Ernst Angel

Ernst Angel (later Ernest Angel ; born August 11, 1894 in Vienna ; † January 10, 1986 at Newark Airport , New Jersey ) was an Austrian-American poet and writer , theater and film critic , screenwriter , film director , publisher and psychoanalyst .

family

Ernst Angel was the second child of the Jewish Viennese paper manufacturer Siegfried Angel (1858 Triesch / Moravia - 1941 Kielce ) and his wife Helene (Ilona) Angel née Traub (1867 Szeged / Hungary - 1941 Kielce). Angel had an older sister, the actress Dora Angel (1889 Vienna - 1984 Berlin), her first marriage to the Viennese writer Otto Soyka and her second marriage to the Berlin writer Heinrich Eduard Jacob .

Life

Childhood, youth, war

Ernst Angel grew up in an upper class and liberal home. He started school at Easter 1900 and in 1905 switched to the kk academic high school in Vienna. The Franz-Joseph Real-Gymnasium and the kk Staatsgymnasium followed, also in Vienna. He graduated from the kk grammar school in Brno in 1914. Angel devoted himself to poetry as a high school student. Immediately after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, on July 28, 1914, he volunteered for service on the fronts of the First World War . In 1918 he was dismissed from military service as first lieutenant in the reserve, awarded the Signum Laudis order of bravery and the Karl-Troop Cross .

Between the wars

After the war, Angel joined the republican-minded people in Vienna, known as the "red rule of the street". It drew him close to the socialist leader Viktor Adler , who propagated the fight for the proletariat, for democracy, for socialism. Still fully influenced by the experiences of the war and the humiliating peace dictate of Saint-Germain-en-Laye , the Treaty of Saint-Germain , Angel published his passionate essay "Last Speech" in the magazine Der Friede , which clearly included Friedrich Nietzsche's " Also spoke Zarathustra "in order to awaken a consciousness revolution of the people who were estranged from himself.

After the First World War , Angel chose Gustav Landauer , whose novel The Death Preacher, was also written under the impression of Zarathustra reading , as his spiritual father . In addition to the revolution, Angel took the time to study philosophy at the University of Vienna from 1918 to 1920 and to publish articles in magazines such as Die Aktion , Das Junge Deutschland , Die Neue Schaubühne or Der Friede . He didn't stay in Vienna for long. The revolution had failed and, like many Austrian writers, he went to Berlin, where he worked as an assistant director at Max Reinhardt's German Theater. He also wrote dramaturgical and critical contributions for the papers of the Deutsches Theater . In 1920 Angels Sturz nach oben appeared , a collection of a total of thirty-one late Expressionist individual poems as well as the two cycles Advertisement and Epilogue , created between 1912 and 1919. Frank Thiess copied the title Sturz nach oben in later years for one of his works. From 1920 Ernst Angel hired himself briefly as a lecturer at the Berlin Erich Reiss Verlag , from mid-1922 he joined the Potsdam- based Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag ; here he was responsible for advertising. In 1924 he became advertising manager for Ullstein Verlag in Berlin for a year , but also editor of the first volume of the series Das Drehbuch. A collection of selected film manuscripts at Kiepenheuer.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Ernst Angel met and fell in love with the Baltic-born Russian Dussia Efrika at Café Central in Vienna . She became his first wife and their daughter Brigitte was born on August 24, 1923. But there was no real coexistence in this marriage. While Angel was mainly in Berlin, his wife lived in Vienna. The marriage ended in divorce in 1925.

Since Angel turned his attention to the film and its manifestations, it was natural that he also dealt with Thomas Alva Edison . During Edison's lifetime, he wrote the first biography in German about the great inventor. With the experience he was able to gain during his publishing activities, he founded the Ernst Angel Verlag in Berlin on May 1, 1925 . He mainly published works by the English author Herbert N. Cassons , but also his own Edison biography.

On February 22, 1927 Angel married his second wife, the literary scholar and historian Johanna (Hanne) Lehmann. From 1928 Angel devoted himself to the film industry and initially produced the full-length film Emden III drives around the world , which he directed as a director with the support of the naval management of the Reichswehr Ministry. The film ran very successfully all over Germany. In 1929 he and his friend Georg Michael Höllering (1898–1980) founded "Erdeka Film-GmbH" in Berlin. Angel made other films as a producer and director such as B. Hunt for you (first performance 1930 in Berlin). Also in 1930 he shot the film Joy in the Body for Maximilian Bircher-Benner's famous Zurich sanatorium . In 1931 Angel got out of the "Erdeka".

At the end of 1932, Ernst Angel left Berlin for Vienna, where he resumed the old plan for a series of lectures on The Secret of Sound Films and made a demonstration film on this subject. After that he wrote, directed and produced his film Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug) in 1934, very loosely based on Heinrich von Kleist, in the Viennese “ Selenophon Studios” . Angel turned Kleist's village Holland into a village Austria. This film was the only German-language entry to be admitted to the "International Sound Film Competition of the Vienna Film Festival Weeks" in June / July 1934 and was awarded the 3rd prize, the "Bronze Camera". The film was also shown in England and Holland with English subtitles. Between 1934 and 1935, Angel headed the film section of the Viennese bi-monthly magazine “Die Zeit. Leaves for Knowledge and Action ”, edited by Max Ermers (1881–1950). On May 20, 1936, Angels initiated the establishment of the Society of Film Friends Austria (gdfö). Founding members were u. a. Karl Bühler , Max Fellner , Arnold Hauser , Ernst Krenek , Fritz Lahr , Viktor Matejka , all honorable Viennese personalities. Under Angel's direction, the gdfö opened in February 1937 with two sold-out performances. After Austria was annexed to the German Reich , the gdfö immediately got a National Socialist at the top and was taken over by the Nazis, including its working capital.

Connection, emigration

Why Ernst Angel did not try to get into a safe country of exile at the time cannot at present be understood with any certainty. He even commuted between Vienna and Berlin until 1938, where his wife Hanna lived. Angel was arrested in Berlin in connection with the November pogroms and immediately transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . He spent around five weeks in the concentration camp and was released on December 15, 1938. This time changed the rest of Angel's life radically. On March 31, 1939, he was able to leave Berlin for England . His old and best childhood friend, Hans Flesch-Brunningen , later husband of the writer Hilde Spiel , took care of him here. Angel finally made it to New York in early 1940 .

Second career in the USA

Together with his brother-in-law Heinrich Eduard Jacob u. a. Angel founded the Friends of the European Writers and Artists in America committee in 1941 . The first lecture evening of this round took place on February 18, 1941 in New York under the motto "Between Two Worlds". Jules Romains and Ivan Goll represented France, WH Auden and Ann Dunnagan England, Raoul Auernheimer and Berthold Viertel Austria as well as Carl Zuckmayer and Heinrich Eduard Jacob Germany. Like almost all emigrants, Angel also had to fight bitterly to survive in the USA. His efforts to get back to work as a filmmaker failed and so he initially hired himself as an unskilled worker in warehouses or as a waiter. From 1947 he turned to psychology, a field to which he has always been close. He associated himself with the psychologists around Rollo May (1909–1994), a well-known psychotherapist and philosopher. Angel enrolled in the New York School for Social Research as a student of psychology and received a Master of Arts degree in 1954. During this time he made his living through various auxiliary jobs. From May 20, 1954, he was employed as a psychologist at the Institute for Motivational Research in New York. As early as 1951, Angel received additional training in psychoanalysis and in 1963 graduated from the Psychoanalytical Training Institute of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). In 1965 he became a member of the NPAP, ​​later even its vice-president. Also in 1965 - at the age of seventy-one - Angel completed his thorough studies at New York University with a Ph.D. With Rollo May and Henri F. Ellenberger , Angel published a sophisticated collection of texts on phenomenology and existential analysis under the title Existence in 1958 , which developed into a bestseller with many editions. From 1973 to 1975 he was President of the Council of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. For the last few years of his life, Angel was President of the Union of Concerned Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists (UCPP). Until immediately before his death, Angel used every forum to point out the psychology of the atomic threat and the armaments craze that went with it.

Late period

On the occasion of Ernst Angel's 90th birthday, on August 11, 1984, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote (No. 184, p. 32) that it was "a long way from Vienna to New York, from Expressionism to psychoanalysis " for Angel . On January 10, 1986, Ernst Angel wanted to fly from Newark Airport to his third wife Evelyn G. Angel, née Epstein, in La Jolla , California. Ernst Angel died of a heart attack at the age of ninety-one in the airport building.

Works

• Fall up. Poems . Vienna: Eduard Strache Verlag, 1920. Reprint: Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1973.
• Edison. His life and invention . Berlin: Ernst Angel Verlag, 1926. Reprint under the same title; Berlin: Wegweiser Verlag, 1931.
• Cultural Distance. A Study of Measures and Modes of the Distance Felt by Groups of American Intellectual Professions in Relation to Contemporary American Culture and Its Practiced 'Values' . New York University, 1965 (dissertation).

Further poems by Ernst Angel are contained in:

• The gate. An anthology of Viennese poetry . Heidelberg: Saturn Verlag Hermann Meister, 1913.
• Alfred Richard Meyer (ed.): The new woman praise. Anthology. Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Verlag AR Meyer, 1919. In it 1 poem ("Edith Hilge") by Angel.
• Emil Alphons Rheinhardt (ed.): The message. New poems from Austria . Vienna: Eduard Strache Verlag, 1920. In it 6 poems ("In memoriam Gustav Landauer", "Wiedersehen I-II", "One who has a bullet in his head", "Furor mysticus nocturnus", "Officer's mess", "Aus' Commercial '") by Angel.

Editing

• Carl Meyer: New Years Eve. A play of light . Edited and with an introduction by Ernst Angel. Volume 1 of the series The Screenplay . Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1924.
• Rollo May, Ernest Angel & Henry F. Ellenberger (Eds.): Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology . New York: Basic Book, 1958. Reissued in 1994 by Jason Aronson Publishers, Lanham, MD (USA); ISBN 1-56821-271-2 .

Translations

• Herbert N. Casson: Earning Money and Happiness! Translated from the English by Ernst Angel and Walter J. Briggs. Berlin: Ernst Angel Verlag, 1926.
• Herbert N. Casson: The design of the shop window: Twelve angles . Translated from the English by Ernst Angel and Walter J. Briggs. Berlin: Ernst Angel Verlag, 1928.
• Herbert N. Casson: The man at the top . Translated from the English by Ernst Angel and Frida Witkowsky. Stuttgart: Schuler Verlag, 1952.

Movies

• Zeitbericht - Zeitgesicht (Germany: 1928, short documentary film). Albrecht Viktor Blum (1888–1959) directed the film alongside Ernst Angel . Total length: 283 m, producer: Willi Münzenberg (1889–1940), production company: Volksverband für Filmkunst eV, Berlin.
• Emden III drives around the world. A “sea trip” in a prelude and seven stages (Germany: 1928/1929, documentary). Total length: 2472 m, production company: Eiko-Film AG, Berlin.
• Chasing you. Film actor from the cinema audience (Germany: 1930). Camera: Eugen Schüfftan (1886–1977), actor: Hans Schweikart (1895–1975). Production company: Erdeka-Film GmbH, Berlin.
• Joy in the Body (1930).
• The broken jug (Austria: 1934).

literature

• Bridget Angel-Bogard: From Vienna to New York. Life memories . Translated from English by Mechthild Alberts. Unpublished translation typescript (2004), 192 pp.
• Siglinde Bolbecher & Konstantin Kaiser (eds.): Ernst (Ernest) Angel ; in: "Lexicon of Austrian Exile Literature". Vienna & Munich: Deuticke Publishing Company, 2000; Pp. 39-40. ISBN 3-216-30548-1 .
• Ernst Fischer & Wilhelm Haefs (eds.): Sparkling brain worlds. Erpressionist literature in Vienna . Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1988. ISBN 3-7013-0745-8 .
• Hans Flesch-Brunningen : The seduced time. Life memories . Edited and with an afterword by Manfred Meixner. Vienna & Munich: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1988. ISBN 3-85447-261-7 .
• Hans Jörgen Gerlach : Ernst Angel ; in: John M. Spalek et al. (Ed.): "Deutschsprachige Exilliteratur since 1933", Volume 3 USA, Part 2. Bern & Munich: KG Saur Verlag, 2001; Pp. 34-59. ISBN 3-908255-17-1 .
• Hans Jörgen Gerlach: Heinrich Eduard Jacob: Between Two Worlds - between two worlds . Aachen: Shaker Verlag , 1997. ISBN 3-8265-2567-1 (therein Ernst Angel pp. 9-20).
• John M. Spalek et al. (Ed.): German-language exile literature since 1933 , Volume 4, Part 1 AG, ​​"Bibliographies. Writers, publicists and literary scholars in the USA". Bern & Munich: KG Saur Verlag, 1994. ISBN 3-907820-47-9 (therein primary and secondary literature Ernst Angel pp. 81/82).
• Gerald Trimmel: The Society of Austrian Film Friends: From the pioneering days of film education and film pedagogy in Austria . Vienna: Edition Unicum, 1996. ISBN 3-901529-01-2 .

estate

• There is an "Ernst Angel Collection" in the manuscript collection of the Vienna City and State Library: The collection includes works, letters, life documents and collectibles, including some stories and reports with lecture character from Ernst Angel's time at the UCPP and the complete script for Film comedy "Blitzlicht". There are letters from Ernst Angel from the period from 1905 to 1939/40 which, among other things, document his difficult situation in emigration. Among the letters to Angel are pieces of correspondence from the writer Otto Soyka , which paint a dramatic picture of the time in Vienna in 1939, and a few from other family members and friends. The success of the short film "The Broken Jug" is reflected in a small collection of reviews. Angel's commitment to the Society of Film Friends Austria is documented with invitation cards and announcements for film screenings. The collection is expanded by photographs that Ernst Angel took of the actress Alma Sergin .
• The extensive correspondence between Ernst Angel and his sister Dora or his brother-in-law Heinrich Eduard Jacob is in the manuscript department, German Literature Archive , in Marbach am Neckar .
• The copyright owner of Ernst Angels is his daughter, Mrs. Bridget Bogard, 535 East 14th Street, New York, NY 10009.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Angel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ernst Angel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Interviews by John M. Spalek with contemporary witness Ernst Angel