Eberhard Wolfgang Möller

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Eberhard Wolfgang Möller (born January 6, 1906 in Berlin ; † January 1, 1972 in Bietigheim ) was a German writer and playwright . He was one of the most famous authors of the Nazi era . He was assistant to the theater department in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda .

Life

Life until 1933

Born the son of a sculptor, Möller studied philosophy , history as well as literature , theater and musicology in Berlin . He wrote his first play at the age of 17. Right from the start, in his literary work, he relied on the new classic Paul Ernst , whom he had already met as a child at home. Möller cleverly combined his ideas of bourgeois “high” art and an intellectually based national community in his pieces with the resources of avant-garde pieces from the 1920s and Bertolt Brecht's didactic pieces. Thematically, he liked to use the "historical clothing" of modern problems.

Möller achieved his first great theatrical success in 1929 with the late Expressionist world war drama Douaumont or The Return of the Soldier Odysseus . In the play he made use of the most modern theatrical means: In the last act, the main actor tore up a cinema screen on which a war film was shown and instead offered his body as a projection surface for the battle scenes. In the Panama scandal (1930), Möller denounced the Weimar Republic by describing a "Jewish system" of corruption and abuse of political power and emphasized the need for national renewal.

Since 1930 member of the SA , Möller joined the NSDAP in 1932 .

Career in National Socialism

Program booklet "Frankenburger Würfelspiel" (1936)

As much as Möller raved about the “idealistic spirit” in his writings, he was just as pragmatic and opportunistic in planning his career. According to the literary scholar Stefan Busch, Möller's most striking character traits were vanity and ambition: "If the political majority situation had developed differently, he would have been available to a left-wing government that would have honored his services."

Möller became one of the most important young National Socialist authors and worked as a cultural functionary. In 1933 he became chief dramaturge at the Königsberg Theater, from 1934 theater advisor in the Propaganda Ministry , in 1935 "Reichskultursenator" and member of the " Reich Youth Leadership of the HJ ". Also in 1935 he received from Joseph Goebbels , who praised him as a “true language genius”, the “ National Book Prize ” he donated , and in 1938 the “State Prize for Literature” .

With Rothschild Siegt bei Waterloo , Möller wrote an anti-Jewish “comedy” in 1934, which cleverly refrained from any open anti-Semitic propaganda and was his greatest stage success. On behalf of Goebbels he wrote the play Frankenburger Würfelspiel, which premiered in the accompanying program of the Olympic Games and was based on the eponymous event from the Upper Austrian Peasants' War . The play was performed in the newly built Dietrich Eckart stage on the Olympic site and was the highlight and “model piece” of the short-lived NS- Thingspiel movement. Goebbels also used him for two anti-Semitic feature films: his Rothschild play was one of the models for Erich Waschneck's film The Rothschilds (1940). Möller was also co-author of the screenplay for Veit Harlan's inflammatory film Jud Süss (1940). In an interview in September 1939 Möller said that the film should show "that the Jew is a completely different person than we are, and that he lacks the moral control we are born with over his actions at all."

Career kink

In 1938 Möller's drama “Der Untergang Karthagos” was removed from the program at the instigation of the NSDAP chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg because it was perceived as an insult by some party members. At Christmas 1938, Möller wrote the book Der Fuehrer on behalf of Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach , in which he compared Adolf Hitler with Martin Luther and attributed godlike abilities to him. The book, of which half a million copies had already been delivered, met with resistance within the NSDAP because of its "early Christian" tone and "kitsch of the great struggle" and was withdrawn from distribution. Möller was a plaything in the cultural and political battle between Rosenberg and Goebbels / Schirach.

Möller escaped the pressure by volunteering as a war correspondent for the SS Panzer Division "Wiking" in the winter of 1939/40 and from then on styling himself as an apolitical "pure artist" who, as an esthete, stood above the everyday life of the Nazi state . Although the internal party attacks against him did not subside, he was able to continue publishing unhindered in the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps and in the Hitler Youth magazine "Wille und Macht" . There, in June 1941, his poem "Der Tote" appeared , in which he described a fallen soldier:

“I have earth above my lips.
There is a big stone in my mouth.
The gentle mole goes inside my ribs
and is my friend. I am no longer alone. "

This time they gave him "aestheticising necrophilia" and "mockery of the fallen soldiers" before. His book The Mask of War (1941) was criticized as tasteless. Moeller, now SS officer, was "front probation" in the Waffen-SS . His But books continued to be distributed unhindered.

post war period

After the end of the war, Möller was automatically interned as a member of a “criminal organization” . He knew how to wriggle out of all charges, so that the denazification proceedings against him ended with the classification in the group 5 of the "exonerated". Dismissed in 1948, Möller continued his literary activity, he did not consider it necessary to deal with his work after 1933. The treatment he felt as a rejection by parts of the Nazi cultural apparatus now offered him the opportunity to define his role in the Nazi state as pure artistry and thus - at least for himself - to create the psychological basis for an artistic existence in the post-war period . Möller had not changed ideologically: For him, “democracy” remained “the breeding ground for every kind of mendacity, indecency and formlessness. True culture is aristocratic. ”From 1955 he also took part again in the “ Lippoldsberger Dichtertreffen ” founded in 1934 by Hans Grimm .

Since his plays could no longer be performed after 1945, Möller initially went public with three historical novels, which at first glance were harmless: The Women of Ragusa (1952), in which the ideal image of a noble republic was drafted, The Beloved of Mr. Beaujou (1954 ) as well as a revised new edition of the book Das Schloß in Ungarn (1953), published in 1935 , from which the worst anti-Semitic attacks of the first edition had been removed. In 1963 the novel Chicago was published , in which the description of the Jewish speculative family of Leiter is mixed with criticism of capitalism using the example of the stock exchange and slaughterhouses. The informality of the overly long and, from countless sources, more poorly than properly compiled work shows the intellectual helplessness in which Möller found himself in the early 1960s. For himself, however, this book was his most important work in recent years. He interpreted the lack of public response as evidence of a “cultural-political conspiracy ”.

Thereupon Möller seems to have given up any kind of "adaptation" to the cultural scene in the Federal Republic. From the mid-1960s onwards, his literary texts became openly neo-Nazi , indulged in senseless demonstrations of educational splinters and, according to Stefan Busch , played with “fictional identity constructions with clear traits of paranoia ”. The novel Doppelkopf , published by Möller in 1966 under the pseudonym Anatol Textor , is about twin sisters in the Netherlands at the time of the German occupation. In a peculiar reevaluation of reality, the Germans are the persecuted in some scenes, a Dutch police special unit spreading terror appears in leather coats reminiscent of the Gestapo and mutates Möller's hero and alter ego into a tragically failed resistance fighter. In 1971, in the last year of Möller's life, a book was published about his time as an SS officer (Russian diary) and a collection of supposedly satirical poems, the Frozzel Breviary , in which Möller's artistic decline is particularly clear:

“I pull in the same step and step
with matzah and moth;
I devil , dutschkle , beatle with
and puke myself. "

His death on New Year's Eve 1972 was only mentioned in right-wing extremist publications.

Eberhard Wolfgang Möller is the father of the former MDR radio director Johann Michael Möller.

Works (selection)

  • Farmers. A Transylvanian Play in 3 Acts (1925)
  • Californian tragedy in 10 pictures (1929)
  • Douaumont or The Return of the Soldier Odysseus. Seven scenes (1929)
  • Panama scandal. Play in eight scenes (1930)
  • Rothschild wins at Waterloo . A play, theater publ. Albert Langen / Georg Müller, Berlin 1934
  • The Infernal Journey (1934)
  • The first harvest. Poems (1934)
  • Calling the time. Cantatas and Choirs (1935)
  • People and King or The Vanished and Found Majesty (1935)
  • The castle in Hungary . Zeitgeschichte Verlag, Berlin 1935, revised new edition 1953 by Pilgram Verlag Salzburg
  • The letters of the fallen. A festive lecture game from the war (1935)
  • The Frankenburger dice game (1936)
  • The fall of the minister. Drama (1937)
  • The admiral. Three novellas , Langen / Müller, Munich 1937
  • The fall of Carthage. A drama in three acts (1938)
  • Speech in Lauchstädt on the occasion of the first Gau culture week of the Gau Halle-Merseburg at the rally of the Reichstheaterkammer, held in the Goethetheater in Lauchstädt on March 2, 1938. Landeshauptmann d. Prov. Saxony, 1938
  • The leader. The Christmas book of German youth . Ed. Baldur von Schirach , Eher-Verlag , Munich 1938
  • The cavalcade. Fateful minutes in German history . Verl. Die Heimbücherei, Berlin 1939
  • The Mask of War (1941)
  • The victim. Game in three acts (1941)
  • The fraternal year. Poems (1941)
  • The women of Ragusa (1952)
  • The mistress of Mr. Beaujou . Roman, Pilgram Verlag, Salzburg 1954
  • Chicago or The Man Who Stepped on the Bread . Holsten Verlag, 1963
  • Double head. Henriette Jakobs' notes . Roman, under the pseudonym Anatol Textor , Hohenstaufen-Verlag, Bodman 1966
  • The sons of Mars. Twelve short stories . Munin-Verlag , Osnabrück 1970
  • Russian diary. Records from the southern section of the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1943 . Munin, Osnabrück 1971
  • Frozzel Breviary: Satires. Arndt Verlag , Vaterstetten 1971
  • The enemy sisters. Henriette Jakobs' notes . Novel. New edition of Doppelkopf . Publishing company Berg- Hohenstaufen-Verlag, Berg / Starnberger See; Bodman, 1983

literature

Memberships (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joseph Wulf: Literature and Poetry in the Third Reich , p. 238.
  2. ↑ Busch, p. 148.
  3. ^ Goebbels, diary entry from April 15, 1936.
  4. ↑ See Jörg Fligge: "Schöne Lübeck Theaterwelt". The city theater during the Nazi dictatorship. Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 2018. ISBN 978-3-7950-5244-7 . Pp. 281–283, 572. The work presented on the theater stage in Lübeck in 1938, which employed 1,200 extras from the Reich Labor Service at the open-air performance in Berlin, was also successful on the cramped stage space and was a work of art of the "new mindset", fulfilled "of the highest national pathos "experienced.
  5. ↑ Quotation from Busch, p. 157.
  6. ↑ Quotation from Sakowicz / Mentzer, p. 314
  7. ↑ Several reports on the book in: Möller: Alfred Rosenberg. The Christmas book of the German youth under the title "Der Führer" ( PDF ).
  8. ↑ All quotations from Busch, p. 166.
  9. ^ Marc-Wilhelm Kohfink: Eberhard Wolfgang Möller - the "national official poet". In: Rolf Düsterberg (ed.): Poet for the "Third Reich". Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 978-3-89528-719-0 , p. 187.
  10. ^ Möller: Diary , p. 120.
  11. ↑ Busch, p. 144.
  12. ↑ Möller: Frozzel Breviary , p 58
personal data
SURNAME Möller, Eberhard Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Textor, Anatol
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1972
Place of death Bietigheim