David Luschnat

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David Luschnat (born September 13, 1895 in Insterburg , East Prussia , † 1984 in Tourrettes-sur-Loup , Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur ) was a German writer.

Life

Luschnat was the son of a pastor and had lived in Berlin since 1908. First he worked as an auxiliary mechanic at Siemens, then he did military service in World War I, in which he was seriously wounded in 1918. The experience at the front in World War I made Luschnat a staunch pacifist who showed an affinity for anarchism and socialism. Between 1918 and 1925 he worked as a casual worker. a. as a transport attendant, freight controller, proofreader, soap dealer and buyer of empty oil drums. As early as 1918 the magazine Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte printed his poem Winter Noon . From 1925 he worked as a freelance poet and published in several German magazines and in the Netherlands, for example in the left-wing literary magazine links richt , 1932/1933 also in De tribune, social-democratisch weekblat . Luschnat was friends with Oskar Schirmer , who also published in Berlin. Luschnat was heard in 1929 (with Hannes Küpper , Marieluise Fleißer, among others ) in a recitation hour on the Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk. From 1931 to 1933 he was a member of the board of the Association of German Writers (SDS), until March 1933 its secretary. With Georg Lukács and Andor Gábor he tried in vain to persuade Carl von Ossietzky to flee the empire .

During the first weeks of the Nazi dictatorship he was interned several times. He was the editor of the illegal monthly newspaper The Freelance Writer . in March 1933 he fled to Paris via Amsterdam. There he was involved in the re-establishment of the SDS, gave lectures in the circle of friends of the Societé d'Etudes gemaniques at the Sorbonne, was an employee of the emergency community and took over the post of secretary until 1934. In Paris he wrote a. a. for the magazine Het fundament , which was co-edited by Wolfgang Cordan . David Luschnat could not stay in Paris for material reasons and went to Switzerland in 1934 with the hope of being able to publish there in his mother tongue. As he was penniless, he was soon expelled. Joseph Roth referred to him in a letter to the Zurich literary critic Carl Selig :

The German writer David Luschnat, not a communist, not even a Jew, a completely harmless man with some strange ideas, has been expelled from Switzerland. [...] David Luschnat did nothing more than Mr. Thomas Mann .

A stay in Spain followed. In 1939/40 Luzhnat was interned in France; after his release he went into hiding and lived illegally in southern France until the end of the war. He received financial support from the American Guild with a $ 50 grant. In 1945 Luschnat returned to Baden-Baden as an employee of the French military authorities.

After 1945, Luschnat was no longer able to gain a foothold in literature in Germany. In 1948 he returned to the south of France after asking for support for his family in a letter to Bertolt Brecht :

“ We live in two small hotel rooms and pay FF ​​260 per day, we are looking for work and an apartment, but we cannot find either. I would be grateful if you could have an aid agency send us a grocery package from Switzerland. "

Luschnat lived with his wife Lotte Hoffmann-Luschnat in Tourrettes-sur-Loup near Nice in the following years. In addition to several volumes of poetry ( The Sonnets of Eternity, Adventures about God, Sonnets from the Path and Meaning ), his small work also includes essays, speeches, stories, a novel ( wind sown, storm reaped ) and a radio play.

Works (selection)

  • Crystal of eternity. Poems by D. Luschnat . Berlin-Schöneberg: self-published n.d. [1926]
  • The sonnets of eternity. Munich, Paul Stangel Verlag der Istist books, 1927.
  • The trip to Insterburg: Novella . P. Reclam, 1927.
  • Writers and war . Baden-Baden, 1947 (= Two Worlds Series )
  • Word inflation. Magic of the word . Lecture given on June 20, 1957 in the Elwert und Maurer bookstore, Berlin-Schöneberg. List of publications 1926–1949. Self-published, Berlin, 1957.
  • A lasting shape . Poems. Dülmen, Circle of Friends, 1963.
  • The sevenfold killing on November 30, 1933 in the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne on the Rhine . Radio play. Tourrettes sur Loup, private print of the author. First edition, in an edition of 5000 copies, 1967.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Archives for the history of the book industry , 55th ed. Booksellers Association, 2001
  2. ↑ Velhagen & Klasingsmonthshefte, Volume 33, Issue 1, 1918
  3. ↑ for example in Der Eigen, Annalen für Literatur, Kunst, Leben (Verlag der Münster-Presse, 1927) and in the two-month publication for philosophy and art Individuality (1927). The Two Parables of God appeared in 1925 in literary reports of the Comenius Society , Volume 34 of the Comenius Society for Spiritual Culture and Popular Education, Verlag Eugen Diederichs , Berlin
  4. ↑ The poems were translated by Jef Last , who was around André Gide .
  5. ↑ Els Andringa: German exile literature in the Dutch-German relationships: . 2014, p. 308 f.
  6. ↑ Marbacher Magazin , issues 95–96, edited by Schiller National Museum and German Literature Archive. , 2001
  7. ↑ documented Sabine Thiel Kaynis: The SDS (Protection Association of German writers) in Berlin and Paris. The story of a liberal association and its secretary David Luschnat . Diss. Phil. University of Cincinnati 1973, when Ms. Dr. At Ann Arbor
  8. ↑ Dieter Schiller Hg .: The Dream of Hitler's Fall: Studies on German Exile Literature 1933-1945 . 2010, p. 86
  9. ↑ He dealt with his stay in the poem Amsterdam, April 1933 . In: The modern German picaresque novel: interpretations , edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister. 1996, p. 256.
  10. ↑ Katja Marmetschke: Enemy observation and understanding: the Germanist Edmond Vermeil (1878-1964) . 2008, p. 391; the essay is online again , slightly abbreviated , p. 503ff., but without mentioning Luschnat.
  11. ↑ Correspondence in exile 1933-1945 . Edited by Franz Schoenberner, Hermann Kesten, Frank Berninger, 2008, p. 271
  12. ^ Alfred Kantorowicz : Politics and literature in exile . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978, p. 165.
  13. ^ Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters , 2012, p. 388
  14. ↑ Kurt Marti : Nature is often a picture postcard: poems, texts, quotes from German-speaking non-Swiss about Switzerland . Lenos press, 1976
  15. ↑ Joachim Hans Seyppel : Farewell to Europe: The story of Heinrich and Nelly Mann presented by P. Aschenback and G. Mühlenhaupt . Aufbau-Verlag, 1975
  16. ↑ Correspondence in exile 1933-1945 , ed. by Franz Schoenberner, Hermann Kesten . 2008. p. 271
  17. ^ Letter to Bertolt Brecht of March 21, 1948. In: Letters to Bertolt Brecht in Exile (1933–1949) , edited by Hermann Haarmann, Christoph Hesse. 2010.
  18. ↑ In 1969 Hoffmann-Luschnat attempted to become a member of the PEN in exile under inglorious circumstances, although she had hardly published. The dispute over Lotte Hoffmann-Luschnat on the board of the PEN was documented by Hans Wagener in his biography Gabriele Tergit : Stolen Years , 2013, p. 272.
  19. ↑ Salomo Friedlaender : Letters from Exile: 1933-1946 . Edited by Hartmut Geerken , Mainzer series; Vol. 54 Mainz: v. Hase and Koehler, 1982 ISBN 3775810307 / 3-7758-1030-7
  20. ↑ Some of his poems were included in anthologies such as Tears and Roses: War and Peace in Poems from Five Millennia (Ed. Von Achim Roscher. Verlag der Nation, 1990). Bernd Jentzsch quotes a Luschnat poem in his book Death is a Master from Germany - Deportation and Annihilation in Poetic Testimonies (Kindler, 1979)
personal data
SURNAME Luzhnat, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Insterburg , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH 1984
Place of death Tourrettes-sur-Loup