Ernst Kaiser (Author)

Ernst David Kaiser (born October 3, 1911 in Vienna , † January 1, 1972 in Reading ) was an Austrian author and translator .

Live and act

The Jewish Austrian Ernst David Kaiser was born in Vienna on Bandgasse. His father, a Jewish merchant, came from the Slovak part of Hungary, his mother from Brno . He was Hungarian at birth and later Austrian as a result of his father's opting. Ernst Kaiser grew up in Vienna, attended grammar school, passed the Matura , did his military service and studied German. Before he was able to complete his doctorate, Austria was annexed to the German Reich on March 12, 1938 . Only a few months later Kaiser fled via Prague to Poland and from there by ship to Southampton / GB. He settled in London. He only found a job in a slaughterhouse, where he hauled pork and beef halves in the cold store. At the beginning of the war Kaiser was interned “and then served for almost six years in the British Army (France, Belgium, Holland, Germany), most recently in the military government in Hamburg as an interpreter with the rank of sergeant, and then preferred to retire to private life to renounce the eventual officer rank. ” Later he noted that he had fought against Germany for Germany.

post war period

While still in Hamburg in 1946 his first book "Schattenmann", a novella, was published by Hans Dulk. He lived in London again and works as a translator. As a writer he was unsuccessful. At the end of 1946 Kaiser received English citizenship. He met Eithne Wilkins, a New Zealand German scholar, translator and poet. At the time she was teaching at the University of London. Kaiser and Wilkins married in 1949.

In 1947 Kaiser applied to the Bollingen Foundation in New York for a grant to write the second part of his novel "The Story of a Murder". It is the writer Hermann Broch who is reviewing the first 480 pages of the manuscript for the Foundation. Broch is full of praise and recommends the promotion of Kaiser. He is aware that it will be difficult to find a publisher for the bulky book. He therefore makes the suggestion to found a library in which manuscripts worth publishing should be collected, for which there is initially no publisher, so that they are not forgotten or lost.

Despite the efforts of Hermann Broch, the foundation refused to support Kaiser. He wrote the second part of his novel without funding, as well as a number of short stories and short stories in the following years. Together with his wife, he translated books from German into English. They are regarded as outstandingly good translators who work for top publishers in the USA and Great Britain. Her long list of transmissions includes a. Novels, stories and poems by Goethe , Kafka , Benn , Feuchtwanger , Wiechert , Kokoschka and Lenz , as well as volumes of letters by Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg .

Musil translation

Their translations of several works by Robert Musil are groundbreaking , including “ The Man Without Qualities ”, which they not only translated but also edited in a new version from the estate. In general, scientific work on Robert Musil's work was their main activity for Kaiser and Wilkins-Kaiser since 1950. As early as 1948 "they gave the most spectacular signal that first raised awareness of the importance of the writer (Musil) after the Second World War with a large article in the London Times". Since 1950 they have jointly published numerous scientific papers on Musil's work in specialist journals and anthologies, and finally in 1962 the extensive volume “Robert Musil - An Introduction to the Work” in Stuttgart.

The contact to the Bollingen Foundation was now helpful. Between 1954 and 1965, the Kaiser / Wilkins couple were able to live in Rome for a total of eleven years thanks to several scholarships from the Foundation, viewing and evaluating Musil's estate. The knowledge gained in this way led to a dissent of several years with the Rowohlt Verlag , where Adolf Frisé published a complete edition of Robert Musil's work. In doing so, Frisé disregarded the texts of Musil's estate; with the result that additional chapters to the novel "The Man Without Qualities" were not published and the order of the published chapters was not correct. Only after heated public discourse and after the translation of the novel in the correct and supplemented form by Kaiser / Wilkins appeared in the USA and Great Britain, the Rowohlt Verlag decided to issue a corrected new edition. In Die Zeit of April 21, 1967, one could read about this: “The years of disputes over the Musil edition, fueled by the investigations into the estate of Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, came to a happy end. Rowohlt Verlag announced ... that a new edition of its works has now been tackled. 1968 appear ... and the new edition of "The Man Without Qualities" developed by Frisé in association with the emperors ... So that it seems as if one of the few outstanding German writers of this century would come to a proper edition of his work after all. "

The Kaiser / Wilkins couple also played a key role in the relocation of Robert Musil's estate from Rome to Austria, where these materials are now archived in the holdings of the National Library in Vienna.

In 1969 Ernst Kaiser was able to publish a second book. It is the Paracelsus monograph in the series of monographs published by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. It is not currently known why the author was interested in Paracelsus. Possibly it was a commissioned work for the publisher, which was made for purely financial reasons.

Publication of the 2nd novel

Ernst Kaiser tried several times to get his novel “The Story of a Murder” published by German publishers. Friends like the Germanist Wilhelm Bausinger tried to support him. The manuscript was in the Suhrkamp Verlag for almost three years . The readiness to publish this work was signaled from there several times. Kaiser was asked to shorten the text significantly. He refused; not because he did not want any cuts, but because he stated that the work had to be "made objectively usable". He hoped, "Long live a god to shorten and tighten." In November 1960, Suhrkamp returned the manuscript without comment. Kaiser handed the text over to the publisher Ledig-Rowohlt, with whom he had been in personal contact for three years regarding the revision of the Musil edition. Ledig-Rowohlt also initially held out the prospect of the novel being published; but also insisted on cuts. As he reported in a letter to Bausinger, Kaiser agreed to this. But he told Ledig-Rowohlt that he could not make this revision. First, it was ten years ago that he finished the work; In terms of time, he was unable to find his way back into his text and, secondly, the novel came from a lifetime that he had completed and to which he did not want to return. But he had given the publisher a free hand to shorten, also to cut sharply. Kaiser was all the more astonished that his manuscript was returned by a publishing secretary two months later without any comment.

The writer Ingrid Bachér , who now lives in Düsseldorf, stayed in Rome in the first half of the 1960s. She met the Kaiser / Wilkins couple, and friendship developed. She also offered to present "The Story of a Murder" to her publishers. Ernst Kaiser also gave her a free hand to revise the text. Their efforts were also unsuccessful at the time. Ingrid Bacher returned to Germany, and Ernst Kaiser and his wife moved back to Great Britain in 1966. Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins received a professorship at Reading University in the spring of 1968. Kaiser was made an Honory Research Fellow and, with his wife, headed the Robert Musil Research Unit at the university. The Kaisers kept in touch by letter with Ingrid Bacher.

Disappeared estate

Ernst Kaiser died in Reading on January 1, 1972 . Only two years later, at the end of 1974, Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins also died. Shortly afterwards, Ingrid Bacher's former assistant at the University of Kaiser-Wilkins wrote that the Kaisers had ordered all of Ernst Kaiser's manuscripts to be handed over to her, with the request that she try to publish from this bundle . She immediately replied that she was ready to take over the texts. The announced package with the texts never arrived. All attempts to clarify the whereabouts of the package were unsuccessful. The assistant had to go to a closed psychiatric clinic and was no longer available. There is no Imperial estate in Reading. Eithne Wilkins' brother, a scientist, refused to give any information. The texts of the writer Ernst David Kaisers had to be considered lost. In one of her novels, Ingrid Bacher wrote about the fate of the Kaiser and his manuscripts. The unknown author thus became a figure in literature.

Ingrid Bacher reported on Ernst Kaiser, his wife and his missing texts at two forums of the Else-Lasker-Schüler-Gesellschaft . In 2001 she approached a young man and offered to conduct research. In the age of the internet there must be something about Kaiser. He was right. The German Literature Archive in Marbach contained numerous references to Kaiser, correspondence with writers, specialist journals and publishers. The legacy of the ethnologist Prof. Dr. Hermann Bausinger. Hermann Bausinger also handed over the estate of his brother Wilhelm, who died in an accident in 1966, to the archive as part of his estate. This includes u. a. an extensive correspondence between Wilhelm Bausinger and Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins. They were not only connected as Musil researchers, but also as friends. In addition, the Bausinger holdings also contain manuscripts by Kaiser, including a carbon copy of a typewritten manuscript of the novel “The Story of a Murder”, a total of over 1,000 pages, divided into a first part, “The Great House”, an “Interlude” and a second part "The White House".

Ingrid Bacher drove to Marbach and read the text “Das Großes Haus” and many letters from Kaiser / Bausinger in the archive. She had the manuscript copied and looked for a publisher. Again it was not possible for years to get a publisher to print the novel “The Story of a Murder”. And this despite the fact that there was always great interest in a publication. It was not until the spring of 2008 that, through personal acquaintance with the publisher Ralf Liebe and his program director Helmut Braun, she found two comrades-in-arms who were ready to publish the novel. After reading the entire manuscript, Braun suggested that the first part of the text should be published as “The Story of a Murder”. Since the second part, "The White House", is far removed from the narrative of the first part and the character of the protagonist serves as the only bracket, it is justified to speak of two novels that can be published separately from one another. As promised at the time, Ingrid Bacher took on the task of “making the text objectively usable” in Kaiser's sense, “tightening and shortening” it. She did this carefully and without stylistic interventions. The necessary transcription - the creation of a file - and its correction led to a careful adjustment to our current spelling and punctuation without affecting the special features of Kaiser's spelling. Now there is a “readable text” that tells of a man who is caught up in a murder case in a surreal way, falls into a trap of reality and fiction, almost perishes over the question of guilt and by renouncing everything made up his life, seeking salvation.

literature

• Gerhard Renner : The bequests in the libraries and museums of the Republic of Austria [...]. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 1993, p. 189; Austrian estate directory ÖNB (Vienna)
• Wolfgang Schmitz [ed.]: Ernst David Kaiser and the story of a murder: literary evaluation; Research on life and work; Text excerpts , Cologne: University and City Library, 2012, ISBN 978-3-931596-70-5

Works

• The story of a murder , love , Weilerswist 2010, ISBN 978-3-941037-21-2 .
• with Eithne Wilkins: Robert Musil: An introduction to the work , Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1962 DNB 452293960 .
• "Schattenmann" , Verlag Hans Dulk, 1946

He was also the translator of numerous novels of world literature.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Kaiser in the catalog of the German National Library
• Exile archive