Elisabeth Frenzel

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Elisabeth Frenzel (born Lüttig-Niese ; born January 28, 1915 in Naumburg an der Saale ; † May 10, 2014 in Berlin ) was a German literary scholar .

Life

The daughter of the lawyer Oswig Lüttig-Niese and his wife Elisabeth, b. Niese, studied at Berlin University , where she did her doctorate in 1938 under Julius Petersen on The Shape of the Jew on the Modern German Stage . Her dissertation reveals glowing enthusiasm for National Socialism and an anti-Semitism based on the racial theories of Hans FK Günther . After the end of the war, the book trade was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the Soviet occupation zone .

Shortly before her doctorate, Frenzel had married Herbert A. Frenzel , the editor of the Nazi propaganda magazine The Attack and later government councilor in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda , to whom she in the afterword to her dissertation “for expanding my scientific interest by referring to the current cultural and political issues ”.

Elisabeth Frenzel was not a member of the NSDAP . But she worked until the end of the Second World War as a research assistant for Alfred Rosenberg's office for art maintenance and as a research assistant for the high school of the NSDAP . Her brochure Der Jude im Theater , published in 1943 in the series of publications on ideological training work of the NSDAP , was described in 2003 by Jochen Hörisch in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung as “one of the worst anti-Semitic publications from Germanic pen ever”. In addition, she tried to create a lexicon of Jewish writers for Rosenberg's Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt am Main, which, similar to the lexicon of Jews in music already published by this institute, was intended to facilitate the exclusion of Jewish artists from German cultural life. In the final phase of the World War, such a major project was out of the question; instead, a one-volume manual for 1945 was announced in 1944, but it was no longer published.

After the Second World War, Frenzel worked as a freelance academic writer. Together with her husband Herbert A. Frenzel, she wrote the standard work, Daten deutscher Dichtung. Chronological outline of German literary history , which was first published in 1953 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch and had several hundred thousand copies of 35 new editions by 2007, each of which was updated by Elisabeth Frenzel in consultation with the publisher. Only after Volker Weidermann described it as a "scandal" in an article for the FAS in May 2009 that this "basic work" was not published until the last edition for the period from 1933 to 1945 by prominent authors such as Kurt Tucholsky, who were persecuted by the National Socialists , Klaus Mann , Joachim Ringelnatz or Oskar Maria Graf or, as with Armin T. Wegner or Irmgard Keun , did not even mention their names, but at the same time paid tribute to National Socialist authors such as Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer or Richard Billinger and their works, the German paperback took Publishing the work "from now on from his program".

Elisabeth Frenzel's reference works on the history of material and motifs in German literature have also appeared in several editions. The Frenzel couple, who were politically and ideologically heavily burdened, were reintegrated without any fuss with this work in the German studies and theater studies of the 1950s (Herbert A. Frenzel became editor of the German Society for Theater History in 1951 ), but they were denied an academic career.

From 1978 to 2001 Elisabeth Frenzel was a member of the commission for literary motif and topic research at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . In 1997 she received the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon. She last lived in Berlin.

Importance for narrative research

Frenzel's importance for German-language narrative research after 1960 is undisputed, even if she chose a literary approach to motifs and subjects. Her reference works, Substances of World Literature and Motifs of World Literature, are still in use today, and anyone who wants to conduct research on motifs and topics in literary studies , which has long fallen into disrepute in German-speaking countries, will find many suggestions in Frenzel's programmatic writings.

In the folkloric-oriented encyclopedia of fairy tales , which - not without controversy - also pays tribute to living authors, Gero von Wilpert ( Sydney ) wrote an honoring article about Frenzel, which praises the consideration of folk literature in her work and the international recognition of the subject matter. und motivational research underlines Frenzel's, but does not go into the Nazi era or the topic of the dissertation.

Publications

  • The figure of the Jew on the modern German stage. Konkordia, Bühl 1940 (dissertation from the University of Berlin, 1940)
  • Jewish figures on the German stage. A necessary cross-section through 700 years of role history. Book trade edition of the dissertation, Deutscher Volksverlag , Munich 1940
  • The Jew in the Theater (= series of publications on ideological training work by the NSDAP; Issue. 25). Rather , Munich 1943
  • German poetry dates. Chronological outline of German literary history. With Herbert A. Frenzel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1953, last in 34th edition by dtv , 2004
  • Theodor Matthias: The new German dictionary. With special consideration of the spelling as well as the origin, meaning and addition of the words, also the loan and foreign words. 9th edition. Verlag Praktisches Wissen, 1954 (edited by Elisabeth Frenzel and Herbert A. Frenzel)
  • Substances of world literature. A lexicon of longitudinal sections of the history of poetry (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 300). Kröner, Stuttgart 1962, DNB 451357396 , (2nd edition there 1963, last 10th edition. 2005).
  • Research on substances, motifs and symbols. Metzler , Stuttgart 1963, last 4th edition 1978, ISBN 3-476-14028-9 .
  • History of material and motifs. In: Wolfgang Stammler (Ed.): Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß. Volume 1, 2nd edition. Berlin 1957, col. 281-332.
  • History of material and motifs. Verlag Schmidt, 1966, last 2nd edition 1974, ISBN 3-503-00784-9 .
  • Motifs of world literature. A lexicon of longitudinal sections of the history of poetry (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 301). Kröner, Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-520-30101-6 , (last 6th edition 2008).
  • From the content of literature. Fabric - motif - theme. Herder, 1980, ISBN 3-451-17402-2 .
  • Pen strokes. A perpetual literary calendar. With Herbert A. Frenzel. Artemis, 1987, ISBN 3-7608-4950-4 .
  • Yellowed papers. The two hundred year history of a middle class family. Droste, 1990, ISBN 3-7700-0877-4 (about the Niese family)

literature

  • Adam J. Bisanz, Raymond Trousson, Herbert A. Frenzel (eds.): Elements of literature. Contributions to substance, motif and topic research. Elisabeth Frenzel on her 65th birthday (= Kröner Themata 702–703). 2 volumes. Kröner, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-520-70201-0 (Volume 1), ISBN 3-520-70301-7 (Volume 2).
  • Ernst Piper : Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler's chief ideologist. Blessing, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-89667-148-0 (also: Potsdam, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2005).
  • Florian Radvan: "... It's not that bad with the Judaization of German theater!" A critical look back at the career of the literary scholar Elisabeth Frenzel. In: German Life and Letters. 54, 1, 2001, ISSN  0016-8777 , pp. 25-44.
  • Peter Goßens: "On the content of literature". Elisabeth Frenzel and the history of material and motifs. In: Comparative Literature. Yearbook of the German Society for General and Comparative Literature Studies. 2000/2001, ISSN  1432-5306 , pp. 128-136.
  • Christoph König (Ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 1: A-G. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 .
  • Levke Harders: Studied, PhD: Arriviert? Doctoral candidates at the Berlin Germanic Seminar (1919–1945) (= Berlin Contributions to the History of Science 6). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2004, ISBN 3-631-52610-5 , review .
  • Birgit Boge: The beginnings of Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Johann Caspar Witsch and the establishment of the publishing house (1948–1959). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2009, esp. Pp. 275–326.
  • Volker Weidermann: Standard work with gaps - a grotesque canon. FAZ . May 11, 2009 (on: Data on German Poetry ).
  • Peter Goßens: Jewish figures on the German stage (book by Elisabeth Frenzel, 1940). In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Volume 7: Literature, Film, Theater and Art. Berlin; Munich; Boston: de Gruyter, 2014, pp. 221–223.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary notice in the Berliner Tagesspiegel ( memento of the original from May 17, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / trauer.tagesspiegel.de
  2. ^ Letter F - List of literature to be discarded. German administration for popular education in the Soviet zone of occupation, Zentralverlag, Berlin 1946.
  3. ↑ Jochen Hörisch: You should recognize them by their works - The “International Germanists Lexicon 1800–1950” ( Memento of July 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. December 31, 2004.
  4. ↑ "Data of German Poetry" - Controversial lexicon is no longer published. FAZ . May 12, 2009.
  5. ↑ Volume 5, 1987, columns 257-258
personal data
SURNAME Frenzel, Elisabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lüttig-Niese, Elisabeth (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Naumburg on the Saale
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 2014
Place of death Berlin