Börries von Münchhausen (writer)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Börries von Münchhausen
(around 1913)

Börries Albrecht Conon August Heinrich Freiherr von Münchhausen (born March 20, 1874 in Hildesheim , † March 16, 1945 in Windischleuba ) was a German writer and poet of neo-romanticism . He was an anti-Semite and was close to the Volkish movement . In the late Weimar Republic he founded the elite German Poet Academy . In the time of National Socialism from 1933 onwards he took an active part in the racist cultural policy of the Nazi state. While contemporary literary criticism valued his literary rank highly and German studies praised him as a ballad poet until the 1960s , the author is largely forgotten today.

Life

origin

Windischleuba Castle (owned by the Münchhausen family from 1880 to 1945)

Börries was the eldest son of the father of the same name Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen (1845–1931) and his wife Clementine, born von der Gabelentz (1849–1913). His four younger siblings were named Clementine, Hans Georg, Elisabeth and Anna Margarete. The parents' property included the Apelern manor , an estate in Moringen and the Windischleuba castle and manor near Altenburg ( Thuringia ). Until 1878 Börries grew up in an apartment rented by his parents in Hildesheim. The house belonged to the Jewish merchant Magnus Meyerhof. His daughters, including the later author and women's rights activist Leonie Meyerhof , also took care of Börries. According to his information, both families remained friends until 1922.

School and study time

From 1878 the Münchhausen family lived on the aforementioned three estates. Börries was first taught privately by his mother and from 1887 came to the Prussian monastery school in Ilfeld , a Protestant boarding school . From October 1888 he attended the grammar school in Altenburg, from spring 1890 the Lyzeum II in Hanover, which later became the Goethe grammar school . There he passed his Abitur in 1895.

In his autobiographical sketch from 1922 ("Happy Week with Friends") he described his parents' house as tolerant of the so-called non-aristocrats, but described almost only contacts with his own relatives and differentiated between " Jews and Germans". He described himself as a "very bad and lazy student" who had to repeat a school year twice and was particularly interested in sports and poetry. He founded a reading club and occasionally read his own poems and ballads to classmates. In Lyceum II he had contact with Sammy Gronemann , who as the son of the Hanoverian rabbi Selig Gronemann was exposed to strong hatred of Jews. With him he got on "well"; but he was “truly friends” with Ludwig Heynemann. In 1891/1892 he often took him to the New Synagogue (Hanover) built in 1870 , invited him to the Passover festival in his parents' house and lent him the Haggadah . Through this influence he became enthusiastic about the Old Testament and was inspired to write his later "Jewish ballads". Through his Jewish classmates he was "first aware of the difference between races "; he did not explain what. Gronemann later reported in his memoirs: Börries "used to be very energetic towards anti-Semitic rabble", but did not become his friend.

Göttingen Muses Almanac for 1898

From 1895 Münchhausen studied law and political science at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . After a semester at the Munich Art Academy , he continued his law studies at the Georg August University of Göttingen at the behest of his parents . There he founded and directed a group of students for literature called "Göttinger Akademie". The name was based on the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen as part of the University of Göttingen, which his ancestor Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen founded in 1734. According to his information, fraternity members , corps students and young women gathered in this circle to enjoy alcohol and singing folk songs. In 1897 Münchhausen published his first volume of poetry and took over the editing of the annual Göttingen Musenalmanac for most editions up to 1905. In it he made himself known to conservative readers as the “innovator of the ballad” and used his student group and his contacts as aristocrats.

In the preface to the Musenalmanach 1898 he contrasted the “natural” work of art of the “healthy and fresh artist” with the work of the “mentally differentiated”. In doing so, he took a position from the outset against authors of modern poetry and pursued programmatically "a restorative effort [...] in the spirit of anti-modernism". He represented neo-romanticism against naturalism and modern art movements, which also took up the social reality of underprivileged sections of the population.

As a student in 1896, Münchhausen used his legal knowledge for literary political conflicts. He filed a criminal complaint against Richard Dehmel for blasphemy and fornication, claiming that he was of Jewish origin. As an occasion, he took Dehmel's poem Venus Consolatrix , which merged the figures of Mary Magdalene , the Mother of God, and the Roman goddess of love Venus . In the criminal trial in 1897 Dehmel was sentenced to delete a passage of the poem and to remove it from the remaining edition and later editions of his work Woman and World .

As a result of this case, Münchhausen lost many sympathies. Gronemann also knew of the indignation of many educated people about the criminal complaint. After both of them had passed the first state examination in law in 1897 with the oral examination on the same day, Münchhausen illegally signed the examination certificate for Gronemann, who as an Orthodox Jew was not allowed to write on the Sabbath . Unlike Gronemann and to the displeasure of his father, he did not go into civil service as a lawyer, but instead studied philosophy and literary history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin to become a writer.

The literary critic Carl Hermann Busse drew Münchhausen's attention to poems by the young Agnes Miegel in 1897 . She was his lover from 1898 to 1900. In 1930 he claimed he discovered her genius and co-wrote many of her poems. They separated by mutual agreement and remained friends. Miegel wrote in 1899: While he had taken his “godly right” to intervene in her life, he had denied her this right. In 1903 she wrote that he despised her precisely because she was his lover. In her ballad La Furieuse (1904) she processed her anger at the nobility and her former lover. However, she accused herself of violating class boundaries. In 1901 Lulu became von Strauss and Torney Münchhausen's new lover, whom he introduced to Miegel. He also had numerous affairs with non-aristocratic women, to whom he openly showed his class.

In Berlin, Münchhausen got to know a diverse cultural scene and was criticized for his origins and the old-fashioned choice of topics in his ballads. For a short time he considered giving up his title of nobility, but preferred to keep his large estates and pass on aristocratic tradition. Although none of his ballads dealt with social issues, he defended a popular educational claim. In 1899 he completed his law education and was with a dissertation "On the duty to report" in Leipzig Dr. iur. PhD .

Relationship to Zionism

Judah (1900)
To you

In 1899 Münchhausen made friends with the Jewish artist Ephraim Moses Lilien , who offered him to illustrate his ballads on subjects from the Bible . According to Münchhausen in 1922, Lily's circle of rabbis and Zionists inspired him to write the special edition Judah . This was published in December 1900. The ballads in it deal with characters from the Tanach as heroes as in Germanic or Greek mythology , not socially declassified, persecuted, murdered Jews in European history . Münchhausen's Christian Zionism at the time coincided with the interest of the German nobility to continue to deny Jews access to officers and higher judicial offices and to expatriate them. That is why Kaiser Wilhelm II, on his Palestine trip in 1898 , promised the leader of political Zionism Theodor Herzl a German protectorate in Palestine for German Jews wishing to leave.

Judah had several editions by 1922, was translated into many languages ​​and gained new readers for the author. The Zionist magazine Die Welt promoted his writings from then on. In return, Münchhausen campaigned for Zionism at readings, which he saw as evidence of a courageous “aristocracy of the Jews”. Many Jewish families gave his work as a present at bar mitzvahs . It provided Lilien with enough income to found the “ Jewish Publishing House ” and the Democratic-Zionist faction , which wanted to renew the Jewish national culture.

In Judah , Münchhausen represented a programmatic philosemitism that unreservedly affirmed the settlement of Jews in Palestine . In the opening lines the speaker complains that he will show the “ostracized people” of the Jews “the bridges of hatred and scorn to your youthful happiness” and show them the way under the slogan “Back!”. This reflected in poetic form a philosemitic view of Zionism and its reflection on the possibilities of achieving its goals. In doing so, he distinguished himself from the Jewish collective and faced him as “the preacher's voice in the desert” ( Isa 40,3  EU ) like a prophet. In the selection and sequence of biblical figures, his ballads gave negative episodes of Jewish history a positive opportunity for interpretation.

Zionist reviewers therefore consistently hailed Judah as a poetic anticipation of their political hopes. They praised Münchhausen's sympathy for Judaism and support for Zionism as exemplary and explained them from his preoccupation with biblical subjects or from a general longing for the foreign. However, some also asked how far he practiced his poetic promise to show Jews the way to their happiness. The cultural Zionist Martin Buber described Münchhausen in der Welt as a German poet who considered the “Jewish folk soul” to be dead and “degenerate”, but who then developed understanding for it through lilies. Buber, however, clearly contradicted the slogan “Back!”: Returning to a poetic past is not the goal of the Zionists, but a new future for Judaism. Judah became a core text of German cultural Zionism. These ballads influenced the young Stefan Zweig , who probably met them through Lilien in Berlin. Zweig was friends with Münchhausen for a few years from 1900.

Morris Rosenfeld's Lieder des Ghetto , illustrated by Lilien, described the everyday work of impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe . Münchhausen saw the work as competition to Judah and wrote a slap in 1902: poets and draftsmen were "completely alien to him where social thoughts democratize". He only knows Judaism as proud and aristocratic, not as proletarian and social-democratic . He accused the author of “ignorance” and described him with anti-Semitic clichés as “homeless” and “beaten with the great curse of his race”. In the poem My Child , he found greed for money in Jewish children. Lilien's pictures of work equipment, exploited and starving people are "accidents" and "missed". Through these images, the proletarian songs would move into the country like “princely children” in order to generate income for the impoverished author. He only recommended the work to educated Jews after it had already been translated into several languages ​​of Eastern Europe and found other readers there.

Münchhausen's sympathy for Zionism was based on racism and social Darwinism : he only valued Jews who, like himself, believed in a “Jewish race”. According to Gronemann, he described them as the “oldest nobility in the world” alongside the “sword nobility”, to which he belonged, and the “merchant nobility”, such as the Fugger . In Judaism in particular, the strongest and most resilient were selected, as centuries of persecution of the Jews "stamped out" the weak. According to Die Welt , he called Zionism “the awakening of a proud aristocratic consciousness of a noble people”, which, however, had no chance of realization due to the many (including Jewish) “ plebeians ”. In 1904 he rejected “the big city Jews who deny their nature and their tribe”. Originally, Judaism grew up through "application of the purely aristocratic basic idea": "Human breeding by keeping the race pure, breeding of certain, strived for characteristics by joining two families in which these characteristics have been alive for a long time". In this way, Jews resembled the nobility. That was what always attracted him so particularly to this people, the courageous advocacy of this unique character.

Because of these views, Gronemann found Münchhausen's “career from a singer of Jewish power and a Jewish hero to a German national bard” understandable: “He valued ancient Judaism and the ancient Maccabees' agreements rooted in tradition . He detested assimilation and did not understand how a Jew could feel other than an aristocrat. "

Other anti-Semitic writers such as Julius Langbehn and Houston Stewart Chamberlain shared Münchhausen's stance at the time: They admired deeply religious, conservative Jews who equated their religion with an identity as their own “people”, and rejected “modern”, emancipated , individualistic and therefore “rootless” “Jews out. They saw their cosmopolitanism and readiness to adapt as a dangerous undermining (“ decomposition ”) of the “racial” integrity and “ethnic” solidarity of their society. According to the linguist and cultural historian Lionel Gossman, invoking Jewish witnesses and sources was a popular rhetorical trick among these anti-Semites.

In 1930, after the first major electoral successes of the NSDAP, Münchhausen openly admitted to being an anti-Semite to Gronemann: “You are a Star of David , I am certainly not a swastika , but you will understand that as a German writer it is embarrassing for me to see Jews in German literature hold a leadership position, but that could still be acceptable. What is absolutely unbearable for me is that they rightly hold this position. "

Pre-war period

On November 15, 1902, Münchhausen married Anna von Breitenbuch , the wealthy widow of Heinrich Crusius who was three years older. She brought a daughter and a son from her first marriage. From then on, the family lived on the Sahlis manor, inherited from Crusius . Münchhausen did not have to pursue any gainful employment, but was only allowed to cultivate his father's property himself after his death (1931). He took over the management of Windischleuba and had his father's castle renovated with his wife's financial means. Their son Börries was born in July 1904. Münchhausen forbade Agnes Miegel to visit Sahlis, but maintained contact with Lilien until 1907. In November 1905 he informed him about the pogroms against the Jews in Russia. For the Kishinev pogrom (1903) Münchhausen wrote the ballad “Die Hesped-Klage”, which appeared in his ballad collection from 1905.

In Berlin he had raved about “art gypsyism” ( bohemianism ) and, according to his own statements from 1922, believed “in the detachment of the artist from society and state, fatherland and clod”. But in the writers 'cafe he had realized "the value of my parents' house, the superiority of my home village path". He described his sedentary country life as an ethnic disposition (“ The Teuton ” had to “anchor” his life) and linked the bohemian with homelessness and rootlessness, nomads and epigones and a lack of morality. These clichés were common among anti-Semites and prepared the anti-intellectual hatred of the National Socialists .

In his essay “On the Aesthetics of My Ballads” (1906), Münchhausen despised art dealing with social misery as “the smell of petty people, painting poor people, Silesian washerwoman's language”. On the other hand, he emphasized "the old age, pride in race, religion and gender, self-confidence of inherited peculiarities in body and soul". In an exchange of letters with the Jewish author Victor Klemperer from 1908 onwards, he showed himself to be heavily stressed by his estate administration and devalued literature as “the most miserable occupation”. Klemperer praised his ballads, but criticized that the author seemed to him "sometimes a bit too narrow in his overemphasized aristocratic pride" and, unlike the ballad poet Moritz Graf von Strachwitz, tended to be "decorative ". Münchhausen found the criticism unjust, emphasizing his "poetic superiority" over Strachwitz and the changes in his life on the estate against the "sad existence" of the critic who allegedly lived in a cramped manner in Berlin. He lamented a lack of recognition as a poet to his wife.

From 1909 he was a salaried chamberlain for the Duchess Adelheid von Sachsen-Altenburg . From then on he was able to undertake lecture tours for noblemen in Europe who made him better known. In his work “Das Herz in Harnisch” (1911), which mixed old and new ballads, he resorted to Grimm's fairy tales and Franz Grillparzer , sang about knight customs, war and “ Gypsies ”, but no longer Jews and still no social issues.

His friend Levin Ludwig Schücking , a connoisseur of the Berlin literary scene, asked Münchhausen in 1905 to include a poem critical of the nobility in the muse almanac and not to name his circle of followers “befitting” so that it would not be considered a “politically reactionary group”. According to Schücking, writers from Berlin paid no attention to Münchhausen's poems; he only became famous for his readings and direct addressing the audience. Werner Bergengruen had admired Münchhausen's poems, but judged after a personal encounter: “Instead of a chivalrous poet, I found a parvenu-like schoolmaster.” His book “The heart in armor” is heartless, the armor is hollow and comes “not from the armorer, but from Costume Lender ".

At that time Münchhausen, like many other aristocrats, educated citizens and academics in the German Empire (see History of Anti-Semitism until 1945 # Germany ) , expressed itself increasingly anti-Semitic. In 1907 he replied to a survey by the SPD politician Julius Moses on the “solution of the Jewish question ”: He felt sadness about “the fact of anti-Semitism”, contempt for the “error of assimilation” and pride in the “truth of nationality ”. “Every non-Jew has a never-ending aversion to every Jew” and “a strong physical and mental aversion [...]. Just as the smell of the black race is unbearable to the white. ”Nobody is to be blamed for that, since this reluctance is“ deep inside ”. "The rabble" shows this with "common words and wild violence", "the educated" curb their disgust through education. But these cannot be "killed" because Jews are a race, not a religion. Therefore her baptism is also pointless. The baptismal water does not extinguish "the smell of negro" any more than does Judaism. Assimilation is of no use to Jews, since society forms “an insoluble secret society” against the foreign “race”. For this reason, corps and regiments, for example, refused to accept Jews, even if the reason was withheld because of financial dependency, fear of Jewish relatives or “our Jewish press”. Only “the way of the nobility: pride” can transform this reluctance into respect for the “race-conscious Jew”. Jews should be set apart as "people within the people"; whoever feels strong enough among them should become a Zionist.

In 1909 he wrote to Schücking: “Every time I see Berlin again, the Jewishness of our people frightens me to the utmost, and I feel clearly that people are not between aristocrats and proletarians, but between these two and the plebeian - as always in Berlin is a jew. It is a terrible breed! [...] The inevitably immodest person is the Jew. "In all areas of society he is" forever the Chimborasso of immodesty ".

When Adolf Bartels, the representative of folk art and anti-Semite, included some of his poems in a collective edition in 1911, Münchhausen wrote to him: He found an astonishing "affinity" in thinking with him. Unlike in 1900, he is today “not the man who is necessarily praised by Judaism”. Because of the too strong “power of foreigners” only a secret society of all Germans could liberate them from Judaism; perhaps Zionism could also ensure the “elimination of the foreign body” in a “national suppuration process”. When Else Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew Ballads appeared in 1913, Münchhausen ranted: She was “by far the worst Jew in the zoo, but she has all the skill of her race in making poetically ultra-modern goods”. He attributed to their influence that his “position in the Berlin literary Jew world was shaky”.

Munchhausen endangered his marriage through constant affairs and whims. When Schücking advised him to go back to poetry and not to become a “slave to comfort”, he replied in August 1913: His everyday life mainly consists of estate deals. For him, concentration on literature means impoverishment. For him, recognition from country doctors, corps students and officers is sufficient. He was "far too haughty" to write a literary magazine; this would ruin his position in the nobility, which would also marginalize his family. His profession could therefore be "only that of all peers: the management of my property". He will continue to invite artists to Sahlis, but not “limitlessly declassify his family as urban dwellers [...] who are devoid of the land”. He stylized this decision in his poem "Letter to Apelern" as loyalty to the "fatherly clod" and their farmers, as "great love", recognized late, and escape from the "big world gears".

First World War

At the beginning of the First World War (August 1914), Münchhausen volunteered for the German army at the age of 41. He had himself downgraded from the rank of lieutenant to a simple soldier in order to fight with the Royal Saxon Guard Rider Regiment in East Prussia . He wrote enthusiastically that he could now admire the heroism that has been celebrated for 20 years: “The greatest thing a person can experience is war!” For his male relatives and their wives, too, participation in the war, ready to be sacrificed, was considered "A matter of honor".

After a few months, Münchhausen came to the replacement squadron of the Guard in Dresden because of physical complaints and was used from there for propaganda among German soldiers. In November 1914, his brother-in-law Arthur von Breitenbuch fell on the Eastern Front. In 1915 he took part as an officer in the conquest of the territories occupied as " Upper East " in Poland , Courland and Lithuania . In the autumn of 1916, the new Supreme Army Command under Paul von Hindenburg appointed him to the Military Department of the Foreign Office (MAA) in Berlin, which was established in July . It was subordinate to the foreign department of the OHL , grew quickly to over 100 employees and from 1917 received more and more powers for war propaganda.

In the MAA, Münchhausen worked with Waldemar Bonsels , Arthur Moeller van den Bruck , Hans Grimm , Friedrich Gundolf and Herbert Eulenburg . This group of “young conservatives” represented the anti-democratic stance later known as the Conservative Revolution .

On behalf of the MAA, Münchhausen traveled to sections of the front in Belgium , France , Poland, Russia , Greece , Serbia , Romania , Bulgaria and Turkey as a troop supervisor and propagandist . Although he hardly wrote any more poetry, he increased the circulation of his works enormously through new editions for soldiers during the war and became famous throughout the army. His backward-looking poems, praising heroism, helped the OHL to deter soldiers from pacifism and ideas of subversion, and after the defeat of the war in 1918, gave him folk and national-conservative readers. Since January 1916, he himself shared the Pan-Germanic , imperialist , racist and anti-Semitic goals of the Pan-Germans : They were "right in everything". If the Germans had listened to them, “the war would have ended long ago”. With Hindenburg, he considered the military dictatorship to be "the best form of government" to implement the wishes of the Germans much faster than any parliament. With enough time, they could use a civil servant body for a "millennial empire". In mid-August 1918 Münchhausen was given seven months' leave, so that he experienced the end of the war at home in Sahlis.

Weimar period

Unlike other aristocrats, Münchhausen did not lose any property during the November Revolution of 1918 and thus at the end of the monarchy. He had Windischleuba Castle renovated and only regretted the loss of opportunities to perform at the dissolved aristocratic courts. He welcomed the loss of German territory as an opportunity for a “more German Germany [...] without Poles and French people”. He wanted to wait and see whether the Weimar democracy, which he called the “regiment of the uneducated and poor over the educated and rich”, “would be pleasant in the long run”, and offered his services to any government that “kept order”. In his memoirs of 1922 he described himself in retrospect as free of prejudice and assessed "abuse of Junkerism " as envy .

In his hymn parody De Profundis (1919; according to Psalm 130 and the Choral " Out of the depths I cry to you ") expressed Munchausen the then common opinion of the Germans had been fighting for a just cause, and had been forced into the war. With lines like “We had to defend ourselves - How can you dishonor a guiltless people today - For that ?!” he reinterpreted the emergency cry to God into a defiant accusation and used the Christian religion for the fateful struggle of his own people. In a confidential circular to his relatives, he represented the stab in the back legend .

The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 Munchausen reacted with the poem by heart learn! : It ordered the Germans to memorize the wording of the treaty so that one day they could say “syllable for syllable - and dictate this peace” when they “counterattack” ! ”This alluded to the term“ Versailles dictation ”. The poem was published in 1920 and was also included in Reinhold Eichacker's anthology Haß in 1921 . The answer of German poets to Versailles recorded. The weekly newspaper Die Weltbühne reprinted it in July 1921 as an example of a despicable abuse of poetry and in August published a counter-poem by Ernst Toller , which expressed the desire for peace. The literary historian Helmuth Kiesel cited Münchhausen's 2017 poem as an example of “unscrupulous representatives of the postulate of hatred” who used the “dictated peace” to “politicize literature in the immediate post-war period”.

In 1920 Münchhausen bought Windischleuba Castle from his father with his wife's money and moved there with her. He belonged to the völkisch youth association Adler und Falken, founded in 1920, and later to its circle of friends "Roland's Guild". This united well-known anti-Semites and members of the right such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss and Othmar Spann .

Since the end of the war, Münchhausen saw his ballads as "unsuccessful" and as lacking in talent. In 1922 he considered discontinuing his poetry, but then published a new edition of Juda with graphics by Joseph Budko instead of Liliens as well as his memoirs "Happy Week with Friends". In it he confessed to Jews with whom he had contact in his youth, "talent, kindness and friendship".

A review of the German newspaper by the Pan-German Alfred Hugenberg attacked him with anti-Semitic invectives: He owed his first book success to “influential” and “decisive” Jews in the book trade and literature, who exaggeratedly praised the “alien” manorial property owners. His “continued bowing” to the “presumptuous Jewry” are evidence of “emotional dependence”. Münchhausen then deleted all Jewish-friendly passages from further editions of his memoirs.

In the following years he openly emerged as an anti-Semitic-racist ideologist. His essay Adel und Rasse in the Deutsches Adelsblatt from 1924 stated : Aristocracy only makes sense as “human breeding”. As with dog breeds, the following applies to the crossing of “pure bred” parents: “A marriage between Aryans and Jews always results in a bastard”. Such mixed marriages destroy the “pure Jewish” as well as the “pure blue-blonde tribe” for generations. In order to stop this "bastardization", the "purebred nobility" should be seen as "the most important question [...] of our entire people". Noble families with "Jewish blood admixture" should give up their title immediately, since only "blood purity" entitles them to do so. He recommended the racial studies of the German people from Hans FK Günther for school education and adopted his theses that Europe's nobility was originally "Nordic race" to which "almost without exception all ingenious and creative people" belonged. That is why "the achievement of Nordic racial unity" is the main task of the nobility.

At the instigation of Schücking, the University of Breslau awarded Münchhausen an honorary doctorate in philosophy on his 50th birthday in 1924. Schücking also campaigned for Münchhausen's admission to the Prussian Academy of the Arts , which had already accepted other ethnic poets; but unsuccessful.

From 1925 Münchhausen was editor of the supplement Volk im Wort for the journal Volk und Rasse of the Society for Racial Hygiene . Its new editor Julius Friedrich Lehmann , an anti-Semitic publisher who had been influential since the imperial era, was associated with the fascist organizations Thule-Gesellschaft , Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and later the NSDAP. In 1926 he printed Münchhausen's essay On the Death Bed of the German Soul with an edition of 500,000. In it, the author described "the Jews" as the murderer of a "German soul" and "intruder into areas of art [...] that are not open to him". So could Heinrich Heine not express lyric "German feeling". He was responding to a survey that German booksellers sold more books by Jewish and foreign authors than by non-Jewish German authors. In doing so, as the reviewer Betty Foerder noted, he excluded famous foreign authors, German book buyers and his own collaboration with Jews such as Lilien (died 1925) from the alleged murder of the soul of the Germans. He also claimed that for Germany “it is no longer a question of excluding foreigners and locking Jews into the ghetto ! We are locked in the 'Christian Quarter', that's the truth! "

In 1923, Münchhausen claimed in a letter to Schücking that Kaiser Wilhelm II had never bothered about his art; On the other hand, he felt that “broad sections of the people” were friends. Workers are honestly concerned about education, but in their “mass” they are “alien to all finer pleasures”. In 1924, on a lecture tour through the Netherlands , he met the deposed emperor, whose sons were reading his poems. In 1926 he was outraged in the Deutsche Zeitung about Emil Ludwig's critical biography Wilhelm the Second : He felt “shame and anger” that “an immigrant of foreign origin dares to vilify my prince” and that many German buyers of the book failed to notice “das Aufpeitschende” that lies in the fact that "a Jew represents their emperor so unbelievably". In November he claimed before the German Aristocracy Association that no right-wing MP had tried to recruit him for 30 years, but he had often exchanged letters with leftists, most recently with August Winnig . However, the SPD had excluded this because of right-wing extremist views. Therefore Münchhausen was perceived as a right-wing anti-Semite loyal to the emperor. When his new book, Stories from History, found little approval in 1926 and his Happy Week was not reprinted, he alleged untruthfully: His publisher Lehmann had "branded him an anti-Semite in spite of fierce reluctance, Judah mobilized against me on all fronts".

In 1926 the Academy of the Arts, which had a decisive influence on Weimar's cultural policy, received a section for poetry. In the years that followed, Münchhausen participated in intrigues from outside to exclude democratic and Jewish authors from the academy. The writer Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer , who is close to the NSDAP, proposed in 1927 that ethnic and national conservative authors, including Münchhausen's, be accepted into the academy, but did not prevail and resigned with other right-wing authors. At the poetry and radio conference in 1929, the struggle for direction escalated when the later National Socialist Arnolt Bronnen demanded that radio be used for nationalist propaganda and against “a shameless guild of irresponsible writers who were alienated from their own people, who were not attached to any race or landscape”.

The listener Münchhausen claimed in a comment that there was no argument at the conference. In his diary, on the other hand, he described the tumult after Bronnen's lecture as a “surge of Jewish opponents” and particularly emphasized an alleged “screeching, bubbly speech” by the Jewish academy director Alfred Döblin , which he found “horrible to look at”. Because Walter von Molo was "even more violently anti-Semitic" than himself, Molo was allowed to campaign for his admission to the academy. He actually refused to join because of the “many Jews” in the academy and the resignation of racist nationalist authors. After Ina Seidel's admission, he tried to persuade her to resign with letters: Döblin only accepted her to “camouflage” his convictions, was an “extraordinary misfortune” for the academy and caused her “political suppression”: “He cannot do great right-wing artists because he has a blood-like aversion to everything that I perceive to be specifically German. "In doing so, he lied to Seidel:" As you know, I am not an anti-Semite, but believe that Germans are protecting Germans in their desperate defensive struggle against overgrowth of the Jewish spirit To have to. ”To this end, he consulted as a non-member with national conservative academy members. The Poetry Section criticized these meetings when it became aware of them. Nevertheless, Münchhausen continued to work towards eliminating the academy with numerous letters and diplomatic talks.

In January 1930 the NSDAP entered a state government in Thuringia for the first time. With the slogan “Against Negro culture for German folkism”, the Minister for the Interior and Education of the People, Wilhelm Frick , introduced a racist cultural policy that anticipated the later Nazi campaign against “ Degenerate Art ” and met Münchhausen's goals. He immediately contacted Frick, his cultural advisor Paul Schultze-Naumburg and speakers Hans Severus Ziegler , brought his poems to their Saaleck circle of friends around the National Socialists Hans FK Günther, Walther Darré and Alfred Ploetz and promoted his cultural policy plan. He wanted to establish the Wartburg against the Berlin Poetry Section as the central German poet academy . In April 1930 he applied for the position of captain of the castle, but then got his like-minded cousin Hans von der Gabelentz through for this office.

At Münchhausen's instigation and with Frick's help, the Wartburg Foundation set up an annual poets' conference in 1931, at which a “Silver Wartburg Rose” was awarded. The winners should wear them like a medal and thus form a visible elite of German poets. At the first conference in May 1932, Münchhausen and four other national conservative authors received the award he designed himself. After a meeting in the summer of 1932, the new Chancellor Franz von Papen described him as “the only German poet still alive today”, whom he trusted to lead and model a role as a model for an all-German nationalist educational policy. Thereupon Münchhausen, in his essay Thoughts on a German Poet Academy (October 1932), praised his Wartburg district and the Wartburg against the “unnatural” modernity as the future national center for a “poetry of the highest value”, which according to the “essence of our people” “ reflects the eternal values ​​of our piety ”, far from“ the Berlin mentality, the 'asphalt' and politics ”. Papen's resignation on November 17, 1932 did not interfere with the plan he was sticking to. On January 2, 1933, he met with Papen and discussed with him the merging of the national conservative and national socialist poets and writers. On January 3rd, Papen discussed the modalities of the future government coalition of the NSDAP and DNVP with Adolf Hitler .

Münchhausen had been canon for St. Marien zu Wurzen Cathedral since 1920 and planned a renovation of its interior, which began in 1928. In 1931/1932 the sculptor Georg Wrba created a series of bronze cast works for the altar and pulpit area of ​​the cathedral. Busts of the apostles under the altar bore the facial features of all former and reigning canons. Against Münchhausen's objections, the Wurzen pharmacist Hermann Ilgen , whose foundation had borne most of the renovation costs, received his bust. Münchhausen praised the entire oeuvre in an essay: Wrba's crucifixion group has given the cathedral the highest artistic rank in Germany.

Nazi era

When Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, the Hitler Youth (HJ) sang poems set to music in the streets of Münchhausen. In the Association of German Girls, these belonged to the particularly valuable German educational and cultural assets.

From February 1933, the new Prussian minister of culture Bernhard Rust and the author Gottfried Benn forced leading members of the section for poetry to leave the Prussian Academy of the Arts, including Alfred Döblin, Käthe Kollwitz , Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann . Munchausen met Rust on March 8, 1933, agreed to the expulsion of these "unpleasant" persons and recommended Rust to release Benn as well. Rust offered him the head of the academy. Münchhausen refused, but continued the political cleansing of the academy. He was silent about the National Socialist book burnings . In June 1933 he and his Wartburg district were admitted to the academy and were given leadership positions in the poetry section. Münchhausen became one of their ten senators. In October 1933 he signed with 87 other writers, including ten aristocrats, the pledge of the most loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler and in August 1934 the call by cultural workers for a “ referendum on the head of state of the German Reich ”. After Hindenburg's death, this enabled Hitler to combine his chancellery with the office of Reich President to form the dictatorship of the Fiihrer.

In his abusive article The New Poetry (October 1933), Münchhausen claimed that poetic expressionism was driven by a “greed for ever more fantastic new formations” and “completely unruly indecent”. He had dissolved the form “to the same extent as the morality of the content”. His representatives had "simply trampled down everything German through cold-blooded irony, through icy rejection, and often the downright diabolical skill of the newspaper condemners." Among the writing "deserters, criminals, prisoners" were "about a hundred to two hundred times" as many Jews as in the general population. He made a list of the intended authors with Gottfried Benn at the head. He wanted to damage Benn's reputation in the academy so badly that Rust would fire him as a Jew.

34 newspapers printed the pamphlet. Benn defended himself publicly and privately: Expressionism was "revolutionary" art, this was a metaphysical basic condition of the "white race" too. But in January 1934 Münchhausen refused to join the newly founded Union of National Writers (UNS) because its Vice President Gottfried Benn was a "pure-blooded Jew" with a Hebrew surname. His appearance also speaks for it. The “tragic attitude” of his works is typical of the “Jewish half-breed”. His poems showed "a kind of inner insecurity, fear of life or vulnerability, or instability" that Benn's "Jewish blood" had created.

This denunciation threatened Benn's professional and economic existence and forced him to publish an Aryan certificate . Münchhausen replied: Benn was convinced of his Aryan origins, but was “generally considered to be a Jew”. If Benn had told him about his mother's “racial-western origin” right away, then he, Münchhausen, “would not have gotten into this line of thought”. Now he wants to quickly forget "this annoying little interlude". But later Benn gave up his offices in the Academy and UNS, and in 1935 also his Berlin medical practice.

Münchhausen wanted more independence and financial resources for the Wartburg Foundation and the Wartburg as the seat of the German poet elite. But Joseph Goebbels planned instead a Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK) as part of the Reichskulturkammer . Münchhausen stayed away from its inauguration on November 15, 1933 because it was placed in the thirtieth row instead of at the front. In October 1934, he learned from Section Chairman Hanns Johst that Hitler wanted art to be Nazi propaganda . Now he saw his “spiritual freedom” threatened internally and swore a “break in barbarism”. Shortly afterwards he declared that Hitler must have meant that only the highest art had a propagandistic effect, and saw himself again in harmony with him. The NSDAP party headquarters promised him in 1935 that if ministers interfered in the award of the Wartburg rose, he could turn to Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess , who would then intervene directly through Hitler. Six of nine “Wartburgrittern” were elected before 1933, seven were accepted into the Academy of the Arts in 1933, two more ( Hans Friedrich Blunck and Hanns Johst) became presidents of the RSK one after the other: Accordingly, Münchhausen in 1935 provided complete external and “internal correspondence” Wartburg meeting and awarding of prizes with the Nazi regime.

In the dispute over the relationship between the "folk literature" propagated by the Nazi regime, trivial literature and kitsch , Münchhausen stood up for Hedwig Courths-Mahler in 1934 , who was unable to continue her earlier sales successes during the Nazi era: the "much vilified" once said that it “awoke the need to book in millions of people in the first place”. The publisher used it to advertise their books.

As a successor to the late Fedor of Zobeltitz was Munchausen 1934 President of the Society of Bibliophiles (handicap), which brought into line and was incorporated as an umbrella organization bibliophile clubs in the RSK. He changed the statutes of the GdB, which should now work “in the popular educational sense for exemplary book and print design of valuable German literature”. By 1937, the last Jewish members had to leave the GdB, so that fewer than 400 members remained. In September 1941 Münchhausen resigned from his office because the GdB lost its status as an umbrella organization again. His successor was Baldur von Schirach . According to the vice-president of the GdB Ernst Volkmann (1950/51) Münchhausen resigned in protest against Goebbels' orders for the complete Nazification of the GdB.

In 1934 Münchhausen's only biological son Börries died in a car accident. He never mentioned it in letters to friends, but now added "the last of his tribe" to his titles. In 1935 the Jewish painter Conrad Felixmüller, later defamed as “degenerate”, was allowed to make portraits of Münchhausen and his cousin Hans von der Gabelentz.

In a magazine article from May 1936, Münchhausen discussed an edition of Heinrich Heine's songs set to music by Robert Schumann . He condemned Heine's alleged lack of morality, but at the same time emphasized that moral judgments were unimportant for aesthetics , thus also "the racial question as such" (Heine's Jewish origin). The “fateful fact” that Heine does not reach the German audience is significant, however. He deliberately ignored the reasons for this. He called Heine a “bastard” who “only managed to produce miserable German-language poems, but purely Jewish” and was therefore not a “German poet”. He thus represented a racist language concept that traced Heine's wit and sarcasm back to his Jewish origins and thus denied him being German. Münchhausen's essay was the culmination of the discourse on the exclusion of Heine at the time.

In the same year Münchhausen was a prominent guest at the Lippoldsberger Dichtertage by Hans Grimm (the author of “People without Space” ) and performed his ballad “Tot Spieler” in front of around 4,000 listeners from the Wehrmacht , Sturmabteilung (SA) and HJ. For the 1936 Olympics he was commissioned to find a text for Richard Strauss' hymn . The drafts of the poets selected by him were all "too German" for the purpose and would have been "not understood or rejected" by other peoples. He explained his work as a judge in an essay and sent it to Goebbels. This allowed him to sit in the VIP box near Hitler, Goebbels and Hermann Göring for the opening of the Olympics .

Since 1934, Münchhausen welcomed the racist policy of the Reich Food Minister Walther Darré, who was striving for a new nobility made of blood and soil , with "passionate sympathy" and "deepest joy"; Darré's successes exceeded his “wildest dreams”. He drew his attention to unpleasant “agitation against large estates” in press articles and exchanged views with him about “today's wild language” (foreign words).

Through his publishing house, Münchhausen received articles on National Socialist Racial Hygiene from Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and SS Oberführer Arthur Gütt , who was jointly responsible for the law to prevent hereditary offspring and its murderous consequences. On September 25, 1936, Münchhausen suggested to Gütt that German names be taken away from Jews. Often they would have chosen them only as a "cover name". One would have to induce them to give up the German names adopted since 1900, at the same time forbid them to accept French and English names and force them to accept Old Testament names. Such a measure would "facilitate the recognition of the Jews". Gütt immediately passed the letter on to Frick, who thereupon ordered a consultation on the law on changing surnames and first names that was being prepared at the time , among others between Government Councilor Hans Globke and State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart . In the ongoing debate, it turned out that “Jewish” and “German” surnames could not be consistently differentiated, so that the 1938 law only ordered an additional Jewish first name established by the state, and from 1939 the Jewish star was added. Münchhausen had stimulated this labeling process, which led to the Holocaust from 1941 on .

In 1937, Münchhausen complained to Hanns Johst about a reading book in which Theodor Fontane's ballad Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in Havelland was "mutilated". He formulated a decree that Johst took over and published. As a result, the anti-Semite Mathilde Ludendorff attacked Münchhausen in her magazine as a “great friend of the Jews”, who had “richly endowed his work Juda with Jewish symbols and drawings”. Philipp Bouhler , who headed the party official examination commission for the protection of the National Socialist literature , declared Judah to be “intolerable”, although the book was already out of print. A letter to the editor accused Münchhausen of "intellectual high treason against the German people". Münchhausen sued the author, but deleted all Jews from his works.

In a review of the anthology of German poems Echtermeyer , he criticized that the censorship had deleted and replaced 92 of 170 poets. He asked how far the “greats of 1900” had already been forgotten, and suspected that he himself would also be forgotten in the future and replaced by “new 'immortals'”. Because he implicitly also counted Jewish authors among the “greats”, parts of the Nazi press attacked his criticism as an unimportant, outdated or “reactionary view of art”. The new poets wrote for the “National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft ”, no longer for “the Freiherrn's circles”. The head of the Reich Security Main Office, Heinrich Himmler, judged internally that Münchhausen was a typical representative of the "old feudal aristocracy", had openly known himself as a "friend of Judaism" before 1933 and maintained contact with the Jewish literary scholar Georg Witkowski as late as 1937 . But apart from Judah and Jewish-friendly passages in his memoirs, his works are not objectionable. Goebbels instructed the RSK not to do anything against Münchhausen, "since he must be regarded as a widely respected author and poet of rank". The internal concerns didn't hurt him. In June 1938 he noted in his diary that Goebbels had been “enticingly amiable as always” to him.

In 1937 Hermann Göring became Reich Protector of the Academy of the Arts and commissioned Münchhausen, who had campaigned heavily to convert it into a "German Academy". He approved of Göring's measures against “Jewish misfits and politically unpleasant” and wanted to end the “messing up” of art in the modern age in order to save “true” art as the “pure, unsaved, noble activity of human spirit and human soul”. According to his diary, he agreed with the Nazi regime that among painters and musicians at the academy there were still "Jewish descendants [...], communists and enemies of the state". He suggested to Rust to let the non-Jewish members decide whom to vote for and to put the academy directly under Hitler. So he wanted to further promote his poetry elite and exclude the influence of subordinate bodies. But in the following years the poetry section of the academy lost its importance for the Nazi regime.

From 1938 the Wartburg meeting for the awarding of the "silver Wartburg rose" was no longer allowed to take place, since the Weimar poets 'meeting of the National Socialists brought together all previous poets' meetings.

Münchhausen continued to defend the Nazi state publicly and wrote to Thomas Mann in exile in April 1937: He was evidently betrayed by "false and probably defamatory news about Germany". In fact, there is no civil war there, no murder of innocents, no strikes, no unemployed, no hunger or shortage. Despite occasional shortages, the German people have been "deeply happy for 4 years". He himself was not a National Socialist, but was never "as largely in agreement with the Empire as with the Third Reich". He referred to the promotion of culture and literary prizes and summed up: never and nowhere has a government "poured out such an abundance of blessings on a people as Hitler did in such a short and difficult time".

In the Second World War from 1940 onwards, Münchhausen again undertook lecture tours to occupied territories in the service of German war propaganda. He affirmed the German wars of conquest as "barbed wire around the sheaf of intellectual freedom [...], which alone and for the first time in 2000 years tied the people together and made all valid successes of that time possible". During the war, the sales of his books and his income from lectures and radio broadcasts multiplied.

From 1940 Münchhausen gradually withdrew from cultural policy and devoted himself only to maintaining his work and country life. In 1941 he reissued his “Happy Week with Friends” for the last time, after removing “everything Jewish” from it. In it he emphasized that he had not written any biblical ballads for 40 years. In the past, he saw Zionism as the only way to “liberate Europe from the Jews”, but was “taught better” about it. That is why he left his “outlived” convictions at the time, “not without the express consent of relevant authorities”. He “fundamentally” rejects Judaism and has published articles on it since 1907. During the entire Nazi period, Münchhausen published almost only new editions and collections of earlier works. He kept the Hesped lawsuit in it as late as 1942.

In 1943 Münchhausen compiled a list of all 636 settings of his poems and ballads for the Berlin State Library. He did not comment on Jews and the war situation. On his 70th birthday (March 20, 1944) the UFA European Week brought a film report about him. The RSK, the district administrator of the Altenburg district, the NSDAP and the HJ congratulated him. The Lord Mayor of Altenburg granted him honorary citizenship. Since 1937 he has owned this from the city of Göttingen, whose university has now also made him an honorary citizen. The "Society of Book Friends Chemnitz" reissued its ballads under the title Thöks Defiance - A Ballad Wreath . In the foreword he wrote that he had designed some works as “components of a temple of German legend”. He lacks the time to build this temple, “maybe also strength and gift”. The edition should partially replace “the unfinished”.

In March 1944, the NSDAP Gauleiter Hartmann Lauterbacher donated the Münchhausen Prize for German poetry , which was awarded only once, namely to the author Moritz Jahn .

In April 1944 Münchhausen was a candidate for the Eagle Shield medal of the German Reich , which only 65 people received during the Nazi era. His wife attributed the fact that he did not receive it in her diary to “the stupid book of Judah” and said: “That thing would be hideous, and you might be hung up if we lose the war.” In August 1944, Hitler took Münchhausen into the “ Gottbegnadeten-Liste ” of the most important German writers. In September 1944, Münchhausen turned down a request from Goebbels to give the German people "a deeper meaning of the decision of our day" for total war . In his rejection he claimed that religion was "that which lets us hold out in difficult times and that is precisely what must not be said today". In addition, as a poet, he never expressed political ideas because he was a “layman” in them. Since this contradicted his commitment to racist cultural policy, it was understood in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda as an open rejection of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless Munchhausen remained unmolested.

When his wife was dying in January 1945 after a stroke , he described himself in his last letters to Schücking as a “pure urge poet”; his dramas are “miserable”, his short stories “inferior”. He felt a "certain envy" of the death of his wife. When the Allies were advancing to Altenburg, he committed suicide on March 16, 1945. His relatives covered it up and spoke of heart failure. According to Elmar Schenkel , Münchhausen had believed in the German "final victory" until the end; he probably took his own life out of fear of the invasion of Russian soldiers. He was buried in the Windischleuba cemetery.

reception

Poetry

Münchhausen himself placed his ballads after the ballads by Theodor Storm and Theodor Fontane since 1897 . He did not tie in with Friedrich Schiller's art ballad , which he considered out of date, but oriented himself on the tradition of the narrative song from the folk ballad , which he combined with pre-industrial and mythical set pieces. He understood his ballads as "heroic songs" and sang the Germanic world of legends and gods of the Icelandic Edda . Further scenes of his poetry can be found in the medieval world of knights and in phases of the Thirty Years War , in which the lonely heroes were able to prove their qualities of character. In his texts he transfigured social and political processes into natural occurrences and represented an anachronistic ideal of nobility. In this way he became an outstanding representative of “folk” literature. Since his first publications, national literary criticism (alongside Agnes Miegel and Lulu von Strauss and Torney) has praised him as the innovator of the German ballad.

These three authors juxtaposed literary historians such as Karl Borinski , Josef Nadler and Oskar Walzel in the 1920s. According to Walzel, Münchhausen most successfully continued the tradition from Strachwitz via Fontane and Detlev von Liliencron . According to Albert Soergel, Miegel's best ballads surpassed those of her two poet colleagues. At that time, Münchhausen and other völkisch and / or National Socialist authors such as Gustav Frenssen , Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Hans Grimm and Lulu von Strauss and Torney were considered "Heimatkunst" in the successor of Wilhelm Raabe .

Münchhausen's reputation reached its peak during the Nazi era. Moritz Jahn praised him in July 1939 in the National Socialist literary magazine Das Innere Reich as the leading German poet and greatest ballad poet since Fontane. In his ballads he conveyed the love of home as the essence of the German spirit. He and his poetry are eternal possessions of the German people. 740,000 copies of his works were sold during Münchhausen's lifetime.

His poem from 1907 received a special reception. Beyond the valley stood their tents . The text deals with the emotional conflict of a young king (possibly the last Staufer Konradin ) between his lover and his cavalry army, which a "rider's boy" decides in favor of the army. In 1920 the music teacher Robert Götz set it to music for the Wandervogel . The song was reprinted many times during the Weimar period. In 1933 the Hitler Youth included it in their songs. Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach changed the text in two places and removed homoerotic references from it. In doing so, he countered rumors about homosexuality in the HJ in order to make King Konradin's Hohenstaufen Castle a HJ pilgrimage site. For the historian Jürgen Reulecke , the process shows the continuity of right-wing German men's associations and the suitability of texts from Münchhausen for ideological purposes in the Nazi state. For the historian Franz Wegener, Schirach's intervention exemplifies “the transition from the freedom-loving rebellious youth of Weimar to the totalitarian mind control of the Hitler Youth”.

The Zionist Jewish Boy Scout Association, which did not have its own songs, took over from the songs of the Wandervogel and the HJ Münchhausen songs from 1933 The bells stormed from the Bernwardsturm and Beyond the Valley , although the author was "a supporter, even an admirer of the Nazis" (see above the contemporary witness and later literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki ). Reich-Ranicki included the two poems mentioned in 2005 in his anthology Der Kanon, Volume 5 .

The pop singer Heino achieved his first hit with the song Jenseits des Tales in 1965. The single was sold more than 100,000 times. Heino left out the second and third stanzas of the original text because of their homoerotic motifs. In 2014 he added a stanza he had composed for a new recording. Heino's ahistorical takeover of such songs by the Wandervogel, the Hitler Youth and the SS met with criticism in 2018 when the state government in North Rhine-Westphalia hired him as a “home ambassador”.

The German pointed to the 1960s Munchausen rank as ballad writer. The anthology German Poetry of the Modern Era by Ernst Bender for secondary schools in the Federal Republic, which was often reprinted from 1950 to 1972, contained some poems by Münchhausen. They can also be found in the anthologies Der Ewige Brunnen and Der Große Conrady . The political scientist Iring Fetscher interpreted Münchhausen's poem Die Hesped-Klage in the fifth volume of the collection of German poems published by Marcel Reich-Ranicki and their interpretations .

Since the 1960s, Münchhausen's ballads have received little attention. In 2000, his name and his lyrics were almost unknown in Germany. Today his ballads are almost forgotten, except for his popular Lederhosen saga (1907).

According to the German studies specialist Uwe-K. Ketelsen (1976), Münchhausen's ballads cannot only be viewed in terms of literature. He chose his tradition consciously and combined it with a Germanistic theory of the “Nordic”, heroic ballad. He had formulated their “renewal” as an artistic disinterest in the poor, non-aristocratic populations and opposed socialism . That is why earlier German scholars such as Wolfgang Kayser would have interpreted these ballads as a "challenge to previously suppressed tribal and racial forces against literature determined by the bourgeois spirit". Völkisch-national-conservative literature she counted among her basic stock and valued as literary counter-manifestations against modern narrative poems by Arno Holz , Frank Wedekind , Christian Morgenstern and against the modern development as a whole. Until recently, such anti-modern ballads were anchored in general literary consciousness through school lessons under the guise of “youthfulness”.

In the author's lexicon of German-language literature of the 20th century , Münchhausen is referred to as a “representative of reactionary ideas”. In his work he glorified a “chivalrous-feudal and junky-rumbling lifestyle” to which he had given himself up. Dorothee Weg ( Kindlers Literatur Lexikon ) pointed out in 1991 that Münchhausen's poetry was integrated into the ideology of nationalist nationalism .

The literary historian Klaus Ehlert puts Münchhausen's “Revival of the Ballad” in the context of a literary development that tended towards the blood-and-soil ideology of German fascism as early as 1900 and offered the up -and- coming bourgeoisie texts to compensate for living environments that were inaccessible to them. The “homeland poets” Münchhausen and Miegel reacted to the social problems by not addressing them, and instead chose legend , mythology and superstition as subjects of their texts. Unlike Theodor Fontane, they would not have exhausted the individual design possibilities of the ballad. Ehlert recalls the judgment of the literary historian Albert Soergel ( poetry and poet of the time , from 1911, here 1916): Münchhausen's “Herrenstolz only sees his peers, he is completely antisocial”; with Fontane one could say: "All dat Tüg is spectacular ... Dat allens hums and rattles to veel."

According to the cultural and literary scholar Eva Edelmann-Ohler, it remains to be clarified whether and from when Münchhausen's poetry was anti-Semitic. The texts of Judah left open the motives for supporting Zionism around 1900. The historian Michael Brenner describes the ambiguity of the motives of German philosemites like Münchhausen . Nonetheless, the Zionist activist Wolfgang von Weisl prefixed his autobiography (1971) with the introductory verses of Judah as his own motto in life. He had met Judah from Samuel Gronemann's memoir in 1946.

Münchhausen's letters to Levin Schücking (published in 2001) document: “Long before National Socialism, Münchhausen indulged in hostility towards Jews, saw 'the Jewish' again and again as an element that destroys culture or deplored the 'Judaization' of Germany. He never tires of emphasizing that he is actually not an anti-Semite. ”According to the reviewer Elmar Schenkel, his anti-modern poetry served“ a conservative-patriotic to National Socialist ideology ”.

Possessions

Münchhausen, who remained childless after the death of his son, bequeathed one of his manors, Moringen and Parensen, to his two stepchildren. Windischleuba Castle was expropriated during the land reform in 1945 and has been used as a youth hostel since 1977.

In 2004 the neo-Nazi Karl-Heinz Hoffmann , who had several criminal records , bought the Sahlis manor, which had fallen into disrepair. Until 2016, the Free State of Saxony sponsored Hoffmann's “Kulturstiftung” with 130,000 euros, which he hardly used to renovate the estate. Because he did not pay for sewers, the Wyhratal wastewater association had the property foreclosed in January 2016. A businessman from Oberhausen bought it for more than 160,000 euros. Because his bidder stated that he wanted to build a concentration camp there, the auction was legally checked. On January 27, 2016 ( International Holocaust Remembrance Day ), the bidder was awarded the contract; the wastewater association made the decision without examining possible purchase intentions.

Honors

The city council of Kohren-Sahlis , in which Münchhausen's great-great-nephew Georg-Ludwig von Breitenbuch was represented since 1999, honored Münchhausen in 2003 on the 550th anniversary of the city. Protests in advance were fended off. Letters from Nazi victims who were subjected to "re-education" as children in the SS Lebensborn homes of Kohren-Sahlis went unanswered. In a study, the local historian Rainer Arnold denied Münchhausen's “commitment in the interests of the NSDAP”: He was conservative and apolitical, early on proclaimed his “contempt for racial and racial hatred”, “accommodated Jewish friends” and was only because of his “vanity Alters "get into" sometimes embarrassing proximity to the Nazis ". Evidenced information from the biographer Jutta Ditfurth , a great-great-niece of Münchhausen, fended off local letters to the editor as “presumptuous interference” and “character assassination for the country and its people”, with which she wanted to “spoil the preparations for the festival”. During the parade, actors portrayed the Münchhausen couple in a moving carriage; local Nazi victims were not shown. The commemorative publication for the city anniversary (editor: Rainer Arnold) also only mentioned the poet, not the Lebensborn home.

In 2014 the University of Göttingen commissioned two historians to investigate the attitudes of 35 people who had been made honorary citizens during the Nazi era. They found that Münchhausen was not honored for special achievements for Göttingen, but for his anti-Semitism and his constant support of the Nazi state. His certificate only honored the "German poet who [...] had renewed an old native style of poetic design" and the "German man who knew how to awaken a chivalrous disposition through the sound of disciplined speech". She referred to the Göttingen musenalmanacs and the connection between his noble family and the founding of the university. The University of Münchhausen and seven other people then withdrew the award in February 2015.

The cities of Altenburg and Göttingen continue to lead Münchhausen as honorary citizens. On his 125th birthday in 1999, the city of Altenburg named a street after him and organized an exhibition and festive event for him in Windischleuba Castle. His literary estate was in the archive of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena until 1991 , and has been in Göttingen since then.

Publications

The standard
editor
  • Göttingen Muses Almanac for 1898.
  • Göttingen Muses Almanac for 1901.
  • Göttingen Muses Almanac for 1905.

Verlag Lüder Horstmann, Göttingen 1898; 1901; 1905

  • (with Gustav Stölting): The manors of the principalities of Calenberg, Göttingen and Grubenhagen. Hanover 1912
  • Göttingen Muses Almanac for 1923. Hochschulverlag, Göttingen 1922
  • People and race. Quarterly for German Volkstum. Supplement people in the word. Lehmann, Munich 1925ff.
  • Works on the family history of the Barons von Münchhausen. (4 volumes) Windischleuba 1935
author
  • Poems , 1897
  • Judah. Chants. Lattmann, 1900; Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), Stuttgart 1922
  • Ballads. Breslauer & Meyer, 1901
  • Chivalric songbook. Lattmann, Berlin / Goslar / Leipzig 1903
  • On the aesthetics of my ballads. Building blocks for the aesthetics of the German ballad. In: German monthly for the entire life of the present 11/1906, issues 1 (October), 2 (November), 3 (December)
  • The ballads and chivalrous songs. Egon Fleischel, Berlin 1908; DVA, Stuttgart 1921; 1941
  • The heart in armor. New ballads and songs. Egon Fleischel 1911; DVA, Stuttgart 1922; 1937 (with a list of the settings of Münchhausen's poems); 1940
  • A refusal [of Henri Guilbeaux's translation of BvM's ballads into French]. Der Türmer 16/1914, pp. 7, 98 f.
  • Germanic and Romanic feeling for nature. Der Türmer 17/1915, p. 11, 761–763
  • Old and new ballads and songs. Choice for the field. Egon Fleischel, Berlin 1915; 1918
  • The standard. Ballads and songs. Egon Fleischel, Berlin 1916; DVA, Stuttgart 1922; 1928
  • Münchhausen berry selection. A selection from the complete works of Baron Börries von Münchhausen. Egon Fleischel, Berlin 1920; DVA, Stuttgart 1920; Special edition for official use in the Hitler Youth , DVA, Stuttgart 1937; often reissued, among other things as "Soldier Library Volume 82", published by the High Command of the Wehrmacht ; last in 1944
  • Against the adult education centers! In: Der Kunstwart 33/1920
  • From my lectures with a failure against the reciters. Velhagen & Klasings monthly books, 1921
  • Happy week with friends. DVA, Stuttgart 1922
  • Castle in meadows. Ballads and songs. DVA, Stuttgart 1921; 1922
  • On Coudenhoven's Jewish hybrid proposal. In: Deutsches Adelsblatt, 1923, p. 144 f.
  • Master ballads. A guide to joy. DVA, Stuttgart 1923; Improved and greatly increased 10th edition , DVA, Stuttgart 1940; 1958
  • The ballad book. DVA, Stuttgart 1924ff .; 1944
  • The songbook. DVA, Stuttgart 1928
  • Hans Grimm. Of civil honor and necessity. In: Der Hochwart 2/1932 , p. 69 f.
  • The new seal. In: German Almanach for 1934. Reclam, Leipzig 1933, pp. 28–36
  • The Sheaf: Selected Articles. DVA, Stuttgart 1933
  • Stories from the history of an ancient gender history retold. Philipp Reclam junior, Leipzig 1934
  • The consecration song of the Eleventh Olympiad. Leipzig 1935
  • Heinrich Heine in German tones. In: Deutsche Zukunft 18, May 3, 1936
  • Autophilology. In: Heinz Otto Burger (Ed.): Poem and Thought. Halle (Saale) 1942, pp. 380-390
  • The poetic work in two volumes. Volume 1: Das Balladenbuch - final edition ; Volume 2: The songbook. DVA, Stuttgart 1950; 1969
  • Joy was my job. Ballads and songs. Selected by Moritz Jahn. Sachse & Pohl, Göttingen 1965
  • Beate Schücking (ed.): "Your eyes over every verse I wrote." Levin Ludwig Schücking - Börries von Münchhausen: Correspondence 1897–1945. Igel, Oldenburg 2001, ISBN 3-89621-127-7 .

literature

Biographies
Work analyzes and contemporary history
  • Eva Edelmann-Ohler: Philosemitism as a text process - On the relationship between 'poetic Zionism' and philosemitism in Börries von Münchhausen's 'Juda' (1900). In: Philipp Theisohn, Georg Braungart (eds.): Philosemitism: Rhetoric, Poetics, Discourse History. Wilhelm Fink, 2017, ISBN 3-8467-5301-7 , pp. 269-293
  • Thomas F. Schneider: A “Contribution to Knowledge of the Essence of the German People”: The instrumentalization of the ballad in the extreme political right and in National Socialism 1900-1945. In: Srdan Bogosavljevic, Winfried Woesler (Ed.): The German Ballad in the 20th Century. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-03911-628-2 , pp. 125-150
  • Thomas F. Schneider: "Heroic events" and "pure blue-blond trunk". The renewal of the ballad and its instrumentalization by Börries von Münchhausen since 1898. In: Edward Białek, Manfred Durzak , Marek Zybura (eds.): Literature in the witness stand. Contributions to German-language literary and cultural history. Festschrift for Hubert Orłowski's 65th birthday . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-631-39495-0 , pp. 541-561.
  • Inge Jens: Poet between right and left. The history of the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of the Arts presented according to documents. (1971) 2nd, expanded and improved edition with the collaboration of Norbert Kamppe, Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-378-00537-8
  • Werner Mittenzwei: The Fall of an Academy, or, The Mentality of the Eternal German: The Influence of the National Conservative Poets at the Prussian Academy of Arts, 1918 to 1947. Structure, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-351-02404-5
  • Uwe-K. Ketelsen: Völkisch-National and National Socialist Literature in Germany 1890-1945. Metzler, Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-476-10142-8 , pp. 44-46
  • Karl Hoppe: Börries von Münchhausen and Raabe. In: Yearbook of the Raabe Society Volume 8, 1967, ISSN 0075-2371, DOI: 10.1515 / 9783110243567.105, pp. 105-109

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 81–84
  2. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 85–98
  3. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 99–103
  4. Thomas F. Schneider: A "contribution to the knowledge of the essence of the German people" , in: Srdan Bogosavljevic, Winfried Woesler (ed.): The German ballad in the 20th century. Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 127 and fn. 15
  5. Peter Sprengel: History of German-Language Literature 1900-1918: From the turn of the century to the end of the First World War. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52178-9 , p. 598 f.
  6. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, p. 104.
  7. Joachim Dyck: Gottfried Benn, a "thoroughbred Jew"? In: Matías Martínez: Gottfried Benn: Interplay between biography and work. Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-89244-964-3 , p. 121 and fn. 20
  8. Andrea Verena Glang-Tossing: Maria Magdalena in literature around 1900: Femininity construction and literary life reform. De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 3-05-006263-0 , p. 110 ; Lars Kaschke: From everyday life in the Wilhelmine cultural scene: Börries von Münchhausen's attacks on Richard Dehmel. In: Text and Context 20/1997, Issue 1, pp. 35–57
  9. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 107–111
  10. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 112–121
  11. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 123–126
  12. Werner Mittenzwei: Münchhausen, Börries Freiherr von. In: NDB Volume 18, 1997, p. 525
  13. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 126–157
  14. ^ Eva Edelmann-Ohler: Philosemitismus als Textverfahren, in: Philipp Theisohn, Georg Braungart (Ed.): Philosemitismus , 2017, pp. 269–276
  15. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 150–155; Emily D. Bilski et al. (Ed.): Martin Buber-Werkausgabe (MBW) Volume 7: Writings on literature, theater and art: poetry, autobiography and drama. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2016, ISBN 3-579-02682-8 , p. 467f.
  16. Mark H. Gelber, Jakob Hessing, Robert Jütte (ed.): Integration and exclusion: Studies on German-Jewish literary and cultural history from the early modern era to the present. Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 2009, ISBN 3-484-97148-7 , p. 173
  17. ^ Mark H. Gelber: Stefan Zweig, Judentum und Zionismus. StudienVerlag, Vienna 2014, ISBN 3-7065-5740-1 , p. 161 and fn. 7
  18. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 158–165
  19. ^ Lionel Gossman: Brown Shirt Princess: A Study of the "Nazi Conscience". Open Book Publishers, 2009, ISBN 1-906924-06-6 , p. 151, fn. 2
  20. Joachim Schlör (Ed.): Sammy Gronemann: Memories. Berlin / Vienna 2002, p. 69 f .; Hanni Mittelmann: Sammy Gronemann (1875-1952): Zionist, writer and satirist in Germany and Palestine. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-593-37511-7 , p. 48
  21. Beate Schücking (Ed.): "Your eyes over every verse I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 7
  22. Beate Schücking (ed.): "Your eyes over every verse I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 11
  23. Werner Mittenzwei: The Downfall of an Academy , Berlin 1992, p. 159
  24. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 167–185
  25. a b Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 187-200
  26. ↑ Annual literary scholarship of the Josef Weinheber Society. New episode 2010/2011/2012. Lit Verlag, Münster 2014, ISBN 3-643-50445-4 , p. 68, fn. 23 ; Ernst Piper: Night over Europe: Cultural History of the First World War. Propylaea, Berlin 2013, ISBN 3-549-07373-9 , p. 199 f.
  27. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, p. 200 f. and 126
  28. Volker Meid: Hear, Germany! A short history of Germany's poems. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2019, ISBN 3-476-04731-8 , p. 135
  29. ^ Helmuth Kiesel: History of German-Language Literature 1918 to 1933. Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 3-406-70804-8 , p. 349 f. ; Full text at dnb.de; Commentary in the world stage; Parody by Ernst Toller .
  30. Beate Schücking (ed.): "Your eyes over every verse that I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 12
  31. ^ Rüdiger Ahrens: Bündische Jugend: Eine neue Geschichte 1918-1933. Wallstein, Würzburg 2015, ISBN 3-8353-2867-0 , p. 94
  32. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 235–239
  33. Ulf Morgenstern: Bürgergeist and Family Sense: The liberal Schücking family of scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 3-506-77353-4 , p. 389 f.
  34. Beate Schücking (Ed.): "Your eyes over every verse I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 15
  35. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 240–242
  36. ^ Hans-Albert Walter: German Exile Literature 1933–1950. Volume 1,1: The mentality of the Weimar Germans / The "politicization" of the intellectuals. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 978-3-476-00536-6 , p. 261
  37. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 242–244
  38. Werner Mittenzwei: The Downfall of an Academy , Berlin 1992, pp. 107–123 and 155
  39. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 253–261
  40. ^ Günter Kloss: Georg Wrba (1872-1939): a sculptor between historicism and modernity. M. Imhof, 1998, ISBN 3932526201 , p. 56
  41. Gerald Wiemers, Reiner Gross: Sächsische Lebensbilder, Volume 5. Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-515-08417-7 , pp. 305-307
  42. Beate Schücking (Ed.): "Your eyes over every verse I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 5
  43. Eva Sternheim-Peters: Did I cheer alone? A youth under National Socialism. Europa Verlag, 2016, ISBN 3-95890-030-5 , p. 241
  44. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 259–264
  45. Uwe-K. Ketelsen: The thirties and forties. In: Walter Hinderer (Hrsg.): History of German poetry from the Middle Ages to the present. 2nd expanded edition, Würzburg 2001, p. 489
  46. ^ Manfred Voigts: Berlin Modernism - Expressionism and Judaism. In: Hans Otto Horch: Handbook of German-Jewish Literature. De Gruyter / Oldenbourg, Munich 2017, ISBN 3-11-057724-0 , p. 291 ; Gerhard Plumpe: Epochs of Modern Literature: A System Theoretical Design. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 978-3-663-09954-3 , [1]
  47. Joachim Dyck: Gottfried Benn, a "thoroughbred Jew"? In: Matías Martínez: Gottfried Benn , Göttingen 2007, p. 120
  48. Wolfgang Emmerich: Gottfried Benn. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2016, ISBN 3-644-56541-4 , p. 66
  49. Werner Mittenzwei: Der Untergang einer Akademie , Berlin 1992, pp. 365–371 and p. 558, fn. 10 and 11; Reinhard Alter: Gottfried Benn and Börries Münchhausen. An exchange of letters from 1933/34. Yearbook of the German Schiller Society, Volume 25, 1981, pp. 139ff.
  50. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, p. 262, pp. 267–269
  51. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, p. 262, p. 275 f.
  52. ^ Christian Adam: Reading under Hitler: Authors, bestsellers, readers in the Third Reich. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2010, ISBN 3-86971-027-6 , p. 186 f.
  53. Reinhard Wittmann : The Society of Bibliophiles. In: Ursula Rautenberg (Ed.): Book Studies in Germany. A manual. 2 volumes. De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-020036-2 , p. 1050
  54. Monika Estermann, Ernst Fischer, Ute Schneider (Ed.): Book cultures. Contributions to the history of literary communication. Festschrift for Reinhard Wittmann. Otto Harrassowitz, 2005, ISBN 3-447-05260-0 , p. 586 f.
  55. ^ Mark H. Gelber: Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism. (2000) De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 3-484-65123-7 , p. 88 and fn. 3
  56. Beate Schücking (Ed.): "Your eyes over every verse that I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 17 f.
  57. Claude Conter, Nicole Sahl (ed.): Aufbruch und Vermittlungs: Contributions to Luxembourg and European literary and cultural history. Aisthesis, 2010, ISBN 3-89528-824-1 , p. 592
  58. a b Matthias Wendt: How “The Bad Old Songs” became “Rübezahl”. On the reception of Schumann's Heine songs in the Third Reich. In: Henriette Herwig et al. (Ed.): Transitions. Between arts and cultures. International congress on the 150th year of the death of Heinrich Heine and Robert Schumann. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 3-476-05263-X , p. 141 f.
  59. ^ Yael Kupferberg: Dimensions of the joke around Heinrich Heine: On the secularization of poetic language. Königshausen & Neumann, ISBN 3-8260-4471-1 , p. 11
  60. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 274–291
  61. Frank-Rutger Hausmann: “Dense, poet, don't meet!”: The European Writers' Association in Weimar 1941-1948. Vittorio Klostermann, 2004, ISBN 3-465-03295-0 , p. 39
  62. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 291–293
  63. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, p. 277 f.
  64. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, p. 293 f.
  65. ^ A b Hans Sarkowicz: Münchhausen, Börries Freiherr von. In: Wolfgang Benz: Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 8: Supplements and Register. Berlin 2015, p. 96
  66. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 294–296
  67. ^ Eva Dambacher: Literature and Culture Awards. Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1996, ISBN 3-929146-43-6 , p. 130
  68. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 296–298
  69. a b Elmar Schenkel: Review: Non-fiction book: We don't want horsemen! FAZ, September 18, 2001
  70. Helga and Manfred Neumann: Agnes Miegel: The honorary doctorate and its history in the mirror of contemporary literary criticism. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1877-X , p. 117
  71. ^ Dorothee ways: Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen. The lyric work. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon Volume 12, Munich 1991, p. 43
  72. Helga and Manfred Neumann: Agnes Miegel: The honorary doctorate and its history in the mirror of contemporary literary criticism. Würzburg 2000, p. 90
  73. Dirk Göttsche, Florian Krobb, Rolf Parr: Raabe manual. Life - work - effect. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-476-05382-4 , p. 52
  74. Mark H. Gelber: Melancholy Pride , Berlin / Boston 2014, p. 89 f.
  75. Beate Schücking (Ed.): "Your eyes over every verse I wrote" , Oldenburg 2001, p. 5
  76. Jürgen Reulecke: In the run-up to the Nazi training camp. Men's association ideology and men's association experiences before 1933. In: Gideon Botsch, Josef Haverkamp (ed.): Youth movement, anti-Semitism and right-wing politics: From the “Freideutschen Jugendtag” to the present. De Gruyter / Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, ISBN 3-11-030622-0 , p. 152 f.
  77. Franz Wegener: Barth in National Socialism. Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, Gladbeck 2016, ISBN 1-5197-9333-2 , p. 109 f.
  78. Marcel Reich-Ranicki: My life. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart / Munich 1999, ISBN 3-421-05149-6 , p. 63
  79. Marcel Reich-Ranicki: The canon. German literature. Poems. Insel, 2005, ISBN 3-458-06785-X ( Börries von Münnchhausen (1874–1945) )
  80. Ulli Tückmantel: Heino's "home" without history: Heino and his business with problematic songs. WZ, March 23, 2018; Ulli Tückmantel: Home Congress: Ina Scharrenbach - a minister with "fatherland songs". WZ, March 20, 2018
  81. Ernst Bender (ed.): German poetry of the modern times. Selected by Ernst Bender for the upper level of secondary schools. G. Braun, 1950, pp. 358-362
  82. Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): 1000 German poems and their interpretations. Volume 5: From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 257
  83. ^ Mark H. Gelber: Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism. (2000) De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 3-484-65123-7 , p. 89 f.
  84. Uwe-K. Ketelsen: Völkisch-National and National Socialist Literature in Germany 1890-1945. Stuttgart 1976, p. 45
  85. Manfred Brauneck (Ed.): Author's dictionary of German-language literature of the 20th century. Reinbek near Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-499-16355-1 , p. 584
  86. ^ Dorothee ways: Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen. The lyric work. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon Volume 12, Munich 1991, p. 44
  87. ^ Klaus Ehlert: Realism and early days. In: Wolfgang Beutin et al. (Ed.): German history of literature: From the beginnings to the present. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2019, ISBN 978-3-476-04953-7 , pp. 295–343, here pp. 325 f.
  88. ^ Eva Edelmann-Ohler: Philosemitismus als Textverfahren, in: Philipp Theisohn, Georg Braungart (ed.): Philosemitismus , 2017, p. 270, fn. 3
  89. Michael Brenner: "God protect us from our friends": On the ambivalence of philosemitism in the empire. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism 2/1993, pp. 174–193
  90. Wolfgang von Weisl: The way to the fatherland is long. In: Dietmar Goltschnigg (Ed.): Wolfgang von Weisl. The path of an Austrian Zionist from the fall of the Habsburg monarchy to the establishment of the state of Israel. Böhlau, Vienna 2019, ISBN 3-205-23271-2 , PDF p. 77f. and 113
  91. Stefan Schirmer: Karl-Heinz Hoffmann: “Not to be dead”. Time January 28, 2016
  92. Matthiasuppe / dpa: From despite "KZ" statement: Oberhausener is awarded the contract for the Sahlis manor. LVZ, January 27, 2016
  93. Jutta Ditfurth: The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Hamburg 2015, pp. 307-310
  94. Giving birth under the Nazis in the utmost secrecy. NZZ, September 12, 2003
  95. Distinguished during the Nazi era: Uni Göttingen distances itself from Hermann Göring. Spiegel, February 16, 2015; Dirk Schumann, Lena Elisa Freitag: Honors from the University of Göttingen (honorary citizens and doctors) during the Nazi era and how they were dealt with after 1945. (PDF download) Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, August 26, 2014
  96. With Alexej Leonow Altenburg loses the last honorary citizen. Leipziger Volkszeitung, October 26, 2019
  97. Honorary Citizens of the City of Göttingen. Göttingen.de
  98. Ulrich Kaufmann: "The Castle in Wiesen" - The ballad poet Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen in Windischleuba 3: The poet in the "Third Reich". Literaturland Thueringen.de
  99. ^ A b Thomas F. Schneider: The instrumentalization of the ballad , in: Srđan Bogosavljević, Winfried Woesler (ed.): The German ballad in the 20th century. Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 146–148
  100. Jörg Weigang: Front reading : Reading material for and by soldiers of the German Wehrmacht in World War II. Niemeyer, 2010, ISBN 3827188334 , p. 10
  101. ^ Thomas Vordermayer: educated bourgeoisie and völkisch ideology: constitution and social depth effects of a network of völkischer authors (1919-1959). De Gruyter / Oldenbourg, Munich 2015, ISBN 3-11-041475-9 , p. 450
  102. a b c Ulf Morgenstern: Bürgergeist und Familiensinn , Paderborn 2012, p. 265, fn. 90