Ernst Johannsen

Ernst Johannsen (born May 28, 1898 in Altona , later Hamburg , † November 1, 1977 in Hamburg) was a German writer .

Life

Johannsen grew up in Hamburg, together with two sisters, as the son of a sailmaker in the Imperial Navy . From the stories of his father he gained detailed knowledge of seafaring, which flowed into some of the works created in the 1930s. After attending primary school, he did an apprenticeship as an electrician . In 1916 he was drafted into the military and came to Verdun at the beginning of 1917 , where he served with the radio operators. In 1919 he returned to Hamburg and worked in a shipyard in what he had learned. He then worked in Würzburg as a chief fitter and began to write on the side. On the occasion of the death of one of his sisters, he returned to Hamburg in 1928 and now devoted himself exclusively to writing. His most successful works were created during this time with the front novel Vier von der Infanterie and the radio play Brigadevermittlung , in which he processed his experience as a telecommunications operator.

In the 1930s Johannsen wrote more prose works and radio plays, but his financial situation became increasingly difficult. In 1938 his Jewish partner and their son had to emigrate to England. Johannsen followed in 1939, married and stayed in London until 1957 . The initial collaboration with the BBC ended in 1941 after personal and artistic differences. From 1942 to 1957 he worked as an electrician for the company "Victory Engineers Limited". In 1957 he returned to Hamburg with his wife and two of his three children, maintained contacts with Hans Henny Jahnn , but was no longer successful as a writer and died lonely and bitter in 1977.

The experience of the First World War at the front shaped Johannsen's thinking and writing to a large extent. With the novel Four of the Infantry. Her last days on the Western Front in 1918 he wrote his most important prose work. In lengthy conversations, four infantrymen, who all perish in the end, question the meaning of the war. Its destructive power is described in the chapter Inferno . The only positive value remains the camaraderie at the front. The novel, published by the small Fackelreiter-Verlag, quickly reached a circulation of 20,000 copies, was translated into several languages, but was nothing new in the shadow of Remarque's Im Westen . Georg Wilhelm Pabst shot his well-known anti-war film Western Front 1918 based on motifs from the novel .

The radio play Brigadevermittlung made Johannsen one of the most successful radio play authors of the Weimar Republic and brought him international fame. It was premiered on October 17, 1929 on Munich radio and broadcast in over 50 productions in eleven countries. Johannsen shows the importance of the telephone for warfare and at the same time uses it, in its capacity as a medium for voices, for the art form of radio play. Further radio plays by Johannsen were broadcast, but did not achieve the success of Brigadevermittlung .

Of his prose works, the story Fronterinnerungen einer Pferd (1929), in which the war is portrayed from the point of view of one of the millions of horses killed in the war, as well as the story Die Kreuz-Apotheke (1932), in which the unjust conditions in German Healthcare are denounced.

Novels, short stories

• Four of the infantry. Her last days on the western front 1918 Fackelreiter-Verlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf 1929. New edition: MEDIA Net Edition, Kassel 2014, ISBN 978-3-939988-23-6 .
• Front memories of a horse. Fackelreiter-Verlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf 1929.
• Station 3. A commander, six men and four machines. Wegweiser-Verlag, Berlin 1931.
• The cross pharmacy. In: Wieland Herzfelde (ed.): Thirty New Storytellers of New Germany. Young German prose. Berlin 1932, pp. 11-30. New edition: Günter Heintz: Texts of the proletarian-revolutionary literature of Germany 1919–1933, Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1974, pp. 128–134. ISBN 3-15-009707-X .
• Six on one island. Hesse & Becker-Verlag, Leipzig 1934.
• Storm over Santa Rock. Hesse & Becker-Verlag, Leipzig 1937.

Radio plays

• Brigade mediation. 1929.
• The comet. 1929.
• Unparalleled miracles. 1939.
• The barrel organs. 1949.
• Antonio doesn't want to be saved. 1966.
• Death in the warehouse. 1970.

literature

• Melanie Fohrmann: The war roared from the loudspeaker. Ernst Johannsen's radio play "Brigade mediation". Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89528-451-3 (Dissertation University Bielefeld 2003, 441 pages).
• Brian Murdoch: Animal People and Human Animals. Ernst Johannsen: "Four of the Infantry" and "Front memories of a horse". In: Thomas F. Schneider, Hans Wagener (eds.): From Richthofen to Remarque: German-language prose for World War I, Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York, NY 2003, pp. 249-257, ISBN 90-420-0955-1 .
• Death begins to reap human and animal casually. Thoughts on Ernst Johannsen's novel “Four of the Infantry” and GW Pabst's film “Western Front 1918”. In: Ernst Johannsen: Vier von der Infanterie: their last days on the Western Front 1918 , edited by Reinhold Keiner and Andre Kagelmann (= films to read no. 2), Media Net-Edition, Kassel 2014, pp. 80–113, ISBN 978-3-939988-23-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Fohrmann 2005, pp. 331–389.