Arthur Eloesser

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Arthur Eloesser (before 1905)
Margarete-and-Arthur-Eloesser-Park in Charlottenburg

Arthur Eloesser (born March 20, 1870 in Berlin , † February 14, 1938 in Berlin) was a German literary scholar and journalist .

Life

Eloesser received his doctorate in 1893 under the Berlin Germanist Erich Schmidt with the work The oldest German translations of Molièrescher Lustspiele . However, his habilitation failed because of the Prussian state, which still demanded Christian baptism from German Jews for this procedure at the end of the 19th century .

Thereupon he turned completely to journalism in 1899 and worked as a critic especially for the Vossische Zeitung . In 1914 he went to the Lessing Theater in Berlin as a dramaturge . Six years later he returned to journalism. He became editor of the Free German Stage and under Siegfried Jacobsohn a permanent employee of the Weltbühne . In 1928 Ullstein brought him back to the features section of the Vossische Zeitung .

His main work, a 1300-page history of German literature (1930/31, 2 volumes) from the baroque to the present, caused a sensation, in which he emphasized the connections between literary schools more clearly than earlier literary historians with great columnist elegance and plastic narrative style. Because of Eloesser's unprofessoral, unpretentious and affectionate portrayal of literary history, the work is still one of the classics of literary historiography. Eloesser deliberately refrains from “dividing the chapters into individual cells with many inscriptions” and from any footnotes . He is likely to be the first author who emphatically admonished the "concern for a beautiful printed image " when describing history. The publisher Bruno Cassirer implemented the big, ambitious project in a brilliant way.

After the " seizure of power " Eloesser forcibly switched to the " Jüdischen Rundschau ". He was also one of the initiators of the Jewish Cultural Association . In 1936 his last major work, Vom Ghetto nach Europa, was published by the “Jewish Book Association” . From 1934 to 1937 he went to Palestine , but then returned to National Socialist Germany, to Berlin. Eloesser died there in 1938. His wife Margarete Eloesser was deported to Riga in 1942. A stumbling block was laid for them on August 23, 2011 in front of the former house .

tomb

Eloesser's grave is on the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof in Stahnsdorf in field C II-UW I-8. His grave is dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave . In 1998, a memorial to Arthur Eloesser, his wife Margarete Eloesser, born at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee. Nauenberg and his sister Fanny Levy geb. Eloesser erected a memorial stone by the grandchildren. Margarete-und-Arthur-Eloesser-Park has been located on Gervinusstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg since 2011.

Works (selection)

  • The bourgeois drama. Its history in the 18th and 19th centuries (1898)
  • Heinrich von Kleist . A study (1905)
  • The Road of My Youth (1919; Memories)
  • Thomas Mann . His life and work (1925)
  • Elisabeth Bergner . Berlin, Williams (1927)
  • German Literature from the Baroque to the Present (1930/31)
  • From the ghetto to Europe. Judaism in the Spiritual Life of the 19th Century (1936)
  • Reopening. Berlin feuilletons 1920 to 1922 . Verlag H. Olbrich, Berlin 2011. ISBN 978-3-9814627-1-5 .
  • AE: Arthur Eloesser's early feature articles from 1900-1913 . Past Publishing, Berlin 2013. ISBN 978-3-8640814-4-6 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Arthur Eloesser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Margarete-und-Arthur-Eloesser-Park in the Bezirkslexikon on berlin.de, accessed August 22, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Eloesser, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary scholar and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 14, 1938
Place of death Berlin