Arthur Langen

Arthur Langen (born January 13, 1858 in Berlin , † October 25, 1927 in Solingen ) was a German magistrate of the state government of Berlin and theater publisher . Between 1912 and 1916 he was married to Grete Trakl , the sister of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl .

Parentage and family

Arthur Adolph Conrad Maria Hermann Felix Langen came from the Mecklenburg nobility . He was the son of Ida Paulina Francisca von Langen- von Plessen ( Ludwigslust 1827– Berlin 1905), daughter of Colonel August Leopold Emil von Plessen and Susanna Ida von Pentz .

Arthur Langen had three sisters: Gustava Luise Johanne Ottilie Olga (Olga) Freiin von Langen (1849–1929), married in 1871 to Werner Jasper Vollrath Julius von Bülow (1840–1909), son of Carl Friedrich Vollrad von Bülow and Elisabeth Flögel (from 5 children of this marriage; branch extinguished); Henriette Louise (Lolo) Freiin von Langen (1853–?), Unmarried; and her twin sister Natalie Hermine (Lilla) Freiin von Langen (1853 – after 1933), married in 1888 to the samurai Yônojô Kashiwamura (Yo Kasiwa Mura), ( Hagi 1849 – Berlin 1912), military envoy from Japan and China, military attaché for Germany, Austria and the Netherlands at the Japanese embassy in Berlin and glass manufacturer in Yokohama / Tokyo (no offspring).

The father of these siblings was Alfred Friedrich Franz Otto von Langen from the house of the barons von Langen , ( Passee / Mulsow 1821– Moisall 1888), Rittmeister in the Grand Ducal Dragoons Regiment and heir and court lord on Moisall and Moorhagen. The fact that Arthur was baptized as the natural son of Ida von Langen-von Plessen does not rule out that Alfred von Langen was Arthur's biological father; the couple did not divorce until the mother was pregnant. Because his mother was referred to as “separated” in Berlin's baptismal register - an unusual name at the time - Arthur lost the title of nobility. In 1886 he married in Berlin as "Plessen" Anne Marie Helène Petitpierre (1860–?), Optician Unter den Linden , daughter of the royal optician Louis-Godefroi Petitpierre and Mathilde Florentine Polack. From this marriage there were three children. The couple divorced in 1906. On March 20, 1896, Arthur Langen submitted an application for a name change to the district president Robert Hue de Grais in Potsdam . He was allowed to use the name "Langen". In practice, Langen used both the name "Langen" and "von Langen" until 1905.

Theater and publishing house

Langen worked as an insurance and tax officer for the magistrate of the state government of Berlin. In his spare time he was passionate about theater, as a manager, publisher and “talent hunter”. He strictly separated his activities in the theater sector from his official profession. In Berlin's address book he had two different addresses and he always operated in the background as a networker among authors, theater directors and all major publishers. Langen commercially assessed the chances of success of new initiatives and invested in risky projects. Many of his initiatives were taken over, incorporated or carried on by others.

The following picture emerges on the basis of still preserved sources:

Langen was managing director of Ludwig Barnay's Berlin theater until the last one moved to Wiesbaden in 1894.

1892-1896 he wrote a few plays in addition to his work as a publisher.

In 1901 he was appointed by Albert Langen to expand the theater branch of his publishing house. The collaboration was terminated in mid-1903 due to disputes with the authorized signatory Ludwig Thoma .

In 1901, Langen in London acquired the entire copyrights of Oscar Wilde, who died in 1900, for the publication and performance of his plays in German-speaking countries. In 1904 Langen founded the Deutsche Bühne GmbH; this was dissolved in 1914. The managing director in 1904 was Heinz Wolfradt, whose son Willi Wolfradt later became a well-known art historian and critic. In 1905 the German stage was incorporated and continued by Ludwig Bloch, director of the Eduard Bloch theater publisher .

In 1909 Langen founded the magazine Die Bühne. Journal of Directional Interests . Editing and publishing were led by the theater writer Ernst Neumann-Jödemann. The magazine was aimed at theater directors who were allowed to use the stage as a speaking tube for their affairs and who could make suggestions to professionalize the theater business. The magazine also provided direct intermediation between authors and theater directors; Authors could have their plays read by the editors for a fee. The magazine was quickly recognized by the German theater magazine. Wochenschrift für Bühnenkunst und Bühnenpraxis , founded in 1908 by theater director Gustav Hartung , taken over and continued as the Neue Theater-Zeitschrift in 1911 .

In 1911, Langen became the second managing director of the Elector's Opera, founded by Max Epstein. This company went bankrupt in 1913 because of poor management by the director Viktor Palfi and was continued as the German Art Theater in 1915 .

Between 1912 and 1916, Langen worked for the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Berlin branch.

On April 1, 1916, Langen became head of stage sales at Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig, until this sales department was merged with three other theater publishers in Berlin on September 21, 1917 to form “The United Stage Sales Three Masks / Georg Müller / Erich Reiss / Kurt Wolff Verlag , Berlin “, the Berlin branch of the main publishing house in Munich.

From 1918 until his death in 1927, Langen traveled regularly from Berlin to Solingen. He worked u. a. together with Louise Dumont , the director of the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf , and a former close friend of his mother's.

Marriage with Grete Trakl

Presumably in autumn 1910, Langen and the musically highly talented Grete Trakl met . This date is given in the research of the poems of her brother Georg Trakl, since Langen had copied some poems in 1910. From March 1911 the couple was engaged. They only got married in Berlin on July 17, 1912, after Langen had forced the marriage through legal proceedings against the Trakl family in Salzburg. In this way, Langen withdrew his protégé from the rule of the family, which lived in debt, in order to offer them a stable environment. Langen hired the avant-garde German-American pianist Richard Buhlig as her private tutor . When Grete received the extensive inheritance from her brother Georg Trakl after his death on November 3, 1914 in Krakow , Langen tried to secure the inheritance for her. The marriage was dissolved in 1916 after it became clear that Grete would not achieve her goal due to psychological instability.

Langen was in Berlin when Grete died. As the closest person in the immediate vicinity, he is said to have determined their final resting place in the morgue in the Institute for Forensic Medicine Berlin of the Charité .

literature

• Correspondence from Arthur Langen can be found u. a. in the German Literature Archive Marbach (with Arthur Schnitzler , Else Lasker-Schüler ) and in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv , Weimar (with Rudolf von Poellnitz, Insel Verlag ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Genealogy Von Langen ( Memento from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file)
2. ^ H. Zwerschina in collaboration with E. Sauermann, Georg Trakl: Complete Works and Correspondence, Innsbruck edition. Historical-critical edition with facsimiles of the handwritten texts , Frankfurt / Basel 1995 ff. Volume I. Poems and journalistic texts 1906 to spring 1912 (2007), pp. 392–396.