Erich von Mendelssohn

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Erich von Mendelssohn (born July 6 . Jul / 18th July  1887 greg. In Tartu ; † 17th June 1913 in Elsinore ) was a German writer , poet and translator . He belonged to the German-Jewish merchant, scholar and artist family Mendelssohn from Jever , which goes back to Moses Mendelssohn (not identical with the philosopher of the same name Moses Mendelssohn ).

Life

Erich von Mendelssohn, 1909
Source: Monacensia , Literature Archive and Library Munich
First edition of the novel Nacht und Tag with a foreword by Thomas Mann, published posthumously in 1914

His father was Professor Ludwig Mendelssohn , his mother Alexandrine von Cramer, daughter of an Estonian landowner, his son the writer Harald von Mendelssohn , his brother the Hellerau artisan Georg Mendelssohn , his sister the graphologist and writer Anja (von) Mendelssohn (later: Ania Adamkiewicz-Mendelssohn, then Ania Teillard ), his uncle the gymnastics teacher Salomon Mendelssohn .

In the rural education home

After the father's death in 1896, the family moved to Jena , where Erich von Mendelssohn attended grammar school. As a senior citizen he came to the newly founded Haubinda Landerziehungsheim in Thuringia , where he was one of the first students of the reform pedagogue Paul Geheeb , with whom his mother had already been in close contact during his student days in Jena. In Haubinda, Mendelssohn was also taught by the school's founder, Hermann Lietz . Although Mendelssohn was valued by Lietz, he suffered from his authoritarian style of upbringing and the regular reprisals of everyday school life in Haubinda. His closest school friends were the later writers Bruno Frank and Wilhelm Speyer . Mendelssohn dealt with the experiences in Haubinda in his last novel Nacht und Tag, written in 1913 . The despotic headmaster Dr. Easy to recognize as Hermann Lietz. He is described as capricious and uncontrolled, often downright domineering, the demagogue of the German state of education; most of the students were afraid of him and he especially suppressed those who did not want or could not follow his pedagogy of hardening. Lietz tried to have this portrait discredited by his classmates - not by himself - but Mendelssohn, who died just before the novel was published, received support from those alumni who recognized Lietz only too clearly. Erich von Mendelssohn left the Landerziehungsheim before the end of the 1904 school year because his performance was not convincing.

High School

Mendelssohn prepared for his Abitur in private lessons in Jena by attending lectures at the university at the same time. The art history lectures given by Jena professor Botho Graef , with whom he had a close personal relationship, particularly captivated him.

Education

It was due to Graef's influence that Erich devoted himself to studying art history after graduating from high school in Berlin in 1906, although he had long known that his love was writing. The beginning of the twitching, experimenting, nervous, temporary, irregular existence of the future writer who is still immature for his profession and yet feels incapable of anyone else. Mendelssohn commuted back and forth between Paris and Munich, where he met Thomas Mann . In 1908 a coincidence took him to Copenhagen , from where he set off on his first trip to Iceland , which cast a lasting spell on him.

Thomas Mann describes it in his foreword to Mendelssohn's novel “Night and Day” as follows: “This country will be the great experience of his soul. His intellectual impulses as well as the ambition to impose chivalrously strict demands on his body - a heroic and perhaps inadequate ambition, because he has a delicate body - find happiness in this nature, among these people. ” After returning to Copenhagen, Mendelssohn decided to stay and started studying Scandinavian languages. During a stopover in Munich, he met Gerda Schack-Schou (1888–1971) from Denmark and fell passionately in love with her. Both married in February 1910 and a year later had their son Harald, who later also worked as a writer and journalist.

author

Von Mendelssohn earned his living mainly translating from Icelandic, Danish and Swedish. So he translated u. a. Works by the Danish writers Jens Peter Jacobsen (including Mogens. A cactus blooms), Svend Fleuron ( A winter in the Jägerhofe ) and Thit Jensen ( Mona Ross. Novel from today's Iceland , published 1913), as well as the Icelandic Einar Hjörleifsson ( Ofurefli , 1912 under the title: Übermacht published).

With the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs he undertook a second trip to Iceland in July – August 1910, which apparently inspired Diederichs to publish the Thule Collection ( Thule - Old Norse Poetry and Prose ), a book series that published the Nordic sagas and myths for the first time in German. Von Mendelssohn contributed to this series the “Greenlander and Faroese Stories” published in Volume 13 in 1912. In 1913 the Leipziger Insel-Verlag published Mendelssohn's "The Saga of Freysgoden Hrafnkel."

Despite his enormous journalistic productivity, Mendelssohn found his situation "grotesque", because he received little positive response for what was really important to him, his own work. A book about Iceland, written after the first trip, remained unprinted. In 1912 he was only able to publish the volume of poems Pictures and Colors as a private print. His first short novel Phantasten , published in 1911 by Oesterheld & Co. Berlin, went unnoticed. For the subsequent novel Heimkehr (published in 1914), Mendelssohn initially failed to find a publisher. A possible breakthrough only became apparent with his last novel Nacht und Tag , which was conceived as a multi-volume, autobiographical work and the Leipzig publishing house of white books was interested in publishing. Then, however, in the summer of 1913, Mendelssohn caught a cold while swimming in the sea, which turned into pneumonia, from which he died - additionally weakened by an old heart condition - on June 17, 1913 at the age of only 26 in Elsinore. His last novel was published posthumously with a benevolent foreword by Thomas Mann , who wrote it at the request of his friend and Mendelssohn school friend Bruno Frank .

criticism

Thomas Mann, on the other hand, later expressed himself very critically to the writer Adolf von Grolmann about Erich von Mendelssohn's novels:

“Dear Mr. von Grolmann, I am returning the critical, highly critical little manuscript with many thanks. Poor M. [meaning Erich von Mendelssohn] can say in Glück's grave that it did not appear. My God, you were so strict. The book was terribly immature (I mean 'day and night' [sic]), but as a document neither unsympathetic nor entirely uninteresting. I say 'was' because in the presence you can no longer talk about it. Of course, I sacrifice 'homecoming' to you completely. At the time I did not withhold my very low opinion from the young person. "

In contrast, the writer Robert Musil wrote about "Night and Day":

“And with Mendelssohn: The grip of a hand that is more gentle than strong, but more secure. One of the most naive artistic stimuli, that of the material, has a very strong effect in Erich von Mendelssohn's novel fragment. (...) since Mendelssohn has an extraordinarily precisely modeled memory of pre-mature mental states, his book becomes an important document of youth. And since these young people, who are left to their own inner responsibility, have an unusually great moral reactivity, the book becomes full of a tremendous, quiet vitality of ethical stimuli. One can just as easily overlook them as, when attuned to them, one gets into a kind of visible overexcitement; the book is quiet. You have to transpose it a little, disregarding the school's importance, there then remain types of mental attitudes that are also possible with other objects. The value then lies in the collection of approaches to unlived, never used morals, all of which at some point came before us as equally possible; past which man grows to his adult ethos without actually knowing with what right. Past worldviews that might have provided more spiritual happiness than our metromanes of 'superfluous necessities'. One listens back in shaky security. The book gives nothing decisive on this; the poet's hand is more gentle than strong; but quietly shocking. "

Works

  • 1911: dreamers
  • 1912: Pictures and colors (as private print)
  • 1912: Greenlander and Faroese stories
  • 1912: The saga of Freysgoden Hrafnkel
  • 1914: homecoming
  • 1914: night and day

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Entry in the baptismal register of the university parish in Dorpat (Estonian: Tartu ülikooli kogudus)
  2. ^ Georg L. Mosse: The völkisch revolution. About the spiritual roots of National Socialism. 1991, p. 179.
  3. Jürgen Oelkers: “Reform Pedagogy”: A German Destiny? Lecture at the University of Wuppertal on July 13, 2010, p. 7 ff.
  4. Peter de Mendelssohn: Marianne. The novel of a film and the film of a novel. 1955, p. 42, also: Peter de Mendelssohn: Imposed portraits: Erich von Mendelssohn. Transcript for a contribution in Bavarian Radio, May 24, 1973, p. 3.
  5. Ibid., P. 8.
  6. ^ Letter from Wolfgang Heine to Paul Geheeb dated February 28, 1904.
  7. Ibid., P. 4
  8. Eugen Diederichs in Mitteilungen der Icelandfreunde , 1st year October 1913, issue 2, p. 21f.
  9. Thomas Mann: Foreword to the novel "Night and Day", 1914
  10. Britta Dittmann, Thomas Rütten, Hans Wisskirchen and Jan Zimmermann: "Your very devoted Thomas Mann". Autographs from the Buddenbrookhaus archive, 2006, p. 98
  11. ^ Robert Musil: About Erich von Mendelssohn , June issue 1914, Neue Rundschau, pp. 851–852
  12. Peter de Mendelssohn: Imposed portraits: Erich von Mendelssohn, transcript for a contribution in the Bavarian Radio , May 24, 1973, p. 4