Felix Hartlaub

Felix Hartlaub (born June 17, 1913 in Bremen , † probably early May 1945 in Berlin ) was a German historian and writer .

Life

Felix Hartlaub was the son of the art historian and museum director Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub . In 1914 the family moved to Mannheim . From 1919 to 1921 Hartlaub attended a private school, then an elementary school in Mannheim. As a child he began drawing, poetry and writing. From 1928 he was a student at the Odenwald School in Heppenheim , where he graduated from high school in 1932. He then studied at the commercial college in Mannheim and from 1932 Romance studies and history at the University of Heidelberg . After completing his labor service , he moved to Berlin in 1934 , where he studied modern history , Romance studies and art history. He fell in love with the mother of his former schoolmate Klaus Gysi , who had to flee to France in 1938 as a Jew and communist. In 1939 he was charged with a historical work as a doctor of philosophy doctorate .

With the beginning of the Second World War , Hartlaub was drafted into the Wehrmacht . From September 1939 to November 1940 he was a member of a blocking balloon unit. Good relations with his doctoral supervisor Walter Elze enabled him to be assigned to the Historical Archives Commission in December 1940, which sifted through French files captured in Paris . From September to November 1941 he served again as a soldier, this time in Romania . He then worked as a historical clerk at the Wehrmacht High Command in Berlin until May 1942 . From May 1942 to March 1945 he was on the staff of the war diary at the High Command of the Wehrmacht. During this time, Hartlaub had access to the outer restricted area in the Führer headquarters in Winniza , Rastenburg and Berchtesgaden and learned about the internal issues of warfare. In April 1945 he was assigned to an infantry unit at the front near Berlin , with the rank of corporal . At the beginning of May 1945 he set out for Spandau . He has been missing since then . His official death declaration was made in 1955, the date of death was set as December 31, 1945.

Hartlaub, who published very few of his literary works during his lifetime, became known after the Second World War for his private notes from the war years - literary drafts, fragments, observations of life in Fascist Italy, in the German capital and in occupied Paris. He made a name for himself above all through the vivid and intensive descriptions of a distant observer of everyday life in the Führer headquarters, which in their concise style already hint at the clear-cut literature of the post-war period. His notes, which he presumably intended as sketches for narrative works to be developed later, were published in an incomplete and edited form by his sister Geno Hartlaub in 1955 . A full edition of the records did not appear until 2002.

Fonts

• Don Juan d'Austria and the Battle of Lepanto . Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1940 (dissertation).
  • New edition, edited by Wolfram Pyta and Wolfgang Schwiedrzik : Edition Mnemosyne, Neckargemünd 2017, ISBN 978-3-934012-30-1 .
• Geno Hartlaub (Ed.): Seen from below. Koehler, Stuttgart 1950.
• Parthenope or The Adventure in Naples. German publishing house, Stuttgart 1951.
• Geno Hartlaub (Ed.): The complete work. S. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 1955.
• Erna Krauss (Hrsg.), Gustav Hartlaub (Hrsg.): Felix Hartlaub in his letters. Wunderlich, Tübingen 1958.
• Lieselotte Ewenz (Ed.): "Banned into your own outline". Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-41332-5 (Vol. 1: Texts ; Vol. 2: Commentary ); 3rd, revised edition 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-41838-3 .
• War records from Paris. With drawings by the author, afterword by Durs Grünbein , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-22462-5 .
• Italian trip. With drawings by the author, ed. and with an afterword by Nikola Herweg and Harald Tausch. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-22473-1 .
• Plato and the State. With a preliminary remark by Karl Corino . In: Sinn und Form 1/2014, pp. 48–62.
• From Hitler's Berlin - 1934 to 1938. With drawings by the author, ed. and with an afterword by Nikola Herweg and Harald Tausch. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-22489-2 .
• "In Naples I was very convinced of the actual impotence of art over life". Letters to the family from Italy 1933 , ed. and introduced by Nikola Herweg and Harald Tausch. In: Sinn und Form 3/2017, pp. 293–317.
• Neapolitan Records , ed. and transcribed by Nikola Herweg and Harald Tausch. In: Sinn und Form 4/2017, pp. 467–477.

Exhibition catalogs

• Felix Hartlaub, The Drawings . Frankfurt 1993.
• Inge Herold (Hrsg.), Ulrike Lorenz (Hrsg.): Felix Hartlaub - Drawn Worlds. Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2012, on the occasion of the Felix Hartlaub exhibition . Drawn Worlds in the Kunsthalle Mannheim from November 11, 2012 to January 27, 2013.

literature

• Christian-Hartwig Wilke: The last notes of Felix Hartlaub. Gehlen, Bad Homburg v. d. H. 1967.
• Christian Wilke:  Hartlaub, Felix. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 718 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Monika Marose: The real thing is invisible. Food 2000.
• Monika Marose: Under the magic hat . Felix Hartlaub. A biography. Transit, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-88747-205-4 .
• Nikola Herweg: Felix Hartlaub (1913–1945) and his sister and estate administrator Geno Hartlaub (1915–2007). In: Volkmar Hansen (Hrsg.), Ulrike Horstenkamp (Hrsg.), Gabriele Weidle (Hrsg.): Special delivery. From artist estates and their administrators. AsKI, Bonn 2011.
• Karl Corino: "Felix was a master of camouflage". Conversation with Geno Hartlaub (1986) . In: Sinn und Form 1/2014, pp. 63–73.
• Harald Tausch: Subversive humor as a laconic answer to the reality of absolute evil. Felix Hartlaub's writing process in the Third Reich. In: Gerald Hartung (Hrsg.), Markus Kleinert (Hrsg.): Humor and Religiosity in the Modern Age. Springer VS, Berlin 2017, pp. 195–230.
• Nikola Herweg (Hrsg.), Harald Tausch (Hrsg.): The work of Felix Hartlaub. Influences, contexts, reception . Wallstein, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-8353-3400-7 .
• Jannis Wagner: double exposures. Language and reality in Felix Hartlaub's writing between war history in the high command of the Wehrmacht and secret literature. In: Lettre International No. 124, spring 2019 pp. 68–74, (with photos).
• Matthias Weichelt: The missing witness - the short life of Felix Hartlaub. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-518-47079-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Felix Hartlaub in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Felix Hartlaub at perlentaucher.de
• Review of the 3rd, rev. Ed. Banned in their own outline. NZZ, Feb. 9, 2008
• Seibt, Gustav: Sea battle as a spiritual fact [1]

Individual evidence

1. ^ Matthias Weichelt: Felix Hartlaub: Inside view of the Stauffenberg assassination . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed July 25, 2020]).