Ernst Behrends

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Ernst Behrends (born May 19, 1891 in Gudow ; † July 9, 1982 in Lübeck ) was a North German poet and narrator .

Life

Ernst Behrends was born on May 19, 1891 as the eldest son of the teacher and organist Karl Behrends in the village of Gudow in Lauenburg . After attending elementary school, Behrends studied from 1905 to 1908 at the Preparandeum in Bad Oldesloe and then at the teachers' seminar in Ratzeburg . After graduating, he was able to take up his first position at the Mölln Middle School in April 1911 . Two years later he went to the military as a one-year volunteer and was seriously wounded by a shot in the head shortly after the outbreak of World War I. The aftermath of the wound accompanied him throughout his later life. After his discharge from the military, he returned to his position as a middle school teacher in Mölln in November 1915, where he stayed until an (early) retirement in 1939.

Shortly after the end of the First World War, Behrends began to work as a writer. In 1921 he published his first novel, Erich Pflüger's Path to the World . In 1923 the volume of poems Ewige Ruhe followed . Between 1925 and 1929 he wrote the complex for the city of Mölln calligraphic crafted chronicle of the fallen city of Mölln . At the same time, he increasingly represented völkisch positions and approached National Socialism . In 1923 he became a member of the Association of Völkischer Teachers, in 1924 of the Völkisch-Sozial bloc and finally in 1925 of the NSDAP . Behrends himself stated that he was proud to have been the first National Socialist teacher in Schleswig-Holstein .

Between 1929 and 1933, Behrends came into contact with the German-Russian refugees who had fled Stalinism , around 6,000 of whom were housed in a refugee camp in Mölln until they emigrated to America. Of the approximately 6,000 refugees, around 4,000 were Russian-German Mennonites . The encounter with the refugees left a strong impression on Behrends and later flowed into several literary works about the Anabaptist movement and Mennonites.

In 1936 Behrends became a member of the Nazi-oriented Eutin poets' circle . When, however, in November of the same year the Völkischer Beobachter printed a devastating criticism of his new novel Der Rohrsänger and the NS examination board also rejected the novel, Behrends, who had seen himself as a staunch National Socialist up to that point, had initial doubts about the NS state . Not least the decision of the Nazi government in 1942 to ban literary works in dialect led to open opposition from Behrends. His novel Stern, not far from Odessa, was also not printed in 1944.

After the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, he was able to present himself as a critic of the Nazi state. Although rejected by Nazi cultural policy, he remained a member of the NSDAP until the end of the war. He himself stated that he felt "a gap between the party and the movement" early on. After the war he took up his work as a writer again. From 1966 he worked on his main work, The People of Wandering , in which he processed the history of the Russian-Germans and especially the Russian-German Mennonites in six volumes. The stories about Till Eulenspiegel published in 1986 and the novel Hans Eidig - Wildschütz und Volksheld, published in 1971, following the Robin Hood motif , can also be mentioned .

In 1981 Behrends received the Duchy of Lauenburg Foundation's Culture Prize . Six months later, Behrends died in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. He was buried in the old Möllner cemetery.

His work, including most of the manuscripts, is kept in the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College in North Newton , Kansas .

Works (selection)

  • The reed warbler. 1936
  • Home without a bank. (Poems) 1942
  • The wandering people. 1966-1977
    • Volume 1: The Heretic Bishop - Life and Struggle of the Reformer Menno Simons. 1966
    • Volume 2: The Rose of Wüstenfelde - A woman's fate in the Thirty Years War. 1973
    • Volume 3: The red tulipan. 1977
    • Volume 4: Upstream. 1970
    • Volume 5: The steppe stallion. 1969
    • Volume 6: We defy the will-o'-the-wisp - Russian Germans in the motherland 1929–1961. 1975
  • Till is still raving - cheerful stories. 1968
  • Hans Eidig - Heidewildschütz and folk hero. 1971
  • My brown protest (poems from many years). 1976
  • The path was full of miracles. (Poems) 1978

literature

  • Christian Lopau: Ernst Behrends and Mölln , in: Eckart Opitz (Ed.): The Duchy of Lauenburg in the mirror of literature. Bochum 2011, pp. 195-201
  • Eckardt Opitz: Ernst Behrends as a writer and winner of the culture award of the Duchy of Lauenburg Foundation. in: Eckart Opitz (Ed.): The Duchy of Lauenburg in the mirror of literature. Bochum 2011, pp. 203-213
  • Lawrence D. Stokes : The Eutin Poet Circle and National Socialism 1936–1945. Kiel 2001, pp. 228-235
  • Heinold Fast : Behrends, Ernst , in: Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 1982, pp. 96-105
  • Herta Marie Funk: The religious worldview in Ernst Behrends' series of novels "The people of wandering". Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1982.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Behrends - German writer. In: munzinger.de. March 25, 2014, accessed November 4, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b Herta Marie Funk: Behrends, Ernst (1891-1982). In: gameo.org. 1987, accessed November 4, 2018 .
  3. ^ The cultural award of the Duchy of Lauenburg Foundation. In: stiftung-herzogtum.de. Retrieved November 4, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Behrends, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION North German lyric poet and narrator
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Gudow
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 1982
Place of death Lübeck