Benjamin Crémieux

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Benjamin Crémieux, 1943

Benjamin Crémieux (born December 1, 1888 in Narbonne ; † April 12, 1944 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a French writer of Jewish origin. He exerted a strong influence above all with his literary critical work on contemporary French and Italian literature. He translated Luigi Pirandello and contributed significantly to the popularity of Italo Svevos . His illegal activities in the Resistance brought him to a concentration camp in 1943 , where he was killed.

Life

Crémieux came from the coastal town of Narbonne in the south of France, where a street is named after him today. He studied literature in Paris . As a soldier in World War I , he was repeatedly wounded. His only novel, published in 1921, is autobiographical. In 1926, the literary magazine Le Navire de'argent published extracts from the novel by the still unknown Italo Svevo along with a momentous article by Crémieux. The Nouvelle Revue Française , led by Jean Paulhan , became Crémieux's most important forum . He was also head of the Italy office in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and secretary of the French PEN . He fulfilled a rather amusing diplomatic mission in Buenos Aires in 1930 when he introduced the pilot and writer Saint-Exupéry to the enchanting Consuelo , who promptly abducted his future muse by plane.

During the Second World War , Crémieux joined the resistance group Combat through his son in 1941 and was mainly active in the underground of Marseille . In May 1942 he and René Milhaud published a manifesto against the Vichy regime . Almost a year later he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar . There he died of exhaustion in April 1944.

Works

  • Le roman Italien contemporain , 1909.
  • Du côté de Marcel Proust suivi de Lettres inédites de Marcel Proust à Benjamin Crémieux , 1919.
  • Le Premier de la classe , novel, 1921.
  • XXe siècle , 1924.
  • L'Esprit européen dans la littérature d'aujourd'hui , 1926.
  • Une conspiratrice en 1830, ou le Souper sans la Belgiojoso , 1928.
  • Panorama de la littérature italienne contemporaine , 1928.
  • La Grenouille et les trois nourrices , 1930.
  • Littérature italienne , 1931.
  • Benjamin Crémieux. Inventaires, Inquiétude et reconstruction. Essai sur la literature d'après guerre , 1931.

literature

  • Italo Svevo : Corrispondenza con Valery Larbaud, Benjamin Crémieux e Marie Anne Comnène , 1953.
  • Alvin Allan Eustis: Marcel Arland , Benjamin Crémieux, Ramon Fernandez; trois critiques de la “Nouvelle revue française” , Paris 1961.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See gallery in Narbonne  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed April 30, 2011@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / home.fotocommunity.de  
  2. ^ According to the Jewish Library , accessed April 30, 2011
  3. ↑ For the Berlin novelist Eduard Wechssler , who invites Crémieux to lectures, Le Premier de la classe is “a beautiful book with deep backgrounds” in which “truth and deception, seriousness and play fight for truly heroic children's souls” - quoted from Hans Manfred Bock (ed.): French culture in Berlin during the Weimar Republic , Tübingen 2005, page 188.
  4. ↑ According to Bernd Blaschke: Der homo oeconomicus ... , Munich 2004, page 213.
  5. ↑ executed by a Nazi firing squad states the Jewish Virtual Library, with reference to a book from 1961, see the lemma about him under web links
personal data
SURNAME Crémieux, Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, resistance fighter and victim of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Narbonne
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1944
Place of death Buchenwald concentration camp