Erhart Kästner

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Grave of Erhart Kästner in the Staufen cemetery

Erhart Kästner (born March 13, 1904 in Schweinfurt ; † February 3, 1974 in Staufen im Breisgau ) was a German writer and librarian .

Life

Erhart Kästner's father was a high school teacher. He spent his youth in Augsburg and attended high school near St. Anna . Kästner completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller , studied German , history and philosophy in Freiburg im Breisgau , Kiel and Leipzig and completed his studies with a doctorate . The topic of his dissertation was "Delusion and Reality in the Drama of Goethe's Time".

From 1930 to 1936 he was a librarian at the Saxon State Library in Dresden , where he set up the book museum . From 1936 to 1938 he worked as Gerhart Hauptmann's secretary (replacing Elisabeth Jungmann , who went to Rudolf G. Binding as secretary in 1933 ). In 1939 he joined the NSDAP (membership no. 7.836.245), volunteered for war and, with the approval of the Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, was given the option to write books about Greece for the fighting troops. In the volume Greece , published in 1942, Kästner glorified the victory of the Nordic Germans as the return of the Aryan race to the ancestral south. Nonetheless, his language is literary and full of admiration and respect for the very Greece that is the cradle of European culture. The post-war editions of his books, cleared of the worst failures, appeared in Insel-Verlag: Crete (1946), Ölberge, Weinberge (1953) and Greek Islands .

In the book Ölberge, Weinberge (Insel-Taschenbuch, p. 244) he describes a cruel retaliatory action by the German occupying forces as follows: “If I went like this, I could avoid the village of Distomo , which eight years ago, during the war, was the scene of one There was a tremendous bloodbath: the pappas of the village, with or without will, had sent two trucks full of soldiers into the ambush of the partisans near Steiri, which was followed by a planned revenge, senseless murder of women, children and peasants, like a country after a hundred Years in the memory. "(See massacre of Distomo )

After the end of the war, Kästner spent two years as a prisoner of war in North Africa after the British military arrested him in Rhodes on suspicion of secret service activity. He wrote the book Tent Book of Tumilat about his stay in a camp in Fayid , Egypt .

From 1950 to 1968 he was director of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel , which under his direction was expanded into a Bibliotheca illustris. After his retirement he moved to Staufen im Breisgau . His grave can be found in the local cemetery.

For a long time Erhart Kästner was considered one of the "quiet" writers of the German post-war era. His stylistically polished and artistically composed prose works, when they appeared in the fifties and sixties, fitted well with the general desire for repression : “One should be silent about the dark” (quote from Erhart Kästner).

The extensive estate of Erhart Kästner with more than 17,000 sheets of manuscripts and more than 6,000 letters has been in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel since 1984.

In 1954 he married the restorer Anita Kästner , née Vogel (1924–2011).

Awards and memberships

Works

  • Greece. A book from the war (1942)
  • Crete (1946)
  • Tumilat's tent book (1949) New: Suhrkamp 1992, ISBN 3518013823
  • Olives, vineyards. A Book of Greece (1953)
  • The hour drum from the holy mountain Athos , Insel Verlag, 1st edition Wiesbaden 1956, 13th edition Frankfurt 1995, ISBN 978-3-458-31756-2 ;
  • The Lark School (1964)
  • Uprising of Things (1971)
  • Open letter to the Queen of Greece. Descriptions, Admirations (1972)
  • About books and libraries. Edited by P. Raabe (1974)
  • The dog in the sun and other prose. Edited by H. Gremmels (1975)
  • Greek islands. Edited by H. Gremmels (1975)
  • Letters. Edited by P. Raabe (1984)
  • Martin Heidegger - Erhart Kästner, correspondence 1953–1974. Edited by Heinrich W. Petzet (1986)
  • What the soul needs - Erhart Kästner on books and authors. Edited by Julia Hiller von Gaertringen and Katrin Nitzschke (1994)
  • Perseus eye light blue - Erhart Kästner and Gerhart Hauptmann. Letters, texts, notes. Edited by Julia Hiller von Gaertringen (2004)

Quotes

"So things are dead. ... They had always lived off the trouble that was put into them. Difficult to understand: but for trouble they gave life. You wanted it to be effortless, you wanted it to be made. That also worked. But at the cost of their lives. ... One day ... the newspapers will read: As is only now known, things are dead. We will come back to this later.
But at the time of this report, not many will understand what is meant. Only very old people will remember having heard or read about it in their younger days: sometime ago, times ago, funny idea, the things, the moon and the brook and the fir, the city and the bay and the cornfield should be lived to have."

- Uprising of things, Frankfurt / M 1973, pp. 159–160

“At the end of the day, life is just a sum of a few hours to live on. You are; everything else was just a long wait. "

- Olives, vineyards

literature

  • Günter Figal (Ed.): Erhart Kästner. For the 100th birthday. The truth of places and things. Modo, Freiburg im Breisgau 2004, ISBN 3-937014-12-8 .
  • Julia Hiller von Gaertringen : "This library is not obliged to anything except itself" - Erhart Kästner as director of the Herzog August Library 1950–1968. Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-447-05879-7 (Wolfenbütteler Hefte; H. 23 [2009]).
  • Julia Hiller von Gaertringen: "My love for Greece comes from the war". Studies on the literary work of Erhart Kästner. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1994, ISBN 3-447-03536-6 (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 58).
  • Anita Kästner, Reingart Kästner (ed.): Erhart Kästner. Life and work in data and images. 2nd edition Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-458-32086-5 (Insel-Taschenbuch 386).
  • Wolfgang Milde :  Kästner, Erhart. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 736 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Julia M. Nauhaus : Erhart Kästner's fantasy cabinet. Variations on art and artists. Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 2003, ISBN 3-7930-9340-9 (Rombach Sciences; Series Cultura, 32).
  • Michael E. Sallinger: Paths and branches. Reflections on Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Georg Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, Carl Schmitt, Erhart Kästner and Armin Mohler. Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2002, ISBN 3-7065-1758-2 .
  • Frank Schulz-Nieswandt: Erhart Kästner (1904–1974). Longing for Greece and criticism of civilization in the context of the “conservative revolution” . transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-3682-6 .
  • Arn Strohmeyer : The poet, the island and the war. Erhart Kästner in Crete 1943–1944. Verlag M. Simmering , Lilienthal 2000, ISBN 3-927723-44-4 .
  • Arn Strohmeyer: poet in tunic. Erhart Kästner in Greece and on Crete 1941 to 1945. Balistier, Mähringen 2006, ISBN 3-937108-07-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ 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. 291.
  2. ↑ Quotes and Sayings , Mannheim: Bibliografisches Institut & FA Brockhaus AG p.782, see also http://www.gutzitiert.de/zitat_autor_erhart_kaestner_thema_leben_zitat_13181.html
personal data
SURNAME Kästner, Erhart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and librarian
DATE OF BIRTH March 13, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Schweinfurt
DATE OF DEATH 3rd February 1974
Place of death Staufen im Breisgau