Egon Schwarz

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Egon Schwarz (born August 8, 1922 in Vienna ; † February 11, 2017 in St. Louis ) was an American literary scholar of Austrian origin. He taught as a professor of modern German literary history at Harvard University in Cambridge near Boston and Washington University in St. Louis.

Life

Egon Schwarz was born in Vienna in 1922 as the only child of an Eastern Jewish businessman and his wife. He attended elementary school in Siegelgasse and then the Franz-Josef-Realgymnasium. In 1938, as a Jew, he and his parents were able to flee from Vienna via Pressburg , Prague , Paris , La Rochelle and Arica to La Paz . In order to be able to contribute to his survival, he worked from 1939 on as an unskilled casual and migrant worker in various industries in Bolivia (there, among others, in the mines of Potosí) and Chile . In 1945, on the day of his 23rd birthday, he entered Ecuador . In the port city of Guayaquil he received the first news about the fate of his relatives who had stayed behind in Europe. Of the twenty-four family members, only one of his mother's brothers survived the Nazi atrocities.

Schwarz traveled on to Quito , where he found a job as an interpreter and translator for the American military mission. He stayed in the city for two years, and when asked what he was doing here during that time, he mentions, among other things: “I worked as an actor in an emigrant theater, where we have everything from Curt Götz to Schiller Performed what is funny or stage-effective in German drama. ”The only émigré theater of this time in Quito were the Kammerspiele founded and directed by Karl Löwenberg . Unfortunately, Schwarz does not mention the roles he played there.

After another stay in Guayaquil and a stay in the USA due to illness, which also served to have school reports and other documents certified by the Austrian consulate in New York, he returned to his parents in Cuenca , Ecuador . Here he put the Abitur , and then studied at the local university Jura . In addition to medicine and engineering, it was the only field of study that existed there and that suited him with his talent for languages.

In 1949 Egon Schwarz was able to move to the USA, which was only possible because Professor Bernhard Blume was unselfishly able to find him a position as a German teacher at the private Christian Otterbein College in Westerville . He studied German and Romance languages at the neighboring Ohio State University in Columbus and later at the University of Washington in Seattle . In Seattle he wrote his doctoral thesis on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg . An important concern for him was the memory of and research into exile literature .

Schwarz held professorships at Harvard University in Cambridge near Boston and Washington University in St. Louis as well as visiting professorships at various universities in America , Europe and New Zealand . He was retired in 1993 . In 1972 he received the Liebieg Medal from the Reichenberg home district in Augsburg and in 2008 the Johann Friedrich von Cotta Prize for Literature and Translation in Stuttgart . Egon Schwarz was a corresponding member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry and a member of the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad .

In 2011, Schwarz gave his legacy to the German Literature Archive in Marbach in southern Germany .

plant

Egon Schwarz is one of the most important mediators of German-language literature and culture in the United States in German studies . He deals with German-language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries and has published important articles on authors such as Joseph von Eichendorff , Rainer Maria Rilke , Franz Kafka , Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse . By him with Matthias Wegner published anthology exile (1964) was the first comprehensive book on emigrated writers who Hitler's Germany had left. In his autobiography No Time for Eichendorff. Chronicle of involuntary wandering years (1979 and a. New edition under the title Unvoluntary wandering years. On the flight from Hitler through three continents , 2005 and a.) Schwarz describes his childhood and youth in Vienna, his and his parents' forced escape from Austria as well his adventurous life in South America, until he reached his goal of studying literature in the USA. In his work, Schwarz approaches literature from a historical-critical perspective, examining the influence of history on literary works as well as its influence on the reading public. This method determines z. B. his study of Hermann Hesse from 1970, in which he explores the question of why Hesse achieved cult status among young Americans in the 1960s. His approach to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke can be found in Das schluckte Schluchzen (1972). In it he advocates the thesis that Rilke's poetry, despite all its mysticism, was influenced by his time; this influence also left socio-historical traces in Rilke's work. With this thesis, Schwarz initiated a further controversy in specialist science. In addition to his academic work, Schwarz was also active as a literary critic for many years, especially for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

Works (selection)

  • Rationalism and Irrationalism in Lichtenberg as Seen in His Attitude Toward National and Racial Problems . Seattle, Univ., Diss. 1954.
  • Hofmannsthal and Calderon . The Hague: Harvard and Mouton 1962. (= Harvard Germanic Studies. 3.)
  • Ed. With Matthias Wegner: Germans on Germany . Hamburg: Wegner 1963.
  • Ed. With Matthias Wegner: Banishment. Records of German writers in exile . Hamburg: Wegner 1964.
  • Joseph von Eichendorff . New York: Twayne 1972. (= Twayne's World Authors Series. 163.)
  • The choked sobs. Poetry and politics with Rainer Maria Rilke . Frankfurt / Main: Athenaeum 1972.
  • No time for Eichendorff. Chronicle of involuntary wandering years . Königstein / Ts .: Athenaeum 1979, ISBN 3-7610-8046-8 . New edition: With a postscript in 1991 and an essay by Hans-Albert Walter . Frankfurt / Main: Gutenberg Book Guild 1992. (= Exile literature library. ) ISBN 3-7632-4059-4 . 2. New edition under the title: Involuntary Wandering Years. On the run from Hitler through three continents . Afterword by Uwe Timm . Munich: Beck 2005. (= BsR. 1662.) ISBN 3-406-52836-8 . 2nd edition, ibid. 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58686-6 . English edition: Refuge. A Chronicle of a Flight from Hitler . Trans. V. Philip Boehm. Riverside, Calif .: Ariadne Press 2002. (= Studies in Austrian literature, culture, and thought. Biography, autobiography, memoirs series. ) ISBN 1-57241-104-X . Chip. Edition: Años de vagabundeo forzado. Huyendo de Hitler a través de tres continentes . Trans. V. Elisabeth Siefer. Mexico City: Eón 2012, ISBN 9786079124762 .
  • Poetry, criticism, history. Essays on Literature 1900–1930. Preface v. Helmut Kreuzer . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1983, ISBN 3-525-20753-0 .
  • Literature from four cultures. Essays and reviews. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1987, ISBN 3-525-20765-4 .
  • I am not a fan of general judgments about whole peoples. Essays on Austrian, German and Jewish culture . (Ed. By Dietmar Goltschnigg and Hartmut Steinecke). Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2000. (= Philological studies and sources. 163.) ISBN 3-503-04971-1 .
  • The Japanese wall. Unusual travel stories . Siegen: Carl Böschen Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-932212-33-9 .
  • Read (with) black. Essays and short texts for reading and reading. Ed. V. Jacqueline Vansant. Vienna: Praesens 2009, ISBN 978-3-7069-0568-8 .
  • Vienna and the Jews. Essays on the fin de siècle . Afterword by Jochen Bloss. Munich: Beck 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66134-1 .

literature

  • Paul Michael Lützeler , Gerhild S. Williams u. Herbert Lehnert (Ed.): Zeitgenossenschaft. On German-language literature in the 20th century. Festschrift for Egon Schwarz on his 65th birthday . Frankfurt / Main: Athenaeum 1987, ISBN 3-610-08921-0 .
  • Ursula Seeber u. Jacqueline Vansant (Ed.): Black on White. A transatlantic book of appreciation for Egon Schwarz . Vienna: Czernin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7076-0239-5 .
  • Helga Schreckenberger: Egon Schwarz , in: John M. Spalek , Konrad Feilchenfeldt , Sandra H. Hawrylchak (eds.): German-language exile literature since 1933. Volume 3. USA: Supplement 1 . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010 ISBN 978-3-11-024056-6 , pp. 295-306

Bibliographies on Egon Schwarz

  • Publications by Egon Schwarz (until 1983). In: Egon Schwarz: Poetry, Criticism, History. Essays on Literature 1900–1930 . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1983, pp. 231-237, ISBN 3-525-20753-0 .
  • Egon Schwarz. List of publications. In: Paul Michael Lützeler , Gerhild S. Williams u. Herbert Lehnert (Ed.): Zeitgenossenschaft. On German-language literature in the 20th century. Festschrift for Egon Schwarz on his 65th birthday . Frankfurt / Main: Athenaeum 1987, pp. 339–352, ISBN 3-610-08921-0 .
  • Bibliography Egon Schwarz. In: Beatrix Müller-Kampel (ed.): Paths of life and readings. Austrian Nazi displaced persons in the USA and Canada . Tübingen: Niemeyer 2000. (= Conditio Judaica. 30.) pp. 204-217, ISBN 978-3484651302 .
  • Black, Egon. In: Keith Alexander u. Annemarie Sammartino (Ed.): German Studies in North America. A Directory of Scholars . Washington, DC: Publications of the German Historical Institute 2004. (= Reference guide. 17.) pp. 879-886.
  • Bibliography Egon Schwarz. In: Armin Winkler: "Writing is communicating". Egon Schwarz: literary scholar and autobiographer . Graz, Univ., Ma.-Arb. 2012, pp. 76-87.

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b Jan Wiele: Through the gap into the open. The literary scholar Egon Schwarz has died. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 14, 2017, p. 12.
  2. ^ No time for Eichendorff , pp. 214–215
  3. ^ No time for Eichendorff , pp. 220–221
  4. ^ Egon Schwarz: Involuntary wandering years. Munich 2005. pp. 17-215.
  5. ^ Correspondence in FAZ of July 22, 2011, page 34
  6. ↑ Cf. among other things the articles in the two Festschriften mentioned under literature .
  7. ↑ See Egon Schwarz: Hermann Hesse, the American Youth Movement, and Problems of Literary Evaluation. In: PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (New York) 85 (1970) pp. 977-987. or the German version: Hermann Hesse, the American youth movement and problems of literary evaluation. In: Basis I. Yearbook for Contemporary German Literature (Königstein / Ts.) 1 (1970), pp. 116-133.

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personal data
SURNAME Black, Egon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar of Austrian origin
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 2017
Place of death St. Louis