Erik Reger

Erik Reger (actually Hermann Dannenberger , born September 8, 1893 in Bendorf am Rhein, † May 10, 1954 in Vienna ) was a German writer and journalist.

Life

Honorary grave at the forest cemetery in Zehlendorf

Erik Reger was the son of a miner's family. After completing secondary school, he began studying literature and history in Bonn, which he then continued in Munich and Heidelberg. He took part as a soldier in the First World War and was taken prisoner by the English .

From 1919 to 1927 he worked as a press officer and balance sheet critic at Friedrich Krupp AG .

His experiences there flowed into his first and best-known novel Union der Solid Hand , which appeared in 1931, for which Reger was awarded the Kleist Prize in the same year (together with Ödön von Horváth ) and which was directed by Claus-Peter in 1978 Witt was filmed for ZDF with Christoph Quest , Dieter Laser , Edith Schultze-Westrum and Hannes Messemer .

The novel was, together with the second novel The Vigilant Chicken , published in 1932 , the subject of the book burning in Germany in 1933 .

In addition to his work at Krupp AG, Reger worked as a theater critic for several newspapers and as an employee of the radio in Cologne. From 1927 onwards he worked for the Essen literary and theater magazine Der Brille , and from January 1928 he was the editor of the weekly Westdeutscher Brille . As an author, he used a number of pseudonyms here: Anton Dornschlag, Walter Enkenbach, Heinz Lamprecht, Eberhard Rauschebart, Fritz Schulte ten Hoevel, Heinrich Schmitz, Ernst Stahlburg, Karl Westhoven.

Reger lived in Switzerland from 1934 to 1936. He then returned to Germany, where he first worked in the advertising department of a pharmaceutical factory, then as a lecturer in the novel department of the "Aryanized" Ullstein Verlag , the German publishing house in Berlin.

In 1945 Reger became a license holder, co-publisher and editor-in-chief of the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel . As the first representative of the German press after World War II , he visited the United States in 1947. In 1947 Reger offered Klaus Bölling (1928–2014) an internship at Tagesspiegel; so began his journalistic career. Since 1950 Reger was a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt .

Reger died of a heart attack in May 1954 during the third general assembly of the International Press Institute in Vienna. He received an honorary grave of the city of Berlin in the department VI W-107/110 at the Berlin forest cemetery Zehlendorf , in the district Berlin-Nikolassee. In Essen, a plaque on Rellinghauser Straße 201 reminds that Erik Reger lived there from 1931 to 1933.

Works

Erik Reger has mainly written novels. After his successful debut Union der Solid Hand (1931; world premiere of a dramatized version in 2000 in Zollverein Essen, director: Stephan Stroux), The Vigilant Chicken was published in 1932 , in which he describes the career of a typical opportunist during the inflationary years. The following year Schiffer appeared in the river , and in 1935 Lenz and Jette. Chronicle of a Passion and Napoleon and the Crucible .

From 1928 to 1932 Reger wrote for Die Weltbühne , currently 6 articles can be found; he had many more appear in this magazine under pseudonyms.

In Homesickness for Hell , published in 1937, he describes the decline of a Corsican family. A new version of this novel appeared in 1943 under the title The Island of Golden Darkness . In 1941, Children of Twilight and The Forbidden Summer appeared .

In addition to the novels, Reger published a volume of short stories in 1943 under the title Urban's Story Book . Political essays appeared in 1947 under the title Two Years After Hitler. Conclusion 1947 and of the future Germany .

In 1955, the novella The Robbery of Virtue about the necklace affair of Queen Marie Antoinette was published from the estate .

In 2014, Zeit des Überlebens appeared , a newly discovered diary about the end of the war in 1945. In it, Reger describes how he experienced the last days of the Third Reich and the invasion of the Red Army in Mahlow near Berlin from April to June 1945.

Erik Reger Prize

The “Zukunftsinitiative Rheinland-Pfalz” has been awarding the Erik Reger Prize to writers and journalists since 1999 for an intensified public debate on the role of business and trade in social life . However, since 2009 the award has not been advertised any more.

literature

• Hans-Werner Niemann: The image of the industrial entrepreneur in German novels of the years 1890-1945 . Berlin 1982.
• Erhard Schütz : Union of firm hands. In: ders .: Novels of the Weimar Republic . Munich 1986, pp. 125-146.
• Erhard Schütz, Matthias Uecker: “Precision Aesthetics”? Erik Reger's “Union of the Firm Hand” - journalism as a novel. In: Sabina Becker, Christoph Weiß (ed.): New Objectivity in the Roman. New interpretations of the novel of the Weimar Republic . Stuttgart 1995, pp. 89-111.
• Matthias Uecker: The publicist as a novelist. Erik Reger's Ruhr area novels. In: Konrad Ehlich (Hrsg.): Language and literature on the Ruhr . 2., ext. and revised Edition. Essen 1997, ISBN 3-88474-488-7 , pp. 167-182.
• Christian Tauschke: "Vivisection of Time". Studies on the representation and criticism of contemporary history in journalism and novels by Erik Reger (1924–1932) . Hamburg 1997.
• Dirk Hallenberger: Industry and Home. A literary history of the Ruhr area . Essen 2000, pp. 246-256.
• Erhard Schütz:  Reger, Erik. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 260 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Jan-Pieter Barbian: "An author who is no longer allowed to do what he wants". Erik Reger and Rowohlt Verlag in the Third Reich . In: ders .: The perfect impotence? Writer, publisher and bookseller in the Nazi state. Selected essays. Essen 2008, pp. 227-251.
• Jörn Steigerwald: The imaginary capital of industry: Erik Reger's union of the firm hand. In: Rudolf Behrens, Jörn Steigerwald (ed.): The power and the imaginary . Würzburg 2005, pp. 247-265.
• Andreas Petersen: Notes on the diary. In: Erik Reger: time of survival. Diary April to June 1945 . Berlin 2014, pp. 131–158.
• Christoph Marx: Political Press in Post-War Berlin 1945–1953 - Erik Reger and Rudolf Herrnstadt . ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-8382-0985-2 .

Web links

Commons : Erik Reger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Erik Reger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Erik Reger in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Erik Reger - Hermann Dannenberger , biography (Society for History and Local Lore of Bendorf and Surroundings e.V.)
• Erik Reger Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin

Footnotes

1. ↑ First broadcast April 30, 1979 ( Union of the firm hand on www.fernsehserien.de )
2. ^ Lexicon of Westphalian authors 1750 to 1950.
3. ↑ Erik Reger. In: NDB . 21, 2003.
4. ↑ stephanstroux.de ( Memento of the original from February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) 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. 
5. ↑ The years refer to the 6 known articles and are therefore estimated. E.g. as E. Reger: The real workers' press. Vol. 25, H. 10, March 5, 1929, pp. 366-372
6. ↑ Kulturpreise.de