Eugen Gottlob Winkler

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eugen Gottlob Winkler (born May 1, 1912 in Zurich ; † October 26, 1936 in Munich ) was a German critic, essayist, poet, storyteller and travel writer.

life and work

Winkler and his parents moved to the outer Stuttgart district of Wangen at the age of three . When he was 15 years old, his father died. He passed his Abitur at the Zeppelin High School and made his first trip to Italy in 1930, which was to be followed by three more. He then studied German, French and art history in Munich, Paris, Tübingen and Cologne and received his doctorate in May 1933 when Karl Vossler at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with a dissertation on "classic performances of modern French stage" for Dr. phil.

Even as a schoolboy, Winkler developed artistic ambitions both in painting and in literature. In 1932 he finally began to write poetry and prose in the style of Paul Valéry and Stefan Georges . His literary taste was classicistic , although he also developed a fascination for Romance literatures. The categories by which he was guided in his lyrical and prosaic work he himself summarized with the following names: purity, clarity, brightness, order and silence. He preferred the "world of pure spirit". His drawings and paintings, on the other hand, had clear echoes of Expressionism in the need for self-expression in a passionate formal language - for example, the philistine caricatures by George Grosz .

In an afterword to a selection of works, Durs Grünbein described Winkler as a completely apolitical writer in his attitude. Nonetheless, Winkler wrote a newspaper article in 1931 - never printed - in which he relentlessly scourged the “cultural fascism” that he diagnosed at the Munich University among his “nationally contaminated” professors and fellow students with their “moldy ideas”. In November 1933 he was arrested and detained for ten days. He was accused of tearing down an NSDAP election poster in Tübingen in the run-up to the Reichstag election . After his imprisonment, Winkler made an initial suicide attempt, but recovered and then traveled to Sicily and Venice . He wrote essays and essays and tried to become literary. Despite his arrest, he was allowed to continue to publish in various magazines, including in Das Deutsche Wort , Der Kunstwart , in the German magazine , in the Hochland and in the bookworm . Stories and sketches from him also appeared in Das Innere Reich , in the Neue Rundschau and in the Frankfurter Zeitung . His particular strength was the literary essay, which he made clear in studies on Stefan George, August von Platen , Friedrich Hölderlin , Ernst Jünger , Marcel Proust and TE Lawrence .

While Winkler had spent the summer of 1932 with a circle of friends made up of painters, sculptors and musicians in Cologne , in the following years he lived alternately in Munich, Stuttgart and Tübingen. Under the influence of the growing political climate, he decided in 1935 to initially only work critically. In 1936 Winkler chose suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills in Munich, worried that he would be arrested again .

Aftermath

A year after his death, the Leipzig Karl Rauch Verlag published the two volumes Gestalten and Problems and Poetical Works with the author's collected poetic and critical works. Both were reissued in a joint edition in 1956 by Pfullinger Verlag Günther Neske. Since then, selected fonts have been reprinted every now and then. Winkler's very narrow work, however, could not achieve a greater impact, and it is largely forgotten today.

Walter Jens wrote about Winkler in a collection of texts he published at S. Fischer Verlag in 1960 : “Eugen Gottlob Winkler was perhaps the last European who succeeded in crowning the form of existence of a Baudelaire dandy with tragic dignity, with the pathos of martyrdom : for the last time dandy and rebel, outcast and victim were synonyms. By voluntarily excluding himself, Winkler accused himself by looking for elegance and accuracy in the stylistic, he pronounced his judgment and professed himself to the order of those in the Resistance by choosing the Lawrencean integrity of joblessness, he shouted his J'accuse against the world that identified meditation with idleness and individualism with betrayal of the people. ”So he saw him as a progressive writer, whereas in the eyes of the writer Franz Schonauer, Winkler was more of an epigonal formalist.

A large part of Winkler's estate is now kept in the German Literature Archive in Marbach .

plant

Essays by Winkler

  • Machine Lyric (1935)
  • Colonel Lawrence (1935/36)
  • The late Holderlin (1936)
  • Legends of a Journey (1936)
  • Marcel Proust (1936)
  • Platen (1936/37)

Edited volumes of the Winkler work

  • Hermann Rinn, Johannes Heitzmann (ed.): Eugen Gottlob Winkler: Gestalten and problems . Leipzig 1937.
  • Hermann Rinn, Johannes Heitzmann (ed.): Eugen Gottlob Winkler: Poetical works . Leipzig 1937.
  • Walter Warnach (Ed.): Eugen Gottlob Winkler: Briefe 1932-1936 . Bad Salzig and Boppard on the Rhine, 1949.
  • Works. Seals. Shape and problems. Estate . Pfullingen 1956.
  • Walter Jens (Ed.): Eugen Gottlob Winkler. From the writings of an early man . Frankfurt am Main, 1960.
  • Exploring the line. Narrative. Essay. Poem . Leipzig, 1993.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to the obituary
  2. ↑ Walter Jens : Eugen G. Winkler - A portrait on the occasion of the publication of his complete works . In: Die Zeit , November 1, 1956, № 44. Retrieved from zeit.de on August 6, 2014.
  3. ↑ Rolf Spinnler: Dandy and rebel in dark times . From: stuttgarter-zeitung.de ( Stuttgarter Zeitung ), May 1, 2012. Accessed August 6, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Winkler, Eugen Gottlob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich
DATE OF DEATH October 26, 1936
Place of death Munich