Edwin Erich Dwinger

Edwin Erich Dwinger

Edwin Erich Dwinger (born April 23, 1898 in Kiel , † December 17, 1981 in Gmund am Tegernsee ) was a German writer . He published in the Weimar Republic , in the time of National Socialism and in the Federal Republic of Germany . His works have been translated into over twelve languages ​​and have a total circulation of two million copies. He is considered the "prototype of a nationalist and fascist writer".

Life

youth

Dwinger's father Johann Heinrich August Dwinger was an officer in the Imperial Navy . Dwinger's mother came from a Russian family who immigrated to Germany in 1868. She taught her son the Russian language and died shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914. Dwinger attended the Oberrealschule (later Hebbelschule ) in Kiel.

First World War

When the war broke out, Dwinger registered as a 16-year-old volunteer for the Dragoon Regiment "King Carl I of Romania" (1st Hannoversches) No. 9 . He received the Iron Cross 2nd class . In the summer of 1915 he was wounded on the Eastern Front in Courland and was taken prisoner by Russia . He experienced the October Revolution in the Daurija officers' camp in the Transbaikal region and fled the camp. In 1919 he joined the White Army , fought on their side against the Red Army and was captured again. During his imprisonment, Dwinger worked on the theater stages of German, Austrian and Turkish prisoners of war. In 1920, after being transported to Irkutsk, he managed to escape to Germany via Omsk, Ufa, Smolensk and Lithuania.

Interwar period

Because of the health damage he had suffered, Dwinger went to a sanatorium in West Allgäu . In 1921 he bought a small farm in Tanneck (Allgäu). He ran agriculture , horse breeding and also gave riding lessons. In 1926 he published his second novel with Korsakoff . In 1929 his book The Army Behind Barbed Wire was published , which achieved high editions and made him famous overnight. It describes in drastic form the experiences of his captivity as a prisoner of war. The success enabled him to travel extensively. In Greece he met his future wife in 1929.

Between White and Red was published in 1930 , the continuation of the first book that describes the time of the Russian Civil War from Dwinger's own experience in Siberia. The work was once again well received across the various political camps and translated into many languages, including Russian. Dwinger was invited to the Soviet Union to see the construction of the country. In 1931 he married and bought a larger estate near Seeg in the Allgäu.

In 1932 the third volume of his trilogy, Wir Ruf Deutschland , appeared, describing the return from Russian captivity. This expresses the rejection of the Weimar Republic , which is viewed as corrupt and decadent, by many former soldiers from the front.

time of the nationalsocialism

Although in 1933 Dwinger's pacifist drama Die Gefangen was banned from performance by the Gestapo due to defeatism , he soon had great success again with novels conforming to the regime, in particular with the novel The Last Riders about the fictional Freikorps Mansfeld in the Baltic States . In contrast to his earlier works, Dwinger no longer fell back on what he had experienced himself, but worked on the material in accordance with the clichés of the time, including hostility towards Jews and, above all, strong anti-communism . In 1935 he received the Dietrich Eckart Prize and was appointed Reich Culture Senator in the Reich Chamber of Culture .

He belonged to the National Socialist group of poets from Eutin, which was founded in 1936 by the Eutin government president and SA group leader Johann Heinrich Böhmcker .

On November 9, 1936, at the suggestion of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , Dwinger was appointed SS-Untersturmführer in the staff of the 15th SS-Reiterstandarte (SS No. 277.082), on February 9, 1938 he was promoted to Obersturmführer. From May 1, 1937, Dwinger was a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 5,293,309).

In autumn 1936 he traveled to Spain as a war correspondent , but had to return soon due to illness and the aftermath of his time in camp. The report Spanish Silhouettes describes the Spanish Civil War from a Francoist perspective. In 1937 he also published an illustrated book in the style of the blood and soil ideology about the life of his family on the Hedwigshof near Seeg .

Second World War

With the outbreak of the Second World War , Dwinger became a special leader and was able to join any units and staffs as war correspondents.

Joseph Goebbels ordered an anti-Polish propaganda pamphlet to justify German policy in Poland. The result, the novel Death in Poland about the Bydgoszcz Bloody Sunday of September 3, 1939, turned out to be Goebbels' satisfaction. In 1940 Panzerführer appeared , a report on the advance to the Channel coast in the French campaign , which Dwinger probably participated in on General Heinz Guderian's staff .

At the end of 1941, Dwinger was sent to the Eastern Front with special SS powers . At the time, Himmler hoped that Dwinger would one day succeed in writing a kind of national epic about the campaign and the settlement in the east . In 1942, Reunion with Soviet Russia appeared through Dwinger's trip.

From 1942 and increasingly after the Battle of Stalingrad , Dwinger publicly criticized Ostpolitik. In the spring of 1943 he published the essay Der Russische Mensch in Wille und Macht , the organ of the Hitler Youth . He denied a racial inferiority of the Russians, who, only freed from Bolshevism , would return to the European family of peoples. Germany's victory is only possible through good treatment of the population in the occupied territories. Dwinger was committed to the establishment of Russian combat units under General Vlasov to disempower the Bolsheviks. Proponents of such ideas included not only high-ranking military officials but also members of the later resistance such as Henning von Tresckow or Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg .

Through his activities and constant memoranda , Dwinger made himself unpopular with the party leadership and also lost Himmler's favor. From autumn 1943, Dwinger was banned from writing, placed under house arrest and monitored by the SD . In his infamous Poznan speech , Himmler mentioned "the Baltic and Eastern dreamers, some of whom write very good books and also had Russian mothers" in connection with Vlasov.

In 1944 and 1945 Dwinger was repeatedly abroad on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Propaganda .

Federal Republic of Germany

After the end of the war, Dwinger was imprisoned in Ludwigsburg for six months. During his denazification process , which did not take place until the beginning of the Cold War in 1948 , he was only classified as a fellow traveler and fined 500 marks. The defense even tried to link him to the resistance.

Living on the Hedwigshof near Seeg, he wrote nationalist and anti-communist books that still found an audience. When the levees break (1950) deals with the invasion of the Red Army in East Prussia . The twelve conversations (1966) and General Vlasov (1951) have autobiographical features. In the utopian war novel It Happened in 1965 from 1950 a nuclear world war is described.

Edwin Erich Dwinger died in 1981 in Gmund am Tegernsee .

Private

In 1931 he married Waltraud Wien, the daughter of the physicist Wilhelm Wien . Together they had two sons and a daughter. The marriage was divorced in 1945. His second wife, Ellen, was previously married to the author and journalist Giselher Wirsing .

Others

• Many of Dwinger's writings were censored in the Soviet zone of occupation and in the GDR by placing them on the list of literature to be sorted out.
• The director Tobias Ginsburg researched together with Dwinger's grandson Raphael Dwinger for a year and a half about the life and work of the writer and worked on it in the documentary theater piece Pollution of the Nest . The play premiered in 2011 in the Reaktorhalle Munich and the Schauburg .
• The Federal Intelligence Service handed over files on Dwinger to the Federal Archives in Koblenz , which have been digitally accessible since 2017, including a text What must happen at the moment to overthrow Stalin's system?

Works (selection)

Between white and red, 1930

• The great grave. Siberian novel. 1920
• Korsakoff. The story of a homeless person. 1926
• The last victim. Roman, 1928
• The army behind barbed wire. The Siberian Diary. 1929
• Between white and red. The Russian tragedy 1919–1920. 1930; NA: Stocker, Graz / Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7020-0929-9 .
• The twelve robbers. Roman, 1931
• We call Germany. Homecoming and Legacy. 1921-1924. 1932
• The prisoners. Drama, 1933
• The last dream. A German tragedy. 1934
• Where is Germany? Drama, 1934
• The last riders. 1935
• And God is silent. 1936
• The nameless army. Experiences in Russian Captivity, 1936 (German Series Volume 35)
• Spanish silhouettes. Diary of a trip to the front. 1937
• An ancestral farm in the Allgäu. Verlag F. Bruckmann AG, Munich, 1937
• Halfway there. Roman, 1939
• Death in Poland. The Volksdeutsche Passion. 1940
• Panzerführer. Diary sheets from the French campaign. 1941
• Reunion with Soviet Russia. Diary from the Eastern campaign. 1942
• Poet under arms. A war almanac of German poetry. Edited by Advertising u. Advisory office for German literature at the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (portrait photographs with short bibliographies, short biographies and samples of the most famous poets of the time: Dwinger and others), 1941
• When the dams break ... downfall of East Prussia. 1950
• General Vlasov. A tragedy of our time. 1951
• They were looking for freedom ... the fate of a riding people. 1952
• Hanka. Novel of a hunter. 1953
• The happiness of the earth. Equestrian training course for horse lovers. 1957
• It happened in 1965. 1957
• The twelve conversations, 1933–1945. 1966

literature

• Jay W. Baird: Hitler's war poets: literature and politics in the Third Reich. 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-14563-3 , books.google.de
• Axel W. Claesges: Edwin Erich Dwinger. A life in diaries. Univ. Diss., Nashville TN 1968.
• Jörg Thunecke (Ed.): Sorrow of words. Panorama of the literary national socialism. Bouvier, Bonn 1987, ISBN 3-416-01930-X . (= Treatises on art, music and literary studies; 367).
• Horst Friedrich List : Edwin Erich Dwinger, the chronicler of our time. Diekreiter, Freiburg im Breisgau a. a. 1952.
• Armin Mohler , Karlheinz Weißmann : The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918–1932. A manual. 6., completely revised u. exp. Edition. Ares-Verlag , Graz 2005, ISBN 3-902475-02-1 .
• Helmut Müssener: Cups and Dwingers. In: Pumpkin Seed. Munich 1982, 2, pp. 125-137.
• Helmut Müssener: Edwin Erich Dwinger's novel "Between White and Red" - The Russian tragedy as a German tragedy. In: Wulf Koepke, Michael Winkler: German-language exile literature. Studies on their determination in the context of the period 1930–1960. Bonn 1984, pp. 125-143.
• Georg Wurzer: Edwin Erich Dwinger's image of Russia. In: Karl Eimermacher, Astrid Volpert: Stormy departures and disappointed hopes. Russians and Germans in the interwar period. Munich 2006, pp. 715-747.
• Susanne Feigl u. a. (Ed.): Our fathers: reflections of daughters and sons. 1988, ISBN 3-7046-0109-0
• Jürgen Hillesheim , Elisabeth Michael: Lexicon of National Socialist Poets. Biographies - Analyzes - Bibliographies. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-511-2 ; books.google.de
• Gregor Thum: Dreamland East: German images of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. 2006, ISBN 3-525-36295-1 ; books.google.de
• Dwinger - The unsolved case of Vlasov . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 1951 ( online ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Edwin Erich Dwinger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Edwin Erich Dwinger  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about Edwin Erich Dwinger in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Works by and about Edwin Erich Dwinger at Open Library
• Gerd Simon: " Chronology Dwinger, Edwin Erich (PDF; 183 kB)"
• Short biography of Edwin Erich Dwinger
• Edwin Erich Dwinger. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
• Theodor Frey: Biography of Dwinger.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thum: Dreamland East. P. 66.
2. ↑ Kurt Böttcher u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon of German-speaking writers. 20th century. Olms, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 1993, ISBN 3-487-09611-0 , p. 156.
3. ↑ Dragoon Regiment No. 9, 1st Squadron; Prussian list of losses No. 315 of August 31, 1915, p. 8472 / German list of losses: missing; No. 611 of August 19, 1916, p. 14217: in captivity.
4. ↑ Dwinger: How I experienced the revolution. In: Journal of Eastern Europe. 17 (1967).
5. ↑ ^{a b} Baird: Hitler's was poets. P. 160.
6. ↑ Lawrence D. Stokes: The Eutin poet circle and the National Socialism 1936-1945: A documentation. Wachholtz, Neumünster 2001, ISBN 3-529-02211-X . (Sources and research on the history of Schleswig-Holstein; Vol. 111.)
7. ↑ Gerd Simon , 2005, pp. 6, 7, 8, 15.
8. ↑ Gerd Simon, 2005, p. 15.
9. ↑ Elke Fröhlich: Joseph Goebbels' diaries . Part I, Vol. 4. Saur, Munich (inter alia) 1987, April 25, 1940, pp. 74 .
10. ↑ Baird: Hitler's was poets. P. 157.
11. ↑ Baird: Hitler's was poets. P. 158.
12. ↑ polunbi.de
13. ↑ polunbi.de
14. ↑ polunbi.de
15. ↑ schauburg.net ( Memento of the original from January 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
16. ↑ Soiling of the nest . ( Memento of the original from June 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
17. ↑ Typescript, in Chapter 5.1: Evaluation: War, technical and general history (see heise.de ).