Berthold Vallentin

Berthold Vallentin (right) with Friedrich Wolters, Bingen, 1910 (photo by Jacob Hilsdorf )

Berthold Heinrich Otto Vallentin (born February 13, 1877 in Berlin ; † March 13, 1933 there ) was a German lawyer, poet and historian. He was a member of the George Circle .

Life

Berthold Vallentin was born into a middle-class Jewish family; his father was the merchant Eugen Vallentin, his mother Honora Tittinger. He passed his Abitur in 1895 at the Königlich-Städtisches Gymnasium Berlin . He then studied law in Munich , Würzburg , Kiel and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin . After his first state examination in 1899, he became a trainee lawyer at the Berlin Supreme Court . In 1900 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the addition . After a time as a judge in Spremberg , Brandenburg , he finally became a freelance lawyer in Berlin.

Around 1900 - even after completing his doctorate - Vallentin studied history with Friedrich Wolters and other friends under the universal historian Kurt Breysig . A circle of friends formed around Breysig, Vallentin and Wolters in Niederschönhausen near Berlin , who held readings together, celebrated cultic festivals and discussed art and spirit. The group that moved to Lichterfelde in 1907 included Friedrich and Wilhelm Andreae , Rudolf von Heckel, Kurt Hildebrandt , and later also Carl Petersen , the sculptor Ludwig Thormaehlen and the architect Paul Thiersch . Even Erika Schwartzkopff , the girlfriend and later wife of Friedrich Wolters and Fanny Rabinowicz called Diana, a talented actress who Vallentin himself married soon had an active part in the meetings of the group.

Their mentor Breysig also introduced the young men to the work of Stefan George , whose poems Breysig admired and whom he also knew personally. Vallentin first met George on December 12, 1902, at the Breysig house. He was immediately impressed by George's charisma and sought connection; The contact only became more intense a few years later. Vallentin kept a diary of his conversations with the poet, which began on November 29, 1902 shortly before the first meeting and ended on September 14, 1931. Because of their immediacy, the posthumously published records are an important source of the life and work of George and the circle. Robert Boehringer describes in his George biography "how the encounter, also on the part of George, turned into a warm friendship."

In Stefan George's great Ode Secret Germany , Vallentin is described in circumscribed form as the seventh in the poem. "Vallentin's all-exploring instinct, as well as Wolfskehl's ecstatic feeling, is celebrated as belonging to the myth of the time," said Ernst Morwitz in his commentary on Stefan Georges' work.

Berthold Vallentin died in Berlin in 1933 at the age of 56 and was buried in the Dahlem forest cemetery. The grave has not been preserved.

Fonts

• The surrender of common law. The addition of the civil code. A contribution to the comparison of the old and new law . Dissertation, 1900.
• Napoleon . Georg Bondi Verlag, Berlin 1923 (= works of science from the circle of papers for art ).
• Winckelmann . Georg Bondi Verlag, Berlin 1931 (= works of science from the circle of papers for art ).
• Conversations with Stefan George, 1902–1931 . Castrum Peregrini Press, Amsterdam 1967.

Web links

• The poem 'Secret Germany', in which Berthold Vallentin is named 'in circumscribed form as the seventh' (so Ernst Morwitz - see above)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Data from Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Vallentin, Berthold . In: Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller (Ed.): Man for man. Biographical Lexicon. On the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area . Volume 2, Lit-Verlag, Münster 2010, pp. 1195f. ( Online access from Google Books; with some inaccuracies).
2. ↑ Cf. Berthold Vallentin: Conversations with Stefan George, 1902–1931 . Amsterdam 1967, p. 16.
3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 590.