

The Armin T. Wegner Society with its headquarters in Wuppertal has existed in Germany since 2002. In 2003, its US sister company, the Armin T. Wegner Society of USA, was founded in Los Angeles. Since then, together with the Arpa Foundation for Film, Music and Art (AFFMA), it has presented the Armin T. Wegner Humanitarian Award, a civil courage and human rights award for filmmakers, every year.

Works

  • Between two cities. Poems, Berlin 1909
  • Poems in prose. Berlin 1910
  • Venice . Poem. In: “ Westermanns Monatshefte ” № 110 (1911), p. 110
  • Italian travel pictures (poems Via Appia , Naples , Messina , Venice , Ponte Vecchio ). In: “Westermanns Monatshefte” № 110 (1911), p. 914
  • Hear me talk, Anna-Marie. A rhapsody. Berlin 1912
  • The face of the cities. Poems, Berlin 1917 ( digitized in the Internet Archive )
  • The way without coming home. Martyrdom in letters. Berlin 1919; 2nd edition Dresden 1920 ( digitized in the Internet Archive)
  • Open letter to US President Woodrow Wilson regarding the genocide of the Armenians, published in the " Berliner Tageblatt " on February 23, 1919 ( full text at musenblaetter.de)
  • In the house of bliss. Records from Turkey. "Written on Turkish soil in the years 1915/16", Dresden 1920
  • The boy Hussein. Turkish short stories. Dresden 1921
  • Foreword to The Talaat Pasha Trial . Stenographic report. Berlin 1921
  • The confession. Roman, Sybillen-Verlag, Dresden 1922 ( digitized in the Internet Archive)
  • The road with a thousand destinations. Poems, Dresden 1924
  • The tent. Notes / letters / stories from Turkey. A selection of Berlin 1926
  • Wazif and Akif or The Woman with Two Husbands. Turkish comedy. Berlin 1926 (together with Lola Landau)
  • How I became a bullfighter and other stories. Berlin 1928
  • Diary sheets from Tehran . In: Kölnische Zeitung of August 3, 1929.
  • Five fingers above you. Records of a trip through Russia, the Caucasus and Persia. Berlin 1929, new edition Wuppertal 1979
  • Moni or the world from below. A child's novel. Stuttgart / Berlin / Leipzig 1929
  • At the cross of the worlds. A journey from the Caspian Sea to the Nile. Berlin 1930
  • In a folding boat across the Violin Lake (Israel); Ahasver in Asia (Baghdad); Travel reports from the Jewish magazine Menorah , 1930/31
  • Hunt through the millennial land. Berlin 1932. Travel report from Palestine.
  • Machines in wonderland. A thousand kilometers through the Mesopotamian desert. Berlin 1932.
  • Letter to Hitler (11 pp., PDF) 1933, first published in the German press in 1953
No works by Armin T. Wegner appeared in print between 1933 and mid-1951.
  • Sonata in blue . In: "Deutsche Zeitung and Wirtschafts-Zeitung" of October 13, 1951 (under the pseudonym Johannes Selbdritt)
  • Saracen Games on the Tyrrhenian Sea . In: "Weser-Kurier" No. 235 / October 1952, p. 15 (under the pseudonym Johannes Selbdritt)
  • The silver trail . Wonder of the world on the journey through nine seas (under the pseudonym Johannes Selbdritt). Frankfurt, Book Guild 1952
  • Termini Station. Rome's train station is Europe's most modern caravanserai. Article (under the pseudonym Johannes Selbdritt) in “ Die Zeit ” № 34/1953
  • Time breaks eternity. A message from western and eastern thinking. Article in “Die Zeit” № 29/1954
  • The Jewish and the Prussian ghetto. About the doctrine of the center and the circle in human society. Reprint from: Eckart Oct. – Dec. 1955
  • Sing to make it pass! Dortmund Lectures, Issue 79
No works by Armin T. Wegner appeared in print between 1956 and 1974.
  • If you fall, also hug the earth or The man who believes in the word. Prose - Poetry - Documents. Selected Works. Wuppertal 1974, ISBN 3-87294-059-7
  • Ronald Steckel (Ed.): Odyssey of the Soul. Selected Works. Hammer, Wuppertal 1976, ISBN 3-87294-097-X ; 2001, ISBN 3-87294-886-5
Published posthumously
  • At the cross of the worlds. Poetry, prose, letters, autobiographies. Book publisher Der Morgen, Berlin (East), 1982
  • Thomas Hartwig (Ed.): "World Over". Farewell to the seven forests. The 1933/1934 concentration camp letters (correspondence between Armin T. Wegner and Lola Landau, edited from the estate). Das Arsenal, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-931109-14-3
  • Letter to Hitler. Trilingual. Foreword by Wolfgang Thierse , Wuppertal 2002, ISBN 3-87294-910-1 (German also in: Banishment. Notes of German Writers in Exile. Christian Wegner, Hamburg 1964, pp. 21–24)
  • Andreas Meier (ed.): The expulsion of the Armenian people into the desert. A slide show. Eyewitness report / documentation (215 p., 103 fig.), With a foreword by Wolfgang Gust . Wallstein, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89244-800-6
  • Series Armin T. Wegner: Selected works in single volumes in Wallenstein Verlag

literature

  • Hermann-Peter Eberlein: Letter to Hitler. In: Das Blättchen , 11th year, issue 9 from April 28, 2008.
  • Thomas Hartwig: The Armenian. Documentary novel about Armin T. Wegner's experiences in Constantinople and Anatolia. SALON LiteraturVERLAG, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-939321-56-9 .
  • Reinhard MG Nickisch : Armin T. Wegner. A poet against power. Basic lines of a biography of the expressionist and world reporter Armin T. Wegner (1886–1978). Hammer, Wuppertal 1982, ISBN 3-87294-191-7 .
  • Martin Rooney: Life and Work of Armin T. Wegner (1886–1978) in the context of socio-political and cultural developments in Germany. Haag and Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-88129-824-X (also: Bremen, Univ., Diss., 1982).
  • Jürgen Serke : Armin T. Wegner. The poet who stayed in Germany and defied Hitler. In: The Burned Poets. With photos by Wilfried Bauer . Reports, texts, pictures of a time. Weinheim, Beltz & Gelberg 1977, pp. 38–51 ( digitized version of the 3rd edition from 1978 in the Internet Archive ).
  • Martin Tamcke : Armin T. Wegner and the Armenians. Claim and reality of an eyewitness. Cuvillier , Göttingen 1993; Lit-Verlag, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-8258-2803-4 (= Studies on Oriental Church History 2).
  • Martin Tamcke: Armin T. Wegner's first testimonies to the genocide of the Armenians in his lecture "With the staff of Field Marshal von der Golz in Mesopotamia". In: Coexistence and Confrontation. Contributions to the recent history and present situation of the oriental Christians (= studies on the oriental church history 28). Lit, Münster 2003, pp. 319–366 (contains the first print of the lecture from 1918; book preview on Google Books).
  • Martin Tamcke: Life in conflict. Comments on Armin T. Wegner's trip to Armenia in 1927. In: Armenologie in Deutschland. Contributions to the First German Armenologist Day (= Studies on Oriental Church History 32). Lit, Münster 2005, pp. 201-217 ( book preview on Google Books).
  • Martin Tamcke:  Wegner, Armin Theophil. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 13, Bautz, Herzberg 1998, ISBN 3-88309-072-7 , Sp. 585-588.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive  on 2007-06-29)
  • Johanna Wernicke-Rothmayer : Armin T. Wegner. Social experience and literary work . Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1982, ISBN 3-8204-5789-5 , ( Europäische Hochschulschriften 1, 503), (At the same time: Berlin, Techn. Univ., Diss., 1979).
  • Johanna Wernicke-Rothmayer (Ed.): Armin T. Wegner. Writer, traveler, human rights activist . Wallstein, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0994-4 .
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Volume 2.2. Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 1213.

Web links

Commons : Armin T. Wegner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dissertation: The strike in criminal law with special consideration of the preliminary draft .
  2. ↑ Hosfeld: Death in the desert. The Armenian Genocide
  3. ↑ Gallery: Armin T. Wegner (genocide1915.org)
  4. ↑ Ralf Hanselle: In the blind spot . In: Friday . April 29, 2005 ( ralf-hanselle.de ).
  5. ^ Ruben Frankenstein: Hachschara in the brand yard near Freiburg. A search for clues. In: Manfred Bosch (Hrsg.): Alemannic Judaism - traces of a lost culture. Eggingen 2001, pp. 123-139. ( Online on the website of the Stegen Home History Working Group )
  6. ↑ Memory of Irene Kowaliska-Wegner ( http://www.erika-mitterer.org/dokumente/ZK2007-1/petrowsky_kowaliska-wegner_1-2007.pdf )
  7. ↑ so in: Alfred Kantorowicz , Richard Drews: "Verboten und burned". German literature suppressed for 12 years. Ullstein / Kindler, Berlin / Munich 1947, p. 167.
  8. ↑ Armin T. Wegner (Yad Vashem) ( Memento from March 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ The Armin T. Wegner Award ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Arpa International Film Festival Awards ( Memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 7, 2015
  11. ^ A review of a confessional novel by Paul Frank at ANNO .
  12. ^ The trip was carried out on behalf of the Volksverband der Bücherfreunde in the winter and spring of 1928/1929, see "Am Kreuzweg der Welten", edition 1930, information on page 382
  13. ^ Author page Johanna Wernicke-Rothmayer at Wallstein Verlag .
personal data
SURNAME Wegner, Armin T.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wegner, Armin Theophil (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Elberfeld
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 1978
Place of death Rome