Felix Gasbarra

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Felix Gasbarra (born December 7, 1895 in Rome , † November 11, 1985 in Bolzano ) was a German-Italian writer , dramaturge and translator .

Live and act

Felix Gasbarra was born in Rome in 1895. His father was Italian, his mother German. His family moved to Berlin when he was two years old. He studied at the University of Bonn law and a doctorate.

Auditorium of the Berlin theater on Nollendorfplatz

In 1921 he joined the Communist Party of Germany and wrote for their satirical magazine and agitation papers Der Knüppel as well as various communist daily newspapers. He married the set designer Doris Homann, with whom he had two daughters. In the interwar period Gasbarra worked closely with the theater director Erwin Piscator in Berlin . Dramaturge of Piscator stage worked he plays, participated together with Bertolt Brecht novel adaptations before and wrote lyrics ( Kurt Weill set to music gas Barras Mussel of Margate / Petroleum Song for Leo Lanias business comedy economy ). Gasbarra documented the cooperation with Piscator in 1929 in the joint volume The Political Theater , which was translated into 16 languages. At the beginning of the 1930s, he successfully turned to the new form of literature radio play ( The March to the Salt Sea ; Fahnen am Matterhorn , both 1931).

After the "seizure of power" by the NSDAP , he moved to Zurich in 1934 , but occasionally stayed in Germany. Under artistic director Ferdinand Rieser he worked as a dramaturge at the Schauspielhaus Zürich with the vague intention of returning to Berlin with Piscator after the hoped-for failure of the Nazi state. Gasbarra moved to Rome (Quartier Parioli ), the city ​​of his birth, in 1935 . He worked for the German hour of the Italian radio station "Radio Roma", a. a. as the German spokesman for the army reports, and joined the Partito Nazionale Fascista . While on the radio, he met the American poet Ezra Pound , who at the time supported Italian fascism. Among the texts that Gasbarra translated into German in the 1930s and early 1940s are works by the Deputy Secretary of the Fascist Party, Arturo Marpicati, the Fascist Foreign Minister of Italy Galeazzo Ciano, and Vittorio Mussolini , one of the sons of Benito Mussolini . The volume Wesen, Wollen, Work of Fascism by Vincenzo Meletti (Berlin 1935), translated by Gasbarra, contains a foreword by Adolf Hitler .

Gasbarras domicile and refuge (1946–1971): Kampenn Castle in the east of Bolzano

After Mussolini's fall, Gasbarra joined the Italian anti-fascist resistance in the final years of the war . In the course of the Allied offensive in 1945, Gasbarra was appointed intelligence officer to control the Italian radio stations for the English occupation forces in Italy for a period of one and a half years. Together with his wife, he acquired the remote, high medieval castle Kampenn near Bozen. In the spring of 1948 his wife separated from Gasbarra, emigrated to Brazil with their youngest daughter Claudia and bought a farm there. In the post-war period Gasbarra worked as a journalist - primarily in the editorial team of the German-language newspaper Dolomiten , where he worked until the mid-1950s - as a radio play writer, translator ( Jules Verne , Grazia Deledda , George Orwell, etc.) and writer. In 1968, in his only satirical novel School of the Planets , Gasbarra revealed himself as a "skeptic who recognized and criticized environmental pollution, overstimulation or overproduction at an early stage".

He spent the last years of his life almost completely blind in a home in South Tyrol, where he died a few weeks before his 90th birthday. He was buried in the evangelical cemetery in Bolzano .

Radio play

Gasbarra's radio plays praised Piscator in a contribution for the North German Radio as a separate category of radio literature - “the satirical-philosophical radio play. In it, an intellectual problem is examined and taken to extremes in a funny, sometimes paradoxical, but always logical sequence. According to Oscar Wilde's words, Gasbarra lets reality dance on the ropes in order to test its truth. "

Works

Erwin Piscator "with the assistance of Gasbarra": The political theater (Berlin 1929)

novel

  • School of Planets. Diogenes, Zurich 1968.

Radio plays (selection)

  • The march to the salt sea . Funk hour Berlin , 1931.
  • Flags on the Matterhorn. Funk hour Berlin, 1931.
  • Monsieur Job or what doesn't belong to a person. NDR , 1956.
  • Pimpanel or what is human freedom? Innsbruck 1959.
  • Schloss Manicor or the limit of what is allowed. ORF , 1975.
  • The trip to Le Toquet. WDR , 1978 (= Munich 1994, compact cassette).

Plays

  • The Prussian Walpurgis Night. Grotesque puppet show. Malik, Berlin 1922
  • Rasputin (adaptation of the play by Alexei Tolstoy and Pawel Schtschegolew), with Bertolt Brecht , 1927
  • The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk (adaptation of the novel by Jaroslav Hašek ), with Bertolt Brecht, 1928
  • Robespierre. Acting in 12 pictures . German stage editing (based on Romain Rolland ): Erwin Piscator and Felix Gasbarra. Desch, Munich, Vienna, Basel 1964

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Letter from Erwin Piscator to Felix Gasbarra, February 8, 1937, in: Erwin Piscator: Briefe. Volume 2: Paris, New York 1936–1951. Volume 2.1: Paris 1936–1938 / 39. Edited by Peter Diezel. B&S Siebenhaar, Berlin 2009, p. 52 fu ö.
  2. ^ Letter from Erwin Piscator to Felix Gasbarra, July 22, 1934, in: Erwin Piscator: Briefe. Volume 1: Berlin - Moscow 1909–1936 . Edited by Peter Diezel. B&S Siebenhaar, Berlin 2005, pp. 291–294, here p. 293.
  3. ^ Article "Felix Gasbarra", in: Handbuch des deutschsprachigen Exiltheater 1933–1945. Volume 2. Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists. Part 1. A – K by Frithjof Trapp , Bärbel Schrader, Dieter Wenk and Ingrid Maaß. KG Saur, Munich 1999, p. 291 f.
  4. ↑ Cf. Felix Gasbarra: Kampenn Castle. Fates and Wandlunen of a Bolzano castle In: Der Schlern 20, 1946, pp. 226–231.
  5. ^ Letter from Felix Gasbarra to Erwin Piscator, January 13, 1948, in: Erwin Piscator: Briefe. Volume 2: Paris, New York 1936–1951. Volume 2.3: New York 1945–1951 . B&S Siebenhaar, Berlin 2009, p. 141.
  6. ↑ Thomas B. Schumann: Roter Rummel , in: Die Zeit, No. 52/1985 (December 20, 1985).
  7. ^ Letter from Erwin Piscator to Heinz Schwitzke , undated [around 1958], in: Erwin Piscator: Briefe. Volume 3.2: Federal Republic of Germany, 1955–1959 . Edited by Peter Diezel. B&S Siebenhaar, Berlin 2011, p. 544 f., Here p. 545.
personal data
SURNAME Gasbarra, Felix
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Italian author and translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1985
Place of death Bolzano