A youth in Germany

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A youth in Germany is an autobiography by Ernst Toller that appeared in 1933 (Wilpert). The author remembers his life until 1924.

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A number in round brackets indicates the page in the source.

On December 1, 1893, Ernst Toller was born in the German city of Samotschin (in the province of Posen , Kolmar district , district court Margonin (145)) in Netzebruch (7) as the son of the businessman Max Toller and his wife Ida, née. Kohn, born. He spent his childhood there in the middle-class (37) parental home. Then Toller attended the secondary school in neighboring Bromberg(22). Because the boy wants to eat apple pie with whipped cream every day for twenty pfennigs a piece and only gets fifty pfennigs a week as pocket money from his parents, he works early as an author for the home column of the Bromberger Ostdeutsche Rundschau (23). The rebellious student Toller critically questions the consequences of creation with the religion teacher : Back then, at the beginning of mankind, directly after Adam and Eve, did brother and sister really get married (27)?

As a student in Grenoble (law, literature, philosophy) (32) he experienced the outbreak of the First World War. The patriot Toller immediately went to German soil (42) and volunteered as a soldier. From Bellheim it went as an artilleryman to the front via Metz in March 1915 (48). Soldier Toller yells Hurray! (50) when his gunfire hit the French enemy in full at Pont à Mousson . In the priest forest (54) and then in front of Verdun (56) Toller got to know the war up close and became a non-commissioned officer (58). Toller finds the articles in the German press about the enemy disgusting. He gets his own contribution on the topic back unpublished from the editor of the Kunstwarts . Reason: One must take the popular mood into account (57). Toller reports to the Air Corps because he wants to break out of the mass extinction. But he fell ill and was unfit for war (62).

In Munich he continued the interrupted studies and met Thomas Mann , Max Halbe , Frank Wedekind , Ernst Weiß and Rilke (64) there. At the Doktorfabrik Heidelberg Toller wants to do his doctorate with Eberhard Gothein on pig breeding in East Prussia (69). There in Heidelberg he joined a fighting alliance during the war for the peaceful solution of the contradictions of national life (70). The Heidelberg district command reacts promptly: The men among the members are sent to the barracks as fit for use in the war (72). The further course of Toller's life is decisively determined by Gustav Landauer's “Call to Socialism” (73). In the chapter Strike of his biography Toller writes: The war made me an opponent of the war (74), and so he fights in Munich at the side of the workers' leader Kurt Eisner against those responsible for the war (75). Toller speaks, stuttering the first sentences, in a mass meeting (77). After participating in labor rallies on Theresienwiese , he was arrested and studied in the military prison in Marx , Engels , Lassalle , Bakunin , Mehring and Luxemburg (82).

Toller tells of November 9, 1918 and the history of this fateful day. The people are starving and do not want a new winter of war (95). Karl Liebknecht proclaims the German socialist republic (97) and is slain with Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919 (100). In February 1919 Toller went to Bern with Eisner for the Congress of the Second International (101). A few days later Eisner was shot dead by Count Arco-Valley in Munich (102). The author goes into more detail about his participation in the Bavarian Soviet Republic , beginning on April 7, 1919 and ending on May 1, 1919. After the violent end of the republic, Toller had to hide from the police as a member of the council government. Shelter is difficult to find. Rilke feels unable to provide effective emergency aid (149). The painter Karli Sohn-Rethel , grandson of the history painter Alfred Rethel , in whose studio they are looking for Toller, is slapped and mistreated (150). Toller is sentenced to five years for high treason by a court martial. He served the sentence from 1920 to 1924 in Niederschönenfeld near Rain (182). While the Volksbühne in Berlin is premiering his drama Masse Mensch , Toller goes on a hunger strike, but soon breaks it off because he goes crazy with hunger (189). The Bavarian government does not follow the amnesty of the revolutionaries after three years imprisonment by the Reichstag (194). Toller is released one day earlier and immediately deported to Saxony (209).

The book ends with the short chapter Blick heute, a complaint against the Germans. In the years from 1918 to the collapse of 1933, they would have learned absolutely nothing. The Republicans have failed across the board.

shape

Ernst Toller's path from German bourgeois to revolutionary socialist (206) is credibly traced. Last but not least, it is the contrast between the easy-going youth of the author and his horrific experiences in the trenches that let the reader empathize. Toller does not give up his comedic narrative attitude even with the most serious topics such as the Munich Soviet Republic. In places the story is told according to the motto: the socialist revolution in Munich - a Bavarian farmer's theater (107 to 111).

Inserted dialogues (65) loosen up the diversity of facts. The work partly contains touching short portraits of Toller's companions (104) and observations of everyday prison life (204 to 208) in Niederschönenfeld. Noteworthy are the numerous excellent short characteristics of people from contemporary history, u. a. Adolf Hitler ( "His program is primitive and simple-minded. The Marxists and the Jews are the internal enemies and to blame for all misfortunes ..." ; Chapter 16).

reception

According to Max Weber , a witness of the Munich Soviet Republic , the revolutionaries had to fail after "amateurish gimmicks". Kiesel also comes to this view after reading the corresponding passages in Toller's autobiography.

literature

Source for this lemma
  • Ernst Toller: A youth in Germany . Text based on the 1936 edition (2nd edition 4th - 7th thousand) Querido Verlag Amsterdam 295 pages on which the Reclam edition, Leipzig 1990, ISBN 3-379-00558-4 with 216 pages is based.
expenditure
  • Ernst Toller: A youth in Germany. Querido Verlag Amsterdam, 1933. First edition, signed with a preface by Toller “On the day of my books being burned in Germany”.
  • Ernst Toller: A youth in Germany. Querido Verlag Amsterdam, 1933. Second revised edition with a preface by Toller, signed “On the day of the book burning of my books in Germany” and an introductory chapter that has been revised compared to the first edition under the title Blick heute .
  • Ernst Toller: A youth in Germany . Rowohlt Paperback, ISBN 978-3-499-14178-2 .
  • Ernst Toller: A youth in Germany . Collected Works, Volume IV. Hanser. 256 pages, ISBN 978-3-446-12520-9 .
  • A youth in Germany in the Gutenberg-DE project
Secondary literature
  • Hans-Jörg Knobloch: Youth at the turn of the century. In the mirror of the autobiographies of Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Ernst Toller . In: History and Literature. Edited by William Collins Donahue, Scott Denham. Tübingen: Stauffenburg 2001. 259–270.
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A-Z . S. 621. Stuttgart 2004. 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 .
  • Helmuth Kiesel : History of German-Language Literature 1918 to 1933 . CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-70799-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alison Beringer ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ): The Dance of Death in Ernst Toller's Masse Mensch
  2. ↑ Kiesel, p. 235 below - 236