Harry Domela

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harry Domela ( Latvian Harijs Domela ; * 1904/05 in Grusche , Kovno Governorate , Russian Empire ; † October 4, 1979 in Maracaibo , Venezuela ) was a German-Baltic impostor and author . As a youth he was a member of the Baltic State Army and a soldier in the Reichswehr . From 1936 he fought as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War with the Fifth Regiment on the side of the Second Spanish Republic .

biography

Harry Domela was born as the son of a German-Baltic miller in the village of Grusche not far from the governorate border in Livonia and spent his childhood in Bauske in Courland . The father died shortly after Domela's birth. Harry visited one of his brothers in Riga in 1915 , who was unexpectedly called up for Russian military service and was then sent to a reformatory for two years. In 1917 he returned to his mother in Bauske. Alienated from her, he joined the Baltic State Army in 1919 in order to fight the Bolshevik occupiers in the Baltic States after the First World War . He was thus a child soldier . As a result of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty , the independent republics of Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania came into being in 1918 . They had to defend themselves against claims to power by the communists (Russian Red Army ), the monarchists (Russian White Army in association with the German Freikorps supported by parts of the German nobility ) and the Poles . With the end of this civil war phase until 1920, part of Lithuania ( Central Lithuania ) remained under Polish sovereignty. The troop was disbanded in Jüterbog , Brandenburg in 1920 . The members of the corps were declared treason in Latvia ; so they were not allowed to return. Domela's way back home became impossible, he was now stateless, and his mother was killed in the fighting. The German authorities refused him a passport, which he needed to get a job. He took jobs in his Roaring Twenties that didn't ask for a passport. He was a brickworker, house boy, beggar, salesman, quick draftsman and gardener.

In 1920 he was drafted into a barracks in Neuruppin in connection with the Kapp Putsch . He joined the Reichswehr there to put down workers' unrest in the Ruhr area , as he feared that he would otherwise be deployed in a free corps in the Baltic States . After several night missions towards the end of the uprisings, his unit was ordered back to Berlin . There he was found too young and discharged from the military. He was now homeless and doing odd jobs. As a cigarette seller, he occasionally acquired a title of nobility in order to boost his business. Several short stays in arrest and prison followed.

Advertisement (around 1920) for the luxury hotel Haus Kossenhaschen in Erfurt .

Domela later adopted the name "von Liven". The court marshal Kuno Graf von Hardenberg , who was approached in Darmstadt because of an employment, offered the supposed comrade support. In autumn 1926 he presented himself in Heidelberg in the liaison office of the Corps of the “Saxo-Borussia” as “Prince Liven, Lieutenant in the 4th Potsdam Cavalry Regiment” and was enthusiastically received. A few weeks later he stayed in Erfurt as "Baron Korff" in the Hotel Erfurter Hof . The hotel manager thought he was Wilhelm Prince of Prussia , the eldest son of Wilhelm of Prussia .

Domela rose to dizzying heights in Thuringian society within a few days. At the invitation of the Erfurt hotelier Georg Kossenhaschen , he stayed in his luxury hotels in Erfurt and Gotha and stayed at his private residence, Creuzburg Castle northwest of Eisenach . Domela visited as "Royal Highness" a. a. the Lord Mayor of Gotha, took part in hunts, operas and private parties.

As an alleged Hohenzollern prince, Domela considered bourgeois society to be the best in Heidelberg , Erfurt, Gotha and Weimar - good looks, fluent language, perfect behavior, elegant and urbane demeanor helped him. But even the heavy rucksack and the dusty, well-worn travel suit when he arrived did not go well with it. When he found out that he was being wanted by the criminal police, he took the train to the Rhineland to join the French Foreign Legion . However, he was arrested in Cologne in January 1927 when he was about to board the train to France. In the same month, with the greatest public interest, he was tried.

During his seven months in prison he wrote the template for the book The False Prince. Life and Adventure of Harry Domela . Wieland Herzfelde published the book, textually revised, in his Malik publishing house . Six editions with a total of 122,000 copies sold within one year, Harry Domela earned 250,000 marks with it at the time. These did not last long.

He was one of the first German media stars, if not the first. The literary celebrities, including Thomas Mann , Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky , celebrated him, he appeared in theaters and revues, and magazines published articles about him. This impostor story was filmed in 1959 by Wolfgang Luderer on behalf of DEFA , and six years later by Wolfgang Schleif on behalf of ZDF .

In the summer of 1929 he opened a small cinema on Rostocker Strasse in northern Berlin . It ran its own silent film: The False Prince. 6 files with Harry Domela . The cinema went bankrupt after three months, Domela lost all his money, tried his hand at being a journalist and also planned another book ( Behind the Scenes of the Sensation ). He was arrested several times, mostly on obscure accusations, in January 1931 on "suspicion of treason ". He made himself unpopular with the National Socialists with various Red Aid events . He sympathized with the KPD . After Hitler came to power and with financial difficulties in which he was entangled, Domela emigrated in 1932 via Vienna , where he obtained a false passport, and Paris to the Netherlands . He now called himself Victor Zsajka : born August 12, 1908 in Vienna and lives there, Matteottiplatz 2.

Emblem of the Fifth Regiment

In the summer of 1936 he was in Paris with his new friend Jef Last . He was a socialist and homosexual like him, a writer and well known to Marinus van der Lubbe, who was convicted of arson in the Reichstag . When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Domela and Last were among the first foreigners to come to the aid of the Spanish Republic. On the mediation of his friend Jef at André Malraux , both came into a republican unit. Despite the requests of Ludwig Renn - whom Domela knew from Berlin - he refused to fight in one of the communist-led international brigades. Domela served Ludwig Renn as an adjutant in the first days of the war. He met Franz Dahlem as head of the Political Commission of the International Brigades . On September 20, 1936, they were in Madrid and served in the regular Spanish People's Army in the 5th Enrique Lísters Regiment . When the People's Army collapsed in January 1939, Domela also fled to France. When Spanish soldiers were also allowed to cross the border from February 5, 1939, Harry Domela was interned as an officer of a divisional staff in the Gurs camp , later in Saint-Cyprien under inhumane conditions. As a Trotskyist , he experienced hostility from German communists in the camps . The writer André Gide stood up for Domela several times at the request of Jef Last and he was released in May.

With an appropriate residence permit, he traveled to Luxembourg . His efforts to emigrate to Mexico or Sweden were unsuccessful. He was still threatened with arrest because he had been living with false papers since 1932.

Gide put him in touch with Aline Mayrisch-de Saint-Hubert , the widow of the Luxembourg steel industrialist Emil Mayrisch . Domela was still posing as Victor Zsajska. The Luxembourg immigration police checked his identity in July 1939. Domela went to Belgium to be on the safe side, was arrested, but managed to escape the German invasion and went into hiding. In the spring of 1941, in the Christi Bar in Nice , in the unoccupied zone of France , he met André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard and advised them not to go to Paris, where he had just come from. Domela was arrested in the summer and imprisoned in the Vernet camp for a year and a half. He escaped extradition to the German authorities thanks to Gide, who got him a visa and a boat ticket to Mexico . However, he never arrived there and was lost forever for many because he had to leave the ship in Jamaica and was interned again for two and a half years. He was then able to travel on to Cuba . Via the island nation he finally came to Venezuela , where he - again a stateless person with forged papers - worked as a drawing teacher and also died.

In September 1965, his ex-boyfriend Jef Last from Maracaibo received a letter from Domela: He had come to Venezuela on an adventurous route and had built up a simple existence as a high school teacher. Last shouldn't say anything about him, however, as he still lives with a false identity and sees no possibility of ever getting a regular passport again. A letter to the Dutch resistance fighter and journalist Tom Rot, dated March 1978, was Domela's last known sign of life. He died on October 4, 1979 in Maracaibo , Venezuela .

reception

Prince Wilhelm (right) with father and grandfather (1927)

In the GDR , Domela was treated as a persona non grata . Although he was a Spanish fighter - with the Fifth Regiment - he was denied there: He was considered an outsider and politically unreliable, especially because of his criticism of the International Brigades, the KPD and their future role.

In the GDR his life was filmed in the film Der FALL HARRY DOMELA in 1959 as the 6th episode of the DFF series “Weimarer Pitaval” by Friedrich Karl Kaul and Walter Jupé .

“Just call me prince”: Harry Domela's life adventure , was published in 2010 as volume 65 in the Weimarer Schriften series , published by the Weimar City Museum . This publication, which would like to show a piece of city history in a new light, could be the beginning of a new Domela reception.

The literary scholar and book scholar Jens Kirsten says about him: “Domela was certainly neither a clown, nor beaten by excessive modesty. His role as a con man is slightly overrated. That was a role. An escapade that he allowed himself when he realized how much this whole Weimar Republic was still stuck in the imperial era, how much the entire social system was based on servility, status, appearance and lie. "

literature

  • Harry Domela: The wrong prince. My life and my adventures. Malik-Verlag, Berlin 1927, cover design by John Heartfield
  • Harry Domela: The wrong prince. Life and Adventure of Harry Domela. Verlag Borstelmann & Siebenhaar, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-934189-49-0 .
  • Steffen Raßloff : "The wrong prince". Harry Domela as guest at the “Erfurter Hof” in 1926. In: Ders. (Ed.): The Erfurt summit in 1970 and the history of the “Erfurter Hof” (writings of the association for the history and antiquity of Erfurt ; vol. 6). Jena 2007, pp. 137–145, ISBN 978-3-940265-05-0 .
  • Kurt U. Bertrams (ed.): The false prince and Saxo-Borussia. The adventures of the impostor Harry Domela . WJK-Verlag, Hilden 2007, ISBN 3-933892-77-5 .
  • Jens Kirsten: Just call me Prince. Harry Domela's life adventure. Stadtmuseum, Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-910053-47-5 .

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.literaturland-thueringen.de/haben/harry-domela/
  2. ↑ Steffen Raßloff: The Creuzburg and the Georg Kossenhaschen era - the lord of the castle and his false prince. In: Breustedt, Susanne-Maria (ed.): 800 years of Creuzburg. A commemorative publication. Creuzburg 2013. P. 68 f.
  3. ↑ http://www.literaturland-thueringen.de/artikel/nennen-sie-mich-einfach-prinz-ich-bin-es-seit-jahren-so-gewoehnt-harry-domela-in-thueringen/hinter-den -scapes-of-a-sensation /
  4. ↑ a b The false prince , Ostthüringer Zeitung, April 3, 2011
  5. ^ Archive Tom Rot, International Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
  6. ^ [1] The false prince: The story of the century by Harry Domela Leipziger Volkszeitung June 4th, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Domela, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Domela, Harijs (lvS)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Latvian-Baltic German impostor, author and Spain fighter
DATE OF BIRTH 1904 or 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Grush
DATE OF DEATH after 1977