Eugen Richtmann

Eugen Richtmann (* 1862 in Solingen ; † after 1932 ) was a Cologne merchant .

Life

Eugen Richtmann, born in Solingen in 1862, was primarily a Cologne merchant and sold typewriters and office furniture in his shops. In 1900 he moved from Solingen to Cologne and had lived in the Rheinblick house in Rodenkirchen near Cologne since 1911 , where he lived with his wife - with whom he had been married since 1894 - in a childless marriage. Since 1902 at the latest he has been one of the supporters of the petition to abolish § 175. There is still a press release about his 70th birthday in 1932, but the exact date of his death is unknown.

His literary work

Eugen Richtmann published only two volumes of poetry during his life. In addition to his almost exclusively gender-neutral love poems, the many poems in his first volume From Two Worlds (1895) that deal with friendships between men are striking. His poem Remembrance of Brussels 1599 speaks of his friend from Luxembourg who died early and is addressed as You, my hyacinth . One can assume that hyacinth was a nickname based on Greek mythology and not the real name of his friend, as his biographer Rost assumed. It is unclear whether the title of the book From Two Worlds - similar to Peter Hamecher's work Between the Sexes - is to be understood as an indication of the conflict in sexual terms or - through its references to the USA - characterizes the old and the new world.

His second volume of poems, Im Banne des Herzens (1915), contains many gender-neutral love poems as well as a poem about the Italian island of Capri. Richtmann had got to know the island - like Taormina - during a trip to Italy in 1904.

Two articles in the gay magazine Der Eigen show that his works were received homosexually. In a review, Im Banne des Herzens is panned : Another one who knows Eros, but who is very careful. Veiled art, that can only be a little. And it didn't get very much either. The language of the poetry is quite unoriginal, the verses are often clumsy. […] But the language is completely that of [August Graf von] Platen, not Richtmann's . A few years earlier, his own poem "Sonett" was published - a gender-neutral love poem that ties in with the Greek cult of beauty and is not included in either of his two well-known works.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Greven's address books from Cologne
2. ↑ List of petitioners from the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in Berlin
3. ↑ Eugen Richtmann: From two worlds . Poems. Coblenz: Groos 1895.
4. ^ Bernhard Rost: Eugen Richtmann, a Rhenish poet . German publisher, Chemnitz 1920
5. ↑ Bergische Heimatblätter of the Bergische Zeitung April 30, 1926. Solingen city archive
6. ↑ Eugen Richtmann: Under the spell of the heart. Xenien-Verlag, Leipzig 1915. pp. 30–31.
7. ↑ Community of Own (1923) issue 17, p. 10.
8. ↑ Der Eigen 7 (1919/1920) issue 6, p. 3.

bibliography

• Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . Cologne: Emons, 2006. p. 24 ( PDF p. 144)