Erich Bloch (writer)

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Else Levi-Mühsam and Erich Bloch in the library they founded in Konstanz, around 1982

Erich Bloch (born on August 4, 1897 in Konstanz ; died on February 5, 1994 there ) was a Jewish German lawyer , literary scholar , journalist , farmer and writer .

life and work

Erich Bloch's father Moritz Bloch (1868–1946) was the head of the Jewish community in Konstanz. After an interruption due to the war, Erich Bloch graduated from high school in Konstanz in 1916; he had already registered as a volunteer in the First World War in 1914 and was deployed in northern France at La Bassée . In the winter semester of 1915/16 he began studying law at the University of Munich , but at Easter 1916 he received a new order to be presented to the Western Front . In February 1919 he continued his studies in Munich; for the winter semester 1919/20 at the University of Freiburg . In addition to law, he also studied economics , literature and art history there and attended lectures in philosophy with Edmund Husserl . In 1921 he was in German with Hans Heinrich Borcherdt in Munich to Dr phil. PhD ; Topic of the dissertation: «The Jacob's Staff», a fragment of the drama v. Otto Ludwig .

After his legal clerkship , which he had done in Freiburg, Bloch worked as a freelance writer and publicist and wrote reviews for the liberal Konstanzer Zeitung . He also taught literature and philosophy at the Landschulheimen Schloss Gaienhofen and Glarisegg . He had already moved to Wangen in 1922 , where he made contact with the artists living on the Höri ; among them Eugen Segewitz , Willi Münch-Khe and the Swiss-German graphic artist Hugo Boeschenstein , who later made Bloch's Wangen house as a poet idyll as the motif of one of his woodcuts . It was Boeschenstein, who was still friends with him at the time, who designed the cover for Bloch's collection of poems Voices of Life , published in 1926 .

In 1925 Bloch married Paula Friedmann (1902–1993). From this marriage the son Walter (born 1928 in Munich) emerged, who, on the mediation of his uncle Fridolin Friedmann , was able to travel to England on January 6, 1939 with a Kindertransport and attend the Bunce Court School there. A cousin of Erich Bloch, who lived in London, paid for the first year school fees. After the Second World War, Walter Bloch stayed in Great Britain with his mother, who had also been able to travel to England, and studied chemistry there. The marriage with Paula Bloch was divorced in 1929 and Erich Bloch moved back to Constance after seven years in Wangen. There he worked as a publishing director and lecturer at the Friedrich Stadler publishing house, owner Ernst Stadler.

In 1930 Erich Bloch married Elise (called Liesel) Levinger (* 1903 in Konstanz) for the second time. This marriage had three children: Elisabeth (born 1932), Eva (born 1935) and Michael (born 1938). In 1933 Erich Bloch lost his job at Stadler-Verlag and with it his main income due to his Jewish origins. With his wife, children and parents-in-law, Bloch retired to the Höri peninsula and bought an empty farm, the Michaelshof in Gaienhofen-Horn , in order to run it for as long as this was still possible. In a kind of family kibbutz , Bloch now worked as a farmer with Jewish refugees. The refugees were mainly so-called shift workers , people who had been banned from working by the National Socialists and now had to acquire practical professional knowledge in preparation for emigration. Many doctors, teachers, lawyers and judges acquired basic knowledge of agriculture and arable farming from Erich Bloch. Bloch's friends and guests in Horn included the writer Jacob Picard , who stayed in an inn in the village between 1936 and 1938.

The Michaelshof was managed by Bloch according to biodynamic principles . Bloch had been interested in this cultivation method based on anthroposophy before . In the memory of Bloch's son Walter, the farm was “a real paradise in summer. There were many cows, horses and chickens, a huge vegetable garden and wonderful fruit trees. My father even knew beekeeping . I can still see how he was dressed all in white, with sturdy gloves and a strange helmet on his head. He handled the honey-drenched wooden frames quite calmly while the bees swarmed around him. He had skillful hands, and I admired him for it. ”Until the ban in 1938, Bloch regularly delivered organic vegetables to the non-Jewish vegetable store Werthmann and to Jewish families in Konstanz; National Socialists were also among his customers.

Alarmed by a house search by the Gestapo of Bloch's first wife in Wangen, Bloch burned his unpublished literary manuscripts, including a radio play ( The Rescue ), a drama ( The Machine Heart ) and various other works, “wherever I thought , they could contain formulations that are not related to the Nazis, but have to do with the problems of the disputes of that time. "

On the morning of the Reichspogromnacht , November 10, 1938, Bloch was arrested on his farm and severely mistreated by SS members from Radolfzell in the town hall of Horn and seriously injured by beatings with flagella and steel rods. Bloch's farm was forcibly "Aryanized" and sold at a lower value to a group of dismissed Waldorf teachers from Kassel.

In April 1939 the family of seven moved to Konstanz again, before Erich Bloch managed to escape to Palestine with his wife and three children in autumn 1939 . After a temporary stay in a kibbutz, he worked and lived as a farmer in the German-speaking settlements of Shavei Zion and Nahariya in northern Israel. Here he founded and organized the cultural circle “Oneg Shabat” over a period of 25 years. In 1969 (according to other sources, 1968 or 1970) Bloch returned to Germany from Israel and resumed his writing.

His best-known work is the story of the Jews of Konstanz (1971), for which Bloch had processed all the documents that had not been destroyed and interviewed the survivors. In 1982 Erich Bloch founded the library of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Konstanz together with Else Levi-Mühsam ; today Dr. Erich Bloch and Lebenheim Library . The Judaica were bought or donated. After his death, Elise Bloch gave the majority of Erich Bloch's private book collection to the library, as he wished. His estate is kept in the city archive of Konstanz. In the Chérisy district of Constance, a street is named after Erich Bloch.

Works

  • «The Jacob's Staff», a fragment of the drama by Otto Ludwig. Freiburg 1922.
  • Voices of life. Poems. Buch- und Kunstverlag Konstanz, Konstanz (1926).
  • History of the Jews of Konstanz in the 19th and 20th centuries. Stadler, Constance, 1971; 3. unchang. Edition 1996, ISBN 3-7977-0355-4 .
  • Vanishing point Höri. In: Alfred G. Frei, Jens Runge (ed.): Remembering - thinking - learning. The fate of Jews, forced laborers and prisoners of war between the Upper Rhine and Lake Constance in 1933 and 1945. Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1990, ISBN 3-7995-4127-6 , pp. 157–166.
  • together with Werner Trapp: Paradise lost. A life on Lake Constance 1897–1939. Thorbecke Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-7995-6833-6 .
  • Light and darkness. Seekreis-Verlag, Konstanz, 1992, ISBN 978-3-924246-13-6 .
  • Memories of Nahariya-Israel (1942–1967) , together with: Jenny Bohrer: The rabbi's wife remembers (1933–1938) . Edited by Horst Reichhardt. Loco Verlag, Schaffhausen 2005.

literature

  • Manfred Bosch : Bloch, Erich. In: Baden-Württemberg biographies. Volume 3. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2002, pp. 22-24.
  • Manfred Bosch: Bohème on Lake Constance. Literary life on the lake from 1900 to 1959. Libelle, Lengwil 1997, ISBN 3-909081-75-4 , here p. 65 f.
  • Manfred Bosch: “Now we have no more peace and quiet.” Erich and Liesel Bloch's Horner Gut. In: Oswald Burger , Manfred Bosch: “It was another dream of a life.” Fate of Jewish farmers on Lake Constance 1930–1960. UVK Verlagsgesellschaft Konstanz 2015, ISBN 978-3-86764-630-7 , pp. 37-59.
  • Barbara Buchmann: Tireless for reconciliation. Erich Bloch (1897–1994). In: 400 years of Heinrich-Suso-Gymnasium Konstanz. Bad Buchau 2004, pp. 127-131.
  • Lena Kreppel: German, Jewish, Israeli. Constructions of identity in autobiographical and essayistic texts by Erich Bloch, Jenny Cramer and Fritz Wolf. In: Epistemata. Würzburg scientific writings. Literary studies series. Volume 750. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2012.
  • Anja Salewsky: "The old Hitler should die!" Memories of the Jewish Kindertransport to England. Econ Ullstein List Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-548-60234-7 . (In it on pages 78–112 the report with interviews about Walter Bloch, which contains a lot more information about the Bloch and Friedmann families, from which Erich Bloch's first wife came.)
  • Bloch, Erich. In: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 37.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Constance stumbling block for Moritz Bloch
  2. ↑ Depicted in Erich Bloch: The lost paradise. A life on Lake Constance 1897–1939. Thorbecke Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, p. 79 f.
  3. ↑ Anja Salewsky: “The old Hitler should die!” Pp. 78–112.
  4. ↑ Short biography at LEO-BW (see web link)
  5. ↑ On Erich Bloch as a farmer on Michaelshof 1933 until his emigration in 1939 cf. Manfred Bosch : “Now we have no more peace and quiet.” Erich and Liesel Bloch's Horner Gut. In: Oswald Burger , Manfred Bosch: “It was another dream of a life.” Fate of Jewish farmers on Lake Constance 1930–1960. UVK Verlagsgesellschaft Konstanz 2015, ISBN 978-3-86764-630-7 , pp. 37-59.
  6. ↑ a b c Anja Salewsky: “The old Hitler should die!” Pp. 78–112.
  7. ↑ Erich Bloch: Paradise lost. A life on Lake Constance 1897–1939. Thorbecke Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-7995-6833-6 , p. 109.
  8. ↑ Markus Wolter: Radolfzell in National Socialism - The Heinrich Koeppen barracks as the location of the Waffen SS. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings. Volume 129, Ostfildern, Thorbecke 2011, pp. 247–286. (Digitized version) ; here p. 261 f.
  9. ↑ Date according to the publisher's text in his book Die Geschichte der Juden .
personal data
SURNAME Bloch, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Constancy
DATE OF DEATH 5th February 1994
Place of death Constancy