Elisabeth Langgässer

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Elisabeth Langgässer (born February 23, 1899 in Alzey , † July 25, 1950 in Karlsruhe ) was a German writer . Elisabeth Langgässer was one of the Christian- oriented writers of the 20th century. One of their main themes was the conflict between the satanic instinctual life and the divine. She was thus in the tradition of Christian mystics . Langgässer was best known for her poetry as well as her short stories and stories .

Life

The birthplace of Elisabeth Langgässer in Alzey
Grave of Elisabeth Langgässer in the old cemetery in Darmstadt

Elisabeth Langgässer was the daughter of the Catholic building councilor of Jewish origin Eduard Langgässer and his wife Eugenie, nee. Service. In 1909, the von Alzey family moved to Darmstadt, where Elisabeth attended the Viktoriaschule from July 5, 1909 , a higher school for girls with an attached seminary for teachers. From 1919 to 1928 she worked as a primary school teacher in Seligenstadt and Griesheim . In 1924 she published her first volume of poetry, The Circle of the Lamb . On January 1, 1929, as a single mother, she gave birth to her daughter Cordelia , whose father was the constitutional lawyer Hermann Heller . In spring she moved to Berlin, where she started teaching again.

From 1931 Langgässer worked as a freelance writer and wrote, among other things, radio plays for the Funk-Hour Berlin . After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , she elected Adolf Hitler in the last free election in March 1933 . In the same year, she and Ina Seidel edited contemporary women's poems. In 1935 she was still able to publish her zodiac poems, as well as her novel Der Gang durch das Ried in 1936 . In July 1935 she married the editor Wilhelm Hoffmann, who shortly thereafter lost his position because of his marriage to a woman classified as “ half-Jewish ” according to the racist Nuremberg laws . The couple had three daughters: Annette, Barbara and Franziska.

In 1936, Elisabeth Langgässer was excluded from the Reich Chamber of Literature as a “half-Jewish woman” . She was thus subject to a publication ban, which she did not adhere to. 1938 brought the Salzburg publisher Otto Mueller just before the " connection " of Austria to the German Reich Langgässers Rescue am Rhein out. Then she secretly began to work on her most famous work, the novel The Inextinguishable Seal .

In 1942 she had to do forced labor in a munitions factory during the Second World War . This year showed the first signs of multiple sclerosis . Her daughter Cordelia, who was considered a “fully Jewish” according to the Nuremberg Laws, received Spanish citizenship through adoption in 1943, but was not allowed to leave the country. Instead, she was deported to Theresienstadt in 1944 and then to the Auschwitz extermination camp . Cordelia survived and was brought to Sweden in a " White Bus " in 1945 .

In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, Elisabeth Langgässer was able to complete the novel The Inextinguishable Seal . In the same year there were again signs of multiple sclerosis. In 1946 she first received messages from Sweden from her daughter Cordelia Edvardson , who had survived the Holocaust . In 1947 she spoke at the First German Writers' Congress . In 1948 Elisabeth Langgässer moved to Rheinzabern and published her collection of short stories, The Torso . In March 1950 she was accepted into the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature . Since the end of June, she had been confined to bed by another episode of multiple sclerosis, and finally died on July 25, 1950 after a ten-day coma in the St. Vinzenz Hospital in Karlsruhe. She was only 51 years old. She was buried in the old cemetery in Darmstadt (grave site: IV C 92).

Her last novel, Märkische Argonautenfahrt , appeared a few months after her death.

To the work

After 1945, Langgässer was considered a typical representative of German post-war literature . As persecuted by National Socialism, she wrote with a (depending on your point of view) pessimism or realism, which always had the Shoah in the background, often as a theme. In doing so, she did not spare criticism of the writers of the so-called Inner Emigration and of her own attitude during the Nazi era, which she described as "flirting with flowers and flowers over the hideous, wide-open abyss of the mass graves that is covered with these flowers" .

Recently there are signs of a re-evaluation. While in the reception after the war her newly published works and their content were the focus of attention, her early writings are now being reread under the aspect of their formal modernity : “By all German-speaking authors who magically found themselves in the 1930s - use realistic text procedures, Langgässer is the 'most avant-garde'. "

Relationship of the daughter Cordelia Edvardson to her mother

In 1949 Cordelia Edvardson visited her mother and her family in Rheinzabern, where they both saw each other for the last time. In 1986 Edvardson's life story "Burned Child Seeks Fire" was published, initially in Sweden. Edvardson reflects the problematic mother-illegitimate-daughter relationship in the political situation in Germany under Hitler and the racial laws, but makes a radical distinction between the two scenarios. Langgässer then hit the headlines; her reputation as a “pious legend of the politically impeccable writer Langgässer seemed to be destroyed once and for all after the publication of this book.” Langgässer was accused of having been guilty of her illegitimate daughter. Langgässer's anti-Semitic remarks "and finally the almost unbelievable narcissism with which she urged the sick daughter in Sweden to send parcels with special tobacco, cosmetics, special shoes or gifts for the family to Berlin (as well as) the." The fact that in 1946 she still described Cordelia's suffering in Auschwitz (as) 'a school of humanity that cannot be thought of as greater and loftier' ”. But it is clear that Langgässer did not send the daughter to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz . “Cordelia Edvardson herself is irritated by the fact that readers of her autobiographical texts blame their mother for their deportation and that she is repeatedly asked during her lecture tours through Germany whether she hate her mother. She repeatedly points out that the political system and not the mother should be accused. "

Honors

Langgässer Bank in Alzey

In 1950, the year she died, she was posthumously awarded the Georg Büchner Prize of the German Academy for Language and Poetry , which she had co-founded the year before (together with 48 other writers, including Adolf Grimme , Erich Kästner and Marie Luise Kaschnitz ). The Elisabeth Langgässer Literature Prize , named after her, has been awarded by the city of Alzey every three years since 1988. The grammar school on Frankenstrasse in Alzey has also been named after her since 1991 .

In Alzey, Länggasser's hometown, a bench was set up as a memento showing her likeness in three phases of her life. In Darmstadt, where she is buried, the Langgässer Weg is named after her in the Bessungen district, as is the Elisabeth-Langgässer-Weg in Cologne.

Works

  • The tropic of the lamb (poetry), 1924.
  • Proserpine (story), 1932.
  • The zodiac poems (poetry), 1935.
  • The walk through the Ried (novel), 1936.
  • Rescue on the Rhine. Three runs of fate , 1938.
  • The indelible seal (novel), Claassen & Goverts, Hamburg 1946. (Here she addresses the fate of her Jewish father, who was baptized.)
  • The Leaf Man and the Rose (poetry), 1947.
  • The Torso (short stories), 1947.
  • The Labyrinth (short stories), 1949.
  • Märkische Argonautfahrt (novel), 1950.
  • Collected works (5 volumes), posthumously 1959–64
  • Selected stories , posthumously 1984, Claassen, ISBN 3-546-45837-0 .

literature

  • Ursula El-Akramy: Wotan's raven: the writer Elisabeth Langgässer, her daughter Cordelia and the fires of Auschwitz. New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-8015-0307-0 . Review by Ruth Klüger in the FAZ on September 11, 1997.
  • Rüdiger Frommholz:  Langgässer, Elisabeth. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , pp. 596-599 ( digitized version ).
  • Carsten Dutt: Elisabeth Langgässer. In: Killy Literature Lexicon. Authors and works of German language. Volume 7: Kräm-Marp. De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-022049-0 , pp. 223-227.
  • Carsten Dutt: Elisabeth Langgässer: The indelible seal. (1946). In: Elena Aggazzi, Eckart Schütz (Hrsg.): Handbuch Nachkriegskultur. Literature, non-fiction and film in Germany (1945–1962). De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-022140-4 , pp. 445-448.
  • Carsten Dutt: Elisabeth Langgässer's claim to modernity. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann, Roman Luckscheiter (Ed.): Modern and Antimodern - The Renouveau catholique and German literature. Rombach Verlag, Freiburg i. Br. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7930-9546-0 , pp. 475-488.
  • Carsten Dutt: Elisabeth Langgässer's Supranaturalism. In: Friederike Reents (Ed.): Surrealism in German-language literature. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009, pp. 151-162.
  • Carsten Dutt: Elisabeth Langgässer's exposition of the question of guilt. In: Carsten Dutt (Ed.): The question of guilt. Investigations on the intellectual situation in the post-war period. Manutius Verlag, Heidelberg 2010, ISBN 978-3-934877-44-3 , pp. 65-87.
  • Eva-Maria Gehler: Female Nazi Affinities. Degree of affinity for the system of women writers in the 'Third Reich'. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8260-4405-2 , pp. 249-282.
  • Daniel Hoffmann : Ariadne thread and Auschwitz number. Cordelia Edvardson's salvation from Elisabeth Langgässer's mythical cosmos. In: arcadia. Journal for general and comparative literature , issue 1/2003, pp. 39–54.
  • Daniel Hoffmann: "The world was whole ..." Profanity and sacralization of the world in Elisabeth Langgässer's The Indelible Seal. In: Annette Deschner, Oliver Krüger , Refika Sariönder (Ed.): Myths of Creativity. The creative between innovation and hubris. Verlag Otto Lembeck, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 77-91.
  • Daniel Hoffmann: “Like a crystal bath.” Elisabeth Langgässer's Claudel lectures. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann, Roman Luckscheiter (Ed.): Modern and Antimodern - The Renouveau catholique and German literature. Rombach Verlag, Freiburg i. Br. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7930-9546-0 , pp. 447-474.
  • Sonja Hilzinger: Elisabeth Langgässer - A biography. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86650-250-5 .
  • Daniel Hoffmann: Elisabeth Langgässer. At the limits of enlightened self-confidence. In: Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Ed.): Stubbornness and attachment. Catholic German intellectuals in the 20th century. Butzon & Bercker Verlag, Kevelaer 2009, ISBN 978-3-7666-1315-8 , pp. 285-297.
  • Dieter Schug: Elisabeth Langgässer and the Christian natural poem . In: Erbe und Einsatz, Vol. 43 (1967), pp. 369–381.
  • Jörg Schuster : The forgotten modern age. German literature 1930–1960 (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 219). Kröner, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-520-21901-5 , pp. 59-62, 79-103 [v. a. on Proserpina , The Savior Obulus and The Walk through the Ried ].
  • Andrea Bramberger, Cordelia Edvardson and Elisabeth Langgässer, in: The smile of the mother on the daughter's lips: Mother-daughter relationships. Freiburg 2008, pp. 12-27 and 58f. Andrea Bramberger, Cordelia Edvardson and Elisabeth Langgässer

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Darmstadt City Archives, inventory 12/14, no. 315, Elisabeth Langgässer was admitted to class VI b of the Viktoriaschule on July 5, 1909.
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 353.
  3. ↑ Elisabeth Langgässer, short biography
  4. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. Complete edition. dtv, Munich 2008, pp. 901 f., 1035.
  5. ↑ See Hilzinger 2009, p. 441.
  6. ↑ Quote from 1947, printed by Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 353.
  7. ↑ Jörg Schuster: The forgotten modernity. German literature 1930–1960. Kröner, Stuttgart 2016, p. 90 f.
  8. ↑ Burned child seeks fire , novel. Hanser, Munich and Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-446-14260-6
  9. ↑ Michael Braun, On the 100th birthday of the writer Elisabeth Langgässer. "The sacred fire of poetry.", In: "Deutschlandfunk" Deutschland Radio Berlin. February 22, 1999
  10. ↑ quoted from: https://www.vormbaum.net/index.php/latest-downloads/gedicht-des-monats/2559-cordelia-edvardson-1/file , p. 6, s. a. Footnotes 25 and 26
  11. ↑ cf. about this: https://www.vormbaum.net/index.php/latest-downloads/gedicht-des-monats/2559-cordelia-edvardson-1/file
  12. ↑ Michael Assmann, Herbert Heckmann (Ed.): Between Criticism and Confidence. 50 years of the German Academy for Language and Poetry. Wallstein, Göttingen 1999, p. 22.
  13. ^ History. In: Elisabeth-Langgässer-Gymnasium. Retrieved October 8, 2019 .
  14. ^ New edition: Kranichsteiner Literaturverlag, Darmstadt 2014
  15. ^ New edition: Kranichsteiner Literaturverlag, Darmstadt 2002
  16. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 11, 1997, No. 211 / page 42: Return with anemone. In: FAZ.net . September 11, 1997, accessed October 13, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Langgässer, Elisabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Alzey
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1950
Place of death Karlsruhe