Erika Spann-Rheinsch

Erika Spann-Rheinsch , actually Erika Emma Emilie Hedwig Gertrude Reinsch , divorced Dorn , married Spann (born October 4, 1880 in Trennfeld , Bavaria, † August 25, 1967 in Neustift bei Schlaining ) was an Austrian poet who also goes by the pseudonym Erika Rheinsch and Gertrud Berg published.

Life

Rheinsch was the oldest child and the only daughter of the Bavarian government councilor and railway engineer Friedrich August Reinsch and his wife Anna Elisabeth, née Berg. Her brother was the biologist Kurt Friedrich Reinsch .

She received a strictly Protestant upbringing and grew up in Trennfeld, Hammelburg , Diebach and Kempten , where her father worked as a civil servant. Reinsch received her schooling in Erlangen , Passau , Rosenheim , Munich and Landshut . She wrote her first poems while she was still at school from 1893. In 1898 she passed the state exams for French and English at the A. B. von Stetten Institute in Augsburg . Since 1900 she was mainly active as a poet. From 1901 she lived in Munich, where she took part in high school courses without success. As a result, she was unable to take up the philosophy course that was planned against her parents' will.

In Munich Reinsch received funding from the women's rights activist Friederike Freudenberg and the writer Otto Leixner von Grünberg ; she joined the association for women's interests. In 1902 she married the publicist and economist Hanns Dorn . From this marriage came their son Heinrich Dorn, who died in 1923.

Through her husband, Erika Dorn met Othmar Spann in 1905 , who, together with Dorn, published the critical journals for the entire social sciences between 1905 and 1907 . In the same year Erika Dorn left her husband and lived with Othmar Spann in Frankfurt am Main . In 1906 they divorced Dorn and in the same year in Dover they married Spann. The sons Adalbert Spann (1907–1942) and Rafael Spann (1909–1983) emerged from the second marriage.

In 1905 she made her first public appearance as a poet and on May 6, 1906, Spann-Rheinsch received her first award at the 8th Cologne Flower Games for her song for the price of music .

From 1906 the poet lived on a farm in Zirnitz near Admont in Styria and from 1907 together with her husband in Vienna . In 1908 the couple moved to Neu Leskau near Brno and in 1909 to Brno . From then on, Spann-Reinsch devoted himself full-time to poetry, but attended lectures at the Brno University of Technology, where her husband taught economics and statistics, as a guest student.

In February 1917, the poet was awarded an honorary gift from the Eduard von Bauernfeldschen Prämienstiftung. In December 1919 she was awarded the Ebner-Eschenbach Prize for 1920. In February 1921, Spann-Rheinsch received an honorary gift from the German Schiller Foundation.

After Othmar Spann's appointment as professor for economics and social studies at the University of Vienna in 1919, Erika Spann continued to live in Brno with her two sons Adalbert and Rafael and moved to Vienna with her husband in 1920. In 1925 Erika Spann, who had increasingly turned to the faith again since 1914, converted to Catholicism and then went on a pilgrimage to Rome . At the University of Vienna she was a guest student in lectures in botany, mineralogy, crystallography and geology.

Alone or with her husband, she traveled through Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Crete and Egypt from the 1920s. During this time she maintained close contacts with the editors of the ethnographic and anthropological journal Anthropos, which is published in Mödling . In addition to her poetry, Spann-Rheinsch now also worked as a translator of Chinese and Latin works. In 1926 she was accepted into the Austrian PEN Club .

After the poet had regularly stayed at a farm in In der Lahn near Vordernberg in Styria from 1924 , the family bought the factory castle in Neustift near Schlaining as a summer residence in 1934 . In May 1933, Spann-Rheinsch joined the NSDAP and the Vienna branch of the Combat League for German Culture . During this time she became a member of the Reich Association of German Writers . On June 29, 1933, Spann-Rheinsch announced that she was leaving the Austrian PEN Club because it had condemned the Nazis' book burning in May 1933. A little later she joined the German PEN Club. Until 1934, Spann-Rheinsch worked for the National Socialist magazine Österreichischer Beobachter , whose editors were her two sons, and became the editor of the Sunday supplement Der Bleikristall . In 1936 she was one of the founding members of the Association of German Writers Austria . In 1938, Spann-Rheinsch made the Neustift Castle near Schlaining her main residence and lived there until her death.

After Austria was annexed to the German Reich , her application to join the NSDAP was refused in 1939 because her husband had fallen out with the rulers and was imprisoned for four months in Dachau concentration camp in 1938 . For the same reason, the Reichsschrifttumskammer also refused to accept them . However, these notices did not prevent her from continuing to appear publicly as a “Hitler admirer”.

After the end of the Second World War, Spann-Rheinsch returned to work as a poet.

Publications (selection)

• The Lute , Berlin 1913
• Trutznachtingall , Eger 1919
• Paracelsus and his disciple , Eger 1921
• Happy wandering , Vienna 1922
• Greetings to Brno - songs and poems , Augsburg 1925
• In front of Attic tombs , Munich 1925
• Spiritual hymns from the song treasure of the Catholic Church , Mainz 1960
• Gloria, laus et honor , Munich 1962

Web links

• Literature by and about Erika Spann-Rheinsch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Spann estate with a detailed biography and bibliography of Erika Spann-Rheinsch

Individual evidence

1. ^ Roček, Roman (2000). Glamor and misery of the PEN biography of a literary club . Vienna / Cologne / Weimar: Böhlau. P. 138.