Egon Vietta

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Egon Vietta (born November 11, 1903 in Bühl / Baden ; † November 29, 1959 in Darmstadt ; real name: Karl Egon Fritz ) was a German travel writer, essayist , playwright and critic.

Life

Vietta's numerous publications, including more than 20 books, characterize him as a versatile, passionate and polemical cultured person who was shaped by the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger . Since autumn 1935 Vietta, then a civil servant in Karlsruhe, had been friends with the painter Willi Baumeister (1889–1955), who was defamed as a “ degenerate artist ” in the Third Reich and who worked in secret despite being banned from working. During this time Vietta acquired several Baumeister's paintings, a. a. With horizon line (today Westphalian State Museum, Münster). He corresponded with important contemporaries such as Gottfried Benn and Hermann Broch ; the correspondence with the latter was published in 2012.

During the Third Reich, Vietta was similar to Rudolf Bach ( Sicilian Days , 1940), Werner Helwig ( Predator Fisherman in Hellas , 1939; In the Thicket of Pelion , 1941), Gustav René Hocke ( The Disappeared Face , 1939), Erhart Kästner ( Greece. A book from the war , 1942) and Eckart Peterich ( The Gods and Heroes of the Greeks , 1938) are part of a literary movement that attempted to evoke a humanity that was thought to be timeless and ideal and rooted in ancient Mediterranean culture. This attitude saw itself as a departure from the zeitgeist, although the aesthetics of fascism and national socialism - at least externally - referred to antiquity. After the ban on membership in 1937, Vietta joined the NSDAP .

An example of this literary neoclassic is Vietta's story Corydon , published in 1943 and set in the strangely timeless present . Its title alludes to Virgil's II Eclogue, which is about the love of the shepherd Corydon for the beautiful boy Alexis, and thus cites a homoerotic motif. André Gide also dealt with homosexuality under the title Corydon in his Quatres dialogues socratiques (1911, final version 1924) . Nevertheless, Vietta's story gives the impression of a game with learned quotations rather than that of a “key work” in the narrower sense. Against a Greek backdrop, it is about the friendship of the first-person narrator Eduard, a German doctor, with the painter Gil, who refuses to settle down and meet bourgeois claims. Eduard finally takes on the task of bringing up his son Corydon in place of Gil: "The children do not belong to the parents, they belong to all of us, to the whole people ..." In this sentence from Eduard one feels reminded of Klabund / Brecht's chalk circle ; however, the association cannot hide the fact that Vietta's artistic means were limited. As a result, his stage works did not receive any lasting resonance either, while the judgments he came to as a theater and art critic can often still claim to be valid today.

After the war, Vietta won his friend Baumeister as a theater dramaturge in Darmstadt for stage and costume designs. Vietta was also one of the organizers of the “Darmstadt Conversation 1955”, on the occasion of which directors, directors and other intellectuals - among them Theodor W. Adorno and Friedrich Sieburg - critically summed up the first ten years of German post-war theater. Vietta attacked the system of subsidized state theaters, which were merely a "function in the public budget", there and in his campaign pamphlet, the catastrophe or the turn of the German theater (Düsseldorf 1955); on the other hand, he advocated giving the stage its cultic character from antiquity as a “place of revelation”. Vietta's attitude has therefore been criticized by Ernst Schumacher (in: Theater der Zeit - Zeit des Theaters, Munich 1960, p. 179) as reactionary and - to that extent, certainly exaggerated - even brought it close to the Nazi ideology. The critic Friedrich Luft also rejected the "overthrow theory" formulated by Vietta and others (under different circumstances) as too radical, but pointed out that the criticism of the "representation and subsidy theater" in which "nothing applies to us and today “Happened, had its justification ( Theater in Germany or the overcrowded vacuum , in: Jahresring 55/56, Stuttgart 1955, p. 369 ff.).

The literary scholar Silvio Vietta is Egon Vietta's son.

Works

  • The collectivists (Freiburg im Breisgau 1930)
  • Sensitive journey to Lapland (Frankfurt am Main 1937)
  • The dance. A Little Metaphysics (Frankfurt am Main 1938)
  • Mysterious Libya. Riding through the Fezzan (Frankfurt am Main 1939)
  • Romantic Cyrenaica. Poetry from a journey (Hamburg 1941; new edition Säckingen 1949)
  • Corydon (Frankfurt am Main 1943, new edition Freiburg 1948)
  • Theology without God (Zurich 1946)
  • Goethe in Italy or The Italiänische Reise. Comedy (Hamburg 1947)
  • Georg Trakl. An interpretation of his work (Hamburg 1947)
  • Letters on Dance (Hamburg 1948)
  • Iphigenia in America. Drama (Hamburg 1948)
  • Attempt on human existence in French philosophy. On the philosophical work of Jean Paul Sartre (Hamburg 1948)
  • The birds honor Aristophanes. A Comedy (Hamburg 1948)
  • Mediterranea (Düsseldorf 1948)
  • Monte Cassino. Drama (1949)
  • Theology without god. Experiment on human existence in modern French philosophy (Zurich 1949)
  • The question of being for Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart 1950)
  • The three masks. Drama (Frankfurt am Main 1952)
  • Magical Land of Crete (Vienna / Innsbruck / Wiesbaden / Zurich 1952)
  • Italy with and without renaissance (Stuttgart 1954)
  • Catastrophe or Turnaround in German Theater (Düsseldorf 1955)
  • Europe is embedded in Asia (Darmstadt 1955)
  • Alexander fails in India (Bern 1957)

As editor

  • Darmstadt Conversation 1955 (Darmstadt 1955)

Correspondence

  • "To get closer to death ..." - Hermann Broch and Egon Vietta in their correspondence 1933–1951. Edited by Silvio Vietta and Roberto Rizzo (Göttingen 2012) ISBN 978-3-8353-1088-9

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Alexander Cammann , Adam Soboczynski : It's back , in: Die Zeit, January 23, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Vietta, Egon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fritz, Egon (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German travel writer, essayist, playwright and critic
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Buhl
DATE OF DEATH November 29, 1959
Place of death Darmstadt