Bernard of Brentano

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Bernard von Brentano (born October 15, 1901 in Offenbach am Main , † December 29, 1964 in Wiesbaden ) was a German writer , poet , playwright , narrator , novelist , essayist and journalist .

Life

Bernard von Brentano was a son of the Hessian Interior and Justice Minister Otto von Brentano di Tremezzo and a brother of Clemens and Heinrich von Brentano . His mother Lilla Beata, née Schwerdt, came from the Frankfurt line of Brentanos.

Unlike his brothers, Bernard von Brentano rarely used his family's long name, Brentano di Tremezzo .

After graduating from high school in Offenbach, Brentano studied philosophy in Freiburg, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin. In Freiburg he became an active member of the Catholic student union Bavaria, in Munich of the K. St. V. Rheno-Bavaria, both in the cartel association, since 1920 he was a member of the PEN His piece GELD (1924) was under the directorship of Gustav Hartung in Darmstadt performed, the dramaturge was Peter Suhrkamp.

From 1925 to 1930 Brentano worked for the features section in the Berlin office of the Frankfurter Zeitung , where he succeeded Joseph Roth , with whom he was close friends. In the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors he was strongly committed and was also an employee of the magazine The left-hander . Together with Bertolt Brecht he wanted to publish another literary newspaper in 1929/30, but this project could not be realized.

In his 1929 essay “About the Seriousness of Life” Brentano evaluated war letters from fallen soldiers and criticized the glorification of war. With the prophetic book The Beginning of Barbarism in Germany , published in 1932 , he finally incurred the hatred of the National Socialists. His books were burned at the stake after they came to power.

It has not yet been possible to clarify whether Brentano was a member of the KPD, but there are several indications for this. In any case, after two trips to Moscow in 1930 and 1932, Brentano rejected the Stalin regime and later distanced himself from Marxism.

Brentano left Berlin at the beginning of April 1933 and emigrated to Switzerland . From 1934 he lived with his family in Küsnacht near Zurich . There he worked for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Weltwoche . In 1936 Brentano's main work Theodor Chindler was published by Zurich-based publisher Oprecht , which was reprinted several times and filmed in 1979 by Hans W. Geißendörfer . This novel, highly praised by Thomas Mann , describes the collapse of the Wilhelminian Empire using the example of a Catholic family and partly refers to its own family history.

From 1940 Brentano tried to get a repatriation. He wrote to the Foreign Office in Berlin: “In addition to the attentive consideration of the policy initiated and carried out by the Fiihrer, the experiences I made as a German abroad, in Switzerland and while traveling in France, fully reflect my earlier domestic political views knocked over. ”In one enclosure he distanced himself from Thomas Mann and called his political views fundamentally different. Brentano was allowed to return, but the Reichsschrifttumskammer did not give him permission for literary activity. The historian Jean Rudolf von Salis , who reported that Brentano let himself be carried away to an anti-Semitic outbreak in his presence at the beginning of the war, explained the behavior with a deep fear of life, Brentano lived in panic fear of falling into the hands of the National Socialists. His wife Margot von Brentano-Gerlach had a Jewish mother.

It was not until 1949 that he returned from emigration to Germany, to the “land of love”, as he called it in his autobiography in 1952, and lived with his family in Wiesbaden until his death.

estate

As early as 1984, parts of the estate were on loan from the family to the German Literature Archive in Marbach , and in May 2018 the literary archive bought the entire estate. In addition to correspondence with contemporaries from literature and science, for example Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann , the estate includes Brentano's diaries and photographs.

Works

  • About the seriousness of life. 1929.
  • Capitalism and beautiful literature. 1930.
  • The beginning of barbarism in Germany. 1932. - New edition (edited by Roman Köster ): Eichborn Verlag, Cologne 2019, ISBN 978-3-8479-0670-4 . ( Reading sample )
  • Berlin novellas. 1934.
  • Theodor Chindler . 1936.
  • Trial without a judge. 1937.
  • The eternal feelings. 1939.
  • Une Famille Allemande. 1939.
  • Phaedra, drama. 1939
  • Diary with books. 1943.
  • August Wilhelm Schlegel. 1944.
  • Goethe and Marianne von Willemer. 1945.
  • Franziska Scheler . 1945.
  • Martha and Maria. 1946.
  • Forays. 1947.
  • The Usedom sisters. 1948.
  • Sophie Charlotte and Danckelmann. 1949.
  • You land of love. 1952.
  • The intellectual situation of art in society. 1955.
  • The image of man in modern literature. 1958.
  • Stories. 1965

posthumously:

  • The three prelates. 1974.
  • Proces Zonder Right. 1982.
  • Where in Europe is Berlin. 1987.

literature

  • Konrad Feilchenfeldt : Afterword. In: Bernard von Brentano: Three prelates. Essays . Limes, Wiesbaden 1974. (Important for assessing Brentano's late work)
  • Ulrike Hessler: Bernard von Brentano. A German writer without Germany. Trends in the novel between the Weimar Republic and exile . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1984.
  • Reichs Handbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft - The handbook of personalities in words and pictures . First volume, Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, ISBN 3-598-30664-4 .
  • Wolfgang Löhr: Bernard von Brentano. In: Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon des KV. 7th part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 9). Akadpress, Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-939413-12-7 , p. 29 ff.
  • Bernd Goldmann (Ed.): Bernard von Brentano. Texts and bibliography . v. Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1992, ISBN 3-7758-1214-8 .
  • Gerhard Müller: Schemes of a controversial 'homme de lettres'. Bernd Goldmann's efforts to get Bernard von Brentano ; online at: muellers-lesezelt.de (PDF; 377 kB)

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Lothar Müller : Now everyone thank God. Interior views of the First World War: Bernard von Brentano's great political family novel “Theodor Chindler” is back. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. October 7, 2014, literature supplement, p. 9.
  2. ↑ Sven Hanuschek: Afterword. In: Bernard von Brentano: Theodor Chindler. A German family novel . Schöffling, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-89561-488-0 .
  3. ↑ quoted from: Thomas spokesman: Bernard von Brentano. In: Thomas Mann in Zurich. Wilhelm Fink Publishing House. Munich 1992, ISBN 3-7705-2822-0 , pp. 85-91, here p. 88.
  4. ↑ Thomas speaker: Bernard von Brentano. In: Thomas Mann in Zurich. Wilhelm Fink Publishing House. Munich 1992, pp. 88-89.
  5. ↑ Thomas speaker: Bernard von Brentano. In: Thomas Mann in Zurich. Wilhelm Fink Publishing House. Munich 1992, pp. 86, 88-89.
  6. ^ Marbach acquires Bernard von Brentano's estate. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, May 29, 2018, accessed on August 7, 2018 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brentano, Bernard of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Offenbach am Main
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1964
Place of death Wiesbaden