Ernst Kreuder

Ernst Kreuder (born August 29, 1903 in Zeitz , † December 24, 1972 in Darmstadt ) was a German writer. His predominantly narrative work has time-critical , romantic and mystical features. Soon after being awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1953 , Kreuder was unable to build on any significant successes from 1945 onwards . Several attempts at "rediscovery" have failed to this day.

Life

Ernst Kreuder grew up in simple circumstances in Offenbach am Main , where he, like his brother Wilhelm Kreuder , attended secondary school. He did a bank apprenticeship and studied philosophy, literary history and criminology in Frankfurt am Main , albeit without a degree. He helped finance his studies as an unskilled worker in an iron mine, a brick factory and on construction sites. In 1926/27 he went on a 13-month hike through Yugoslavia , Albania and Greece with his friend Hanns Ulbricht . The trip ended in financial and health disaster.

During these years Kreuder joined the South Hessian artist group of Animalists , who u. a. Hans Henny Jahnn , Gottfried Benn , Ludwig Klages , Theodor Däubler and Alfred Döblin . However, Kreuder later criticized Benn's unreserved welcome to the “Third Reich”. After the war, Kreuder remained connected with leading animalists such as Carl Mumm and the brothers Max and Jan Herchenröder .

Kreuder had already written features for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s . In 1932 he wrote for the Munich Simplicissimus and worked as an editorial assistant at the satirical magazine until 1933 by the SA haunted and finally brought into line was. From 1934 to 1940 Kreuder and his wife Irene lived in seclusion in the former Kaisermühle near Darmstadt . During this time he wrote adventurous and grotesque short stories as bread-and-butter work, which appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines in the Nazi state . At the same time he began working on the undetectable . This extensive novel in an evocative tone is often referred to as Kreuder's main work. It could not appear until 1948.

Kreuder's role in Inner Emigration is not undisputed. If one follows Stephan Rauer's thorough investigation, the narrator himself tended to paint his "oppositional", even "resisting" role in retrospect with too much color. Kreuder had his short story market, published two anthologies, took part in readings from time to time, and figured he had a good chance of bringing out the undetectable . He probably had a similar success in mind as his Berlin colleague and friend Horst Lange had achieved with the novel Black Weide .

From 1940 to 1945 Kreuder largely had to forego writing because he had been drafted into the Wehrmacht . He served in the air defense in the Ruhr area . Having returned to the Kaisermühle from two months of American imprisonment, completely exhausted and dejected , he nevertheless senses the chance to succeed in the empty book market. Since the manuscript of the large-scale undetectable was still too imperfect, he succeeded in doing this with the three stories " floating path" , " The story through the window" and the company from the attic . The attic caused quite a stir. This short novel, which for Kasimir Edschmid represented the amazingly graceful prelude to Kreuder's opus, was the first literary work from post-war Germany to be translated into English. The attic is the only work by Kreuder that has seen several new editions and has not been forgotten to this day.

In 1949 Ernst Kreuder was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz by Alfred Döblin . His acquaintance and at times friendship with Arno Schmidt dates from this time - until he tore Kreuder's novel Agimos , published in 1959 . Although Ernst Kreuder received the Büchner Prize (1953) almost 20 years later (1971) still the Prize of the Kulturkreis in the Federal Association of German Industry , he had great difficulty in this period of time to feed on his texts - many of them for the press and radio . Shortly before his death, he bitterly assured the author Angelika Mechtel that he would have to write “to the edge of the grave”.

Ernst Kreuder was a staunch beer drinker and cigarette smoker all his life . He also loved elderberries . He suffered from high blood pressure . According to his wife Irene, he was finally prepared not to get very old. The 69-year-old died peacefully of heart failure at home on Christmas 1972 .

plant

Ernst Kreuder opposed the "noisy business that they call history afterwards " with the invitation to dream and contemplative contemplation. His wife Irene calls him - benevolently - "unworldly". But he is also “alien to me”, as he stubbornly refuses all his life to face the biographical dowry and his own vulnerability as a writer. Kreuder despises " reality " in both an objective and a subjective sense. His heroes are all " dropouts " who move in remote areas with a sense of adventure, cunning and slapstick. On the other hand, they tend towards pathos and preaching . For Heinz Puknus, Kreuder set himself the important task of pondering the “' metaphysical ' region of an undisfigured, deeper reality”, “in which the 'secret' of all worldliness, which can only be guessed at, becomes present in the quietly concentrated experience.” Henner Reitmeier counters Duration, namely stretched over a dozen books, this rather simple program was probably not sustainable enough. Accordingly, Kreuder presented mouthpieces instead of characters. For this he failed to develop his own style; every book is written differently. If he nevertheless uses more and more refined aesthetic weapons (above all: multi-layered / nested narrative structures), they unfortunately do not correspond to any real conflict resolution. In his meritorious work, Rauer also repeatedly points out painful formal defects, despite numerous bows to Kreuder's narrative art, including frequent “ declamation ” and “aesthetic inconsistency” of the individual works.

effect

Much has been astonished and puzzled over Kreuder's almost sensational initial success in the post-war years and his “slump” in the favor of the public and critics in the late 1950s. In both cases there are probably several aspects that play together. Rauer cites the various attempts at explanation and discusses them in detail. For example, a popular argument among Kreuder defenders sees the eccentric mill dweller "a victim of Group 47 " - according to the headline of an obituary by Kreuder's friend Karlheinz Deschner . This argument is already invalidated by the fact that writers like Arno Schmidt, Hans Erich Nossack or Marlen Haushofer are also far removed from the “realistic”, “political” and probably also “market economy” -oriented Group 47, without, like Kreuder, in an increasing group Land isolation. Rauer himself takes a consequently new perspective. Decisive for Kreuder's failure was his persistent self-portrayal as awakening and victim, who just as persistently avoids confrontation with itself. Kreuder had "not mastered the material of his own life, his own story literarily", which was recently shown drastically in the failure of the large-scale novel Agimos (1959). If you follow this point of view, Kreuder was never able to convincingly authenticate his literary mission, which was felt so strongly - which was not so noticeable around 1947. “To serve the work, and the work was, in the deepest sense, a service to the mystery, ” Kreuder was able to write through the window with relatively impunity. In this context, Rauer repeatedly points to Kreuder's seldom appreciated self-referentiality. Indeed, it runs through all of his books. Rauer cites a number of evidence that feeds the suspicion that Kreuder was basically only interested in the process of writing and its end product - something like effect , whether on himself or on fellow human beings, i.e. precisely not.

Works

Stories and novels

• The night of the prisoners , Darmstadt 1939.
• The house with the three trees , Gelnhausen-Gettenbach 1944.
• The society from the attic , Hamburg (Rowohlt) 1946.
• Floating way. The story through the window , Hamburg, Stuttgart (Rowohlt) 1947.
• The undetectable , Stuttgart u. a. (Rowohlt) 1948.
• Come in without knocking , Hamburg (Rowohlt) 1954.
• Agimos or the world helpers , Frankfurt / Main 1959.
• Trail under the water , Frankfurt / Main 1963.
• Tunnel for rent , Darmstadt 1966.
• Hearsay , Freiburg u. a. 1969.
• The man in the gatekeeper house , Munich, Vienna 1973.
• Luigi and the green duffel bag and other stories , Mainz 1980.
• Phantom of Fear , Stuttgart (Reclamheft) 1987.
• The company from the attic. Stories. Essays. Self-contemplations , Berlin and Weimar (construction) 1990.

Poems

• Summer hermitage , Hamburg 1956.

Considerations

• On the literary situation of the present , Mainz 1951.
• Georg Buechner. Existence and Language , Mainz 1955.
• The unanswerable. The tasks of the modern novel , Mainz 1959.
• On the poet's environmental situation , Mainz 1961.
• Poetic expression and literary technique , Mainz 1963.

Correspondence

• with Karlheinz Deschner in: "You Oberteufel". Letters to Karlheinz Deschner , ed. by Bärbel and Katja Deschner, Hamburg 1992.
• with Alfred Döblin in: Döblin, Alfred: Briefe , Vol. 2, ed. by Helmut F. Pfanner, Düsseldorf / Zurich 2001.
• with Hans Henny Jahnn in: Hans Henny Jahnn and Ernst Kreuder. The Correspondence , ed. and edited by Jan Bürger. Mainz 1995.
• with Horst Lange in: Kreuder, Ernst: “You don't write like you used to”. Letters to Horst Lange , in: Literaturmagazin 7, ed. by Hans Dieter Schäfer, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1977, pp. 209-231.
• with Hans Erich Nossack in: Nossack, Hans Erich: Give another sign of life soon. Correspondence 1943-1956 , ed. by Gabriele Söhling, 2 volumes, Frankfurt am Main 2001.
• with Arno Schmidt in: Schmidt, Arno: Correspondence with colleagues , ed. by Gregor Strick, Bargfeld 2007, pp. 66–113.

literature

• Christoph Stoll, Bernd Goldmann (ed.): Ernst Kreuder. From him / about him. von Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1974, ISBN 3-7758-0879-5 ( The Mainzer Series 39), Contains numerous considerations and a detailed bibliography.
• Margarete Dierks:  Kreuder, Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 21 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Heinz Puknus: Ernst Kreuder. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Critical lexicon of contemporary German literature (KLG). Text + criticism, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-88377-009-4 .
• Hans J. Schütz: "I was once a German poet". Forgotten and misunderstood authors of the 20th century. Beck, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33308-7 , pp. 163-167
• Peter-Alexander Fiedler: dreamer and rebel. Epilogue in: Ernst Kreuder: The society from the attic. Stories, essays, self-statements. Published by Peter-Alexander Fiedler. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin et al. 1990, ISBN 3-351-01407-4 , pp. 607-634.
• Ulrike Edschmid : This side of the desk. Life stories of women, men who write. Luchterhand-Literaturverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-630-61908-8 , pp. 221-261: Irene Kreuder ( Luchterhand collection 908).
• Christoph Schulz: "Open your eyes and dream!" Ernst Kreuder's narrative work. Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1992, ISBN 3-631-44658-6 ( European university publications . Series 1: German language and literature 1306), (At the same time: Marburg, Univ., Diss., 1991).
• Henner Reitmeier: Some Kreudertee. A portrait. In: Die Brücke , No. 159, 2012
• Stephan Rauer: BUTKU. On Ernst Kreuder's short stories in the “Third Reich”. In: Carsten Würmann, Ansgar Warner: In the break room of the “Third Reich”. On popular culture in National Socialist Germany. Lang, Bern et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-03911-443-6 , pp. 229–246 ( publications on the journal for German studies NF 17).
• Stephan Rauer: Ernst Kreuder. Demonstrated storytelling, demonstrated remembering. (1933-1959). Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89528-686-5 (also: Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Diss., 2007), with selected bibliography.
• Alexander E. Pichugin: Relationship with nature and ecology in the work of Ernst Kreuder. University of Pennsylvania 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stephan Rauer: Ernst Kreuder , Bielefeld 2008, p. 44.
2. ↑ Rauer, especially Chapter II: Breakthrough (1): Writing in the "Third Reich"
3. ↑ Rauer p. 92.
4. ↑ Kasimir Edschmid, Büchner Prize speech in Kreuder, in: German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt, yearbook 1953/54 , Heidelberg / Darmstadt 1954, pp. 57–62. In the speech it is said that Kreuder came with cheerfulness . "I don't mean merriment, I mean that feeling that is gracefully a stage before wisdom."
5. ↑ Benedikt Viertelhaus, review of the society from the attic from 2002, on: http://www.ernst-kreuder.de/rez_dach.htm . Retrieved August 13, 2010
6. ↑ Rauer p. 262.
7. ↑ Arno Schmidt, review of Agimos from 1959, on: http://www.ernst-kreuder.de/rez_agimos.htm . Retrieved August 13, 2010. Rauher counts among Kreuder's "decisive colleague contacts in the 1950s the loners Arno Schmidt, Nossack and Jahnn" (p. 268).
8. ↑ Angelika Mechtel: Old writers in the Federal Republic , Munich 1972, pp. 65–67 Ernst Kreuder .
9. ↑ Rauer p. 270.
10. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid : This side of the desk , Frankfurt / Main 1990, p. 254 ff.
11. ↑ Ernst Kreuder: Come in without knocking , Roman, Hamburg 1954, p. 147.
12. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid p. 238.
13. ↑ Rauer provides numerous evidence of this. To emphasize only two points: p. 148 quotes Rauer from Kreuder's story through the window , published in 1947 : “The work, the writing, is not there to clarify personal matters, to overcome questionable inner states, it has beyond life to penetrate the secret. There are no excuses, there is only the final condensation, the transformation into vision and sound. ”And on p. 168 Rauer writes that this story not only suggests the motto that“ correct ”writing is only a non-autobiographical writing,“ but also, that real life could be one without reflecting on one's own history, without questioning one's own guilt ”.
14. ↑ Heinz Puknus: Ernst Kreuder , in: Critical Lexicon of Contemporary German Literature , loose-leaf collection, as of August 1, 1982.
15. ↑ Henner Reitmeier: Kreuder, Ernst , brief portrait, in: Ders .: Der Große Stockraus. A relaxicon . Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-926880-20-8 .
16. ↑ Henner Reitmeier: Something Kreudertee , detailed portrait, first published in Die Brücke No. 159/2012 , online at: Archive link ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved April 27, 2012. 
17. ^ Rauer Bielefeld 2008
18. ↑ Rauer p. 114 ff (on success), p. 243 ff (on failure).
19. ^ According to Rauer p. 254 in: Konkret 4/1973.
20. ↑ Especially Rauer, p. 228.
21. ↑ Rauer p. 245.
22. ↑ Quoted from Rauer, p. 169.
23. ↑ Extended version here online , accessed on June 21, 2012
24. ↑ This dissertation can be read as a PDF , accessed on June 21, 2012

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Kreuder in the catalog of the German National Library
• Friends of Ernst Kreuder
• Nicklaus, Kirsten: Occident and economic miracle. On the culturally critical physiognomy of West German novel prose between 1945 and 1959 , dissertation, Kiel 2001 (especially on Die Unauffindbaren )