Egmont Colerus

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Egmont Colerus von Geldern (born May 12, 1888 in Linz , † April 8, 1939 in Vienna ) was an Austrian writer .

Life

Birthplace of Egmont Colerus in Linz, Mozartstr. 21st
Coat of arms of the Colerus von Geldern family, awarded in 1878.

Egmont Colerus von Geldern came from an old Dutch family of officers who immigrated to Austria from Holland around 1750. His grandfather Thaddeus Colerus achieved the Austrian nobility on November 25, 1878 with the addition of "von Geldern" to his name. Emil Colerus von Geldern , Egmont's father, was a career officer according to family tradition , and according to the father's garrison , Egmont spent elementary school in Pressburg and high school in Krems an der Donau .

The childhood in Preßburg later flowed into his novel Matthias Werner , the Krems high school time into the novel White Magi . In 1906 he passed the high school diploma with distinction at the Piarist High School in Krems an der Donau . In Vienna he obtained his doctorate on May 19, 1911. jur. and began his military service there in 1912, from which he was released early because of a cardiac neurosis. In May 1912 he started as a legal intern. During this time he met Blanca Nagy († 1983), who was born in Lviv on October 23, 1895 , the daughter of an officer family who were friends with his parents and to whom he became engaged in 1914. In the same year Colerus was accepted into the judicial preparatory service, but did not take the judge's examination because he was called up for the Landsturm service in 1915 and served at a divisional court until the end of the First World War. On November 24, 1917, Blanca Nagy and Egmont Colerus married.

During the First World War Colerus fell ill with tropical dysentery , which was not recognized until 1919, when he had already lost more than 30 kg. During this time Colerus lived from private lessons he gave law students. In 1920 Colerus published his first two books - Antarctica , which he had written as early as 1914, and Sodom , which he had written from 1917 to 1919. When Colerus was halfway able to work again after two years, he joined the Austrian Federal Statistical Office, today's Statistics Austria, full-time as a civil servant . During this time he wrote other historical novels , non-fiction books and also dramas. He wrote most of his books during the night, usually between ten and midnight. In 1930 his daughter Monica was born; this event is reflected in his novel Matthias Werner in the last chapter The Prayer at the Cradle , which also contains a vision of the Second World War . A course in advanced and statistical mathematics led by Walther Neugebauer , which he attended at the Federal Statistical Office, awakened a love of mathematics in him. In order to combat “the disgust for the purest, I would almost like to say, holiest of all sciences”, he wrote his popular scientific mathematical non-fiction books “From the multiplication table to the integral ” , “From the point to the fourth dimension ” and “From Pythagoras to Hilbert ” , which in several languages ​​have been translated and are still very readable for laypeople interested in mathematics.

In 1938 he retired as senior councilor of the Federal Statistical Office. In the same year Colerus published in the "Confession Book of Austrian Poets" (published by the Association of German Writers in Austria ) to welcome the "Anschluss" of Austria to the German Empire . In May 1938, he applied for membership in the NSDAP , which was rejected despite the support of the local group leadership and the Association of German Writers. In the application Colerus claimed to have written an article in the Völkischer Beobachter shortly before and an article in the Berliner Illustrierte in 1936 . In the ultimately successful application for membership of Colerus in the Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK) in December of the same year, the country manager of the RSK wrote that Colerus had “sided with the National Socialist long before the upheaval” and that he was a member of the press department of the Vienna branch in the NSDAP and belonged to the National Socialist Motor Corps and the National Socialist Legal Guardians Association.

On Holy Saturday , April 8, 1939, Egmont Colerus died unexpectedly of a heart attack . A few days before his death, the rumor surfaced that a complaint was to be filed against him because of his Jew-friendly book The Third Way . In 1944 his book “Matthias Werner or Die Zeitkrankheit” was put on the “ List of harmful and undesirable literature ”. Egmont Colerus is buried at the Döblinger Friedhof in Vienna, his grave is dedicated in honor .

In 1960, Colerusgasse in Vienna- Donaustadt (22nd district) was named after him.

Anecdotes

An anecdote about Egmont Colerus can be found in the last chapter of Friedrich Torberg's Die Tante Jolesch : At a writer 's reception in the house of the publisher Paul Zsolnay , the question arose how many Jews there actually were. After some discussion, an agreement was reached on 12 million. Egmont Colerus shook his head and commented: "That is out of the question. I know more alone!"

Another anecdote has been handed down in "Stories about the Viennese Künstlerhaus" by Mirko Jelusich . The painter Hans Strohofer visited Colerus on the occasion of the birth of his daughter Monika and stated: "Now it's Monika. When she's got hair, it's called Hair-Monika and if she gets even more hair, it's called a lot- Hair Monika. "

Literary meaning

Colerus dealt in his novels from a deeply humanistic worldview in an impressionistic, sometimes expressionistic way, a variety of problems from the interwar period, partly in the form of time novels, partly in historical clothing. He was thus one of the most successful German writers in the interwar period (total print run over 670,000 copies); some of his works were translated into up to ten languages.

In “Antarktis” (1920), his first successful novel, the realm of the spirit triumphs over a purely material “Americanism”; in “Sodom” (also 1920) Colerus denounces hedonism , which leads to ruin. “The Third Way” (1921) propagates a return to naturalness and humanity. "White Magi" (1922) postulates a new (and yet quite conventional) sexual ethic. Here, however, Colerus is often difficult to understand for today's reader, it actually looks downright eccentric, as does “Behemoth wanders again. Roman einer Spätzeit “ (1924) shows all too clearly typical weaknesses of the time and is probably able to provide psychologically interesting information about the turmoil of the 1920s, but is in part hardly understandable in its expressionistic exaggeration.

The novels "Die neue Rasse" (1928) and "Kaufherr und Krämer" (1929), which belong together in terms of their subject matter and the characters who appear, depict a newly emerging gender that is able to break free from the traditions of the prewar period, albeit often in dramatic battles and tragic failure. Finally, in “Matthias Werner or Die Zeitkrankheit” (1932) Colerus takes up the problem of a relativism that destroys all values ​​and illuminates the trends of the 1920s - militarism, pacifism, authority, psychoanalysis, etc. - quite critically.

However, Colerus had his greatest successes with the novel-like design of cultural paintings of bygone times, which he often built around the biography of important personalities. The novel “Pythagoras” (1924) takes readers to ancient Greece, Colerus' last work, “Archimedes in Alexandria” (1939), focuses on the struggle of a Greek spiritual hero and offers a fascinating insight into the Hellenistic culture of the Egyptian Ptolemaic period . The novella “Tiberius auf Capri” (1927), which appeared in between, deals with the problem of unlimited arbitrary rule and seems like a premonition of the dawning Third Reich .

Egmont Colerus hit the jackpot with his Marco Polo novel “Zwei Welten” (1926) - stylistically one of his most mature works. Readers experience Marco Polo's youth in Venice, his journey to the Far East and his return as an apparent triumphant and successful merchant, but behind whose visible success hides his personal defeat. At the end of his novel, Colerus has Dante Alighieri ascribe to Marco Polo, who is brooding in doubts, "One world becomes action, the other becomes repentance ." In the novel “Leibniz” (1934), this great modern thinker and mathematician is conjured up as a symbol for the possibility of overcoming German and European disunity. The novella “Mystery of Casanova” (1936), which describes Giacomo Casanova's arrest and escape from the lead chambers of Venice, is lighter .

Colerus achieved the greatest international successes with his popular scientific non-fiction books “From multiplication tables to integral” (1934), “From the point to the fourth dimension” (1935) and “From Pythagoras to Hilbert” (1937). In addition, Colerus also wrote three dramas, of which only two - "Politics" (1927) and "Zweikampf" (1935) - were performed, but could only stay briefly on the repertoire.

Works

Novels and short stories
  • 1920 Antarctica
  • 1920 Sodom
  • 1921 The third way
  • 1922 White Magician
  • 1924 Behemoth wanders again. Novel of a late period
  • 1924 Pythagoras
  • 1926 Two worlds. A Marco Polo novel
  • 1927 Tiberius on Capri
  • 1928 The new breed
  • 1929 merchant and shopkeeper
  • 1932 Matthias Werner or Die Zeitkrankheit
  • 1934 Leibniz
  • 1936 Secret about Casanova
  • 1939 Archimedes in Alexandria
Dramas
  • 1927 Politics ( premiered in 1928 at the Burgtheater in Vienna )
  • 1930 Tiberius and Sejan
  • 1935 duel (premiered November 2, 1935 at the Bremer Schauspielhaus)

Non-fiction books:

  • 1934 From multiplication tables to integral
  • 1935 From point to fourth dimension
  • 1937 From Pythagoras to Hilbert

Secondary literature

Monographs
  • Blanca Colerus: Egmont Colerus. Writer, humanist, mathematician. 1888-1939 . Edited and supplemented by Monica Skidelsky-Colerus, Trauner Verlag, Linz 2005, ISBN 978-3-85487-891-9 .
Articles etc.
  • Colerus of Geldern Egmont. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 150.
  • The intellectual elite of Austria. A handbook of leaders in culture and business . Vienna 1936, p. 114 f.
  • Eduard Castle (ed.): German-Austrian literary history. A handbook on the history of German poetry in Austria-Hungary . Vienna 1937, pp. 2132, 2172, 2175, 2177 f., 2255 f.
  • Josef Nadler: literary history of Austria . 2nd Edition. Salzburg 1951, p. 488 f.
  • Adalbert Schmidt: poetry and poet Austria in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vol. 1 , Salzburg-Stuttgart 1964, p. 371 f.
  • Kürschner's German Literature Calendar. Nekrolog 1936-1970. Berlin-New York 1973, p. 100.
  • Hilde game (ed.): The contemporary literature of Austria . Zurich-Munich 1976, p. 39 f.

Web links

Commons : Egmont Colerus  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Egmont Colerus  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Association of German Writers Austria (ed.), Confessional Book of Austrian Poets, Krystall Verlag, Vienna 1938
  2. ↑ a b Vienna's street names since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 196ff, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
personal data
SURNAME Colerus, Egmont
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Colerus von Geldern, Egmont
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Linz , Austria
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1939
Place of death Vienna , Austria