Franz Fromme (writer, 1880)

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Franz Fromme (born April 26, 1880 in Lesum near Bremen; † May 29, 1960 in Bremen ) was a German author , journalist and translator .

Life

Fromme grew up in Bremen, graduated from high school there and then studied modern languages, history and natural sciences at the universities of Heidelberg , Kiel , Freiburg and Berlin. He was also active as a writer and artist. In 1905 he broke off his studies.

Lübeck 1908–1926

In 1908 he moved to Lübeck and married. He worked as an editor and freelance writer. He made long trips to Italy, Sweden and Iceland and translated from Flemish and Swedish.

In 1916 Fromme was one of the founders of the Fehrs Guild in Neumünster. The Fehrs-Gilde was völkisch -nationalist oriented, which included the anti-Semitism common in the milieu. Pious co-founder Jacob Bödewadt was an avowed supporter of the prominent anti-Semite Julius Langbehn . In 1927, the chairman Otto Wachs stated in the description of the association's goals in anti-Semitic code that “the entire culture” was “permeated and partly dominated by un-German, international character”. In the “very own areas of German nationality”, “foreigners are leading and decisive”. The "culture of education" is "everything ..., but certainly not German".

In 1918 Fromme co-founded the Low German People's Guild , a singing and play group in Lübeck.

During the First World War , Fromme met the Irish independence politician Sir Roger Casement and translated his essays. By 1917 at the latest, he worked in the personnel department of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. In 1918 he met the Flemish nationalist Staf De Clercq , who had been invited to Berlin, and his fellow campaigner van Roy, for whom he and his German-Flemish colleague and confidante Herbert Martens organized talks with high political figures. For Fromme, De Clercq, founder and leader of the Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond (VNV) in 1933 and later a Flemish National Socialist, was an “unadulterated Germanic representative” of the Flemings. De Clercq and the VNV represented the right-wing extremist wing of the vlaamse Fahrt .

Fromme was an ideologist and activist of the Low German Movement , which defined itself as part of the Völkische Movement and to which he assigned a "national mission". This included the question of the annexation of Flemish Belgium to the Netherlands or to Germany. Already in the First World War Fromme appeared as a propagandist of a "Germanic power", a "Germanic culture" in Flanders, a "Germanic feeling" and "resistance" of the Flemish population and against "Welschen" influence. Above all, the world war caused "the Flemings to reflect on their own Germanic nationality".

After the war he mainly worked as a journalist and as a translator of radio plays, essays, novellas, novels and poetry. For a time he was part of the editorial team of the magazine Das Gewissen , published by Eduard Stadtler , for which Franz Schauwecker , Otto Strasser and Werner Best also wrote and which from 1929 "joined forces with the NSDAP". From 1932 to 1935 Fromme wrote a "disproportionately" large number of articles there.

In 1921 Fromme became the second secretary of the newly founded Nordic Society , from which he left in 1924.

Berlin 1926–1945

Fromme supported the right wing of the völkisch-nationalist "Flemish Movement". With a well-known anti-Semitic stereotype that “the Jewish influences” were “far too strong”, he explained that it was not possible to win the support of the German Social Democrats. In 1926 Fromme founded a “German-Flemish Working Group” in Berlin, and with his participation the first of several large German-Flemish congresses of the interwar period came about at the beginning of 1927, the “Low German-Flemish Days” (“Nedderdütsch-Vlaamsche Daag”) . and February 27 in Lübeck, in which numerous Flemish and Dutch activist nationalists also took part. The occasion brought the friends Franz Fromme, Herbert Martens and Erich Klahn together. The Low German Volksgilde Frommes showed a mystery play by Martens translated and staged by Klahn. The main character in Martens play De Meister vun Flandern was the Flemish nationalist August Borms , who was prominent in national circles . The German-Flemish author Martens was an activist on the right wing of the vlaamse Fahrt . In the Niederdeutschen Welt published by the völkisch Westphal-Verlag , he found nine years later “triumphantly” (Claus Schuppenhauer) that it had become superfluous to explain “in the empire of Adolf Hitler” “the importance of the bonds of blood ...” “That would connect the Low German and the Dutch.

In 1933 pious book Ireland's Struggle for Freedom was published. Representation and example of a folk movement up to the most recent times . In it he was "concerned with a race-theoretical foundation of his image of Ireland". Religious vocabulary refers - according to the literary scholar Doris Dohmen - "unequivocally to its firm integration into the National Socialist ideology." The script is clearly "integrated into a specifically ethnic-racist overall structure". In connection with the portrayal of an Irish independence politician, Fromme described Adolf Hitler as "a popular speaker and prudent organizer" who was able to "inspire and collect" the people for their thoughts.

When a special camp was set up in Brandenburg (Stalag XX A, 301) in the summer of 1940 to set up a military “Irish Brigade”, Fromme toured various prisoner-of-war camps and conducted recruiting and examination interviews with potential Irish collaborators. At that time he was working as an agent (“the professor”) of Abwehr II, department “Sabotage, Subversion, Minorities”. As such, he prepared the German agent Hermann Görtz for a parachute mission in Ireland. Both recruiting and the use of agents failed. Fromme was officially employed by the German military government in Belgium at this time. In the years 1940 to 1944 he was also a permanent employee of the occupation organ Brussels newspaper .

Bremen 1945–1960

After the end of National Socialism, Fromme went back to Bremen.

He was one of the lifelong close friends and supporters of the Lübeck painter and artisan Erich Klahn, who through him got to know Paul Brockhaus , who was also a lifelong friend .

Fonts

  • Otto the Third . A German royal drama in five acts, 1909
  • About the English development . A warning consideration of the Germanic ways, 1916
  • Belgian and un-Belgian . Selected essays, 1917
  • Jürgen Mullenwever and Marks Meyer . Een nedderduetsch Spill ut dat ole Lübeck, Lübeck 1924
  • Guys and pranks from the schoolmaster's empire , 1928
  • Ireland's struggle for freedom . Representation and example of a völkisch movement up to the most recent times, Berlin 1933
  • F. Böök: Rich and poor Sweden . Translated with R. Kinsky, 1938
  • J. Simons: guys and heads . Little stories from the Flemish Kempen. Translated, 1940
  • Encounters with Vlamen , Brussels 1942
  • with Jef Simons: guys and heads . Little stories from the Flemish Kempen, Wolfshagen-Scharbeutz 1943
  • C. Verschaeve: Jesus the Son of Man . Edited, 1958
  • F. de Pillecijn: People behind the dike . Translated, 1958

Radio plays

As an author

Translations from Swedish

Editing and translation from Flemish

literature

  • Wilhelm Kosch : German literature lexicon . Volume 10: The 20th Century. 2000, ISBN 3-908255-10-4
  • Bernhard Sowinski : Lexicon of German-speaking dialect authors . Hildesheim et al. 1997
  • Johannes Wilda : Franz Fromme. A forgotten Low German poet . In: Der Schimmelreiter 5 , 1926
  • AJ [= Asmus Jessen ]: Franz Fromme . For the 50th birthday. In: Low German Monthly Issue 5 , 1930
  • Wolfgang Wehowsky : Memorial speech for Franz Fromme, in Der Wagen 1961, pp. 124–126 (with portrait)
  • Curt Almers: Fromme, Franz In: Bremische Biographie 1912-1962
  • Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871 - 1945. 5. T - Z, supplements. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 5: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , p. 443 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Henning Repetzky, "To plow a world lies ahead of me ..." Erich Klahn. A monograph, ed. from the Klahn-Freundeskreis e. V., Bonn 2001, p. 36.
  2. ↑ Uwe Danker / Astrid Schwabe, Schleswig-Holstein and National Socialism, Neumünster 2005, p. 96.
  3. ↑ Claus Schuppenhauer, Eulenspiegel also has time and place. Notes about Erich Klahn and the “Low German Idea”, in: Erich Klahns Ulenspiegel. Series of illustrations for Charles de Coster's novel, Wolfenbüttel 1986, pp. 13–26, here: p. 20.
  4. ↑ On anti-Semitism as a cultural code in Germany since the establishment of the German Empire, see: Shulamit Volkov, Antisemitism as a cultural code. Ten essays, Munich 2000, 2nd, exp. Ed.
  5. ↑ Claus Schuppenhauer, Eulenspiegel also has time and place. Notes about Erich Klahn and the “Low German Idea”, in: Erich Klahns Ulenspiegel. Series of illustrations for Charles de Coster's novel, Wolfenbüttel 1986, pp. 13–26, here: p. 20.
  6. ↑ Burkhard Dietz / Helmut Gabel / Ulrich Tiedau (eds.), Griff nach dem Westen. The “West Research” of the ethnic-national sciences on the north-western European area (1919-1960), Münster 2003, p. 118.
  7. ↑ See website of the De Clercq Foundation: [1] .
  8. ↑ See: Herbert van Uffelen, Modern Dutch Literature in the German-Speaking Area 1830-1990, Münster / Hamburg 1933, p. 342ff., P. 350.
  9. ^ Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, Manchester / New York 2000, pp. 81ff. (= Flanders: Eigen volk eerst! "The extreme right in Flanders, 1917-1980 ).
  10. ↑ Quoted from: Ine Van Linthout, Eine Nation in der Nation. The concept of the nation in the German image of Flanders between 1933 and 1945, in: Germanistische Mitteilungen, 49 (1999), p. 17.
  11. ↑ Olivier Dard / Étienne Deschamps (eds.), Les Relèves en Europe d'un Apres-Guerre A l'Autre. Racines, Reseaux, Projets et Posterites, Frankfurt a. M./Paris et al. 2008.
  12. ↑ Ina Schmidt / Stefan Breuer (eds.), Ernst Jünger - Friedrich Hielscher. Letters 1927-1985, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 339, 348.
  13. ^ Franz Fromme: From the beginnings of the settlement movement. in: Der Wagen 1955, pp. 103-108.
  14. ↑ Quoted from: Ine Van Linthout, Eine Nation in der Nation. The concept of the nation in the German image of Flanders between 1933 and 1945, in: Germanistische Mitteilungen, 49 (1999), p. 29.
  15. ↑ Henning Repetzky, "To plow a world lies ahead of me ..." Erich Klahn. A monograph, ed. from the Klahn-Freundeskreis e. V., Bonn 2001, p. 66.
  16. ^ Herbert Martens, De Meister vun Flanders. A Flemish mystery play. Translated into Low German by Erich Klahn, Lübeck 1927.
  17. ↑ Martens stood up for the “ethnic side of the arts” and against “the limitless degeneration” of literature: Herbert van Uffelen, Modern Dutch Literature in the German Language Area 1830-1990, Münster / Hamburg 1993, pp. 342ff., 352, see also : [2] .
  18. ↑ Quoted from: Claus Schuppenhauer, Eulenspiegel also has time and place. Notes on Erich Klahn and the 'Low German Idea', in: Erich Klahns Ulenspiegel. Series of illustrations for Charles de Coster's novel, Wolfenbüttel 1986, pp. 13–26, here: p. 22.
  19. ^ Doris Dohmen, Das deutsche Irlandbild. Imagological studies on the representation of Ireland and the Irish in German-language literature, Amsterdam / Atlanta 1994, p. 138.
  20. ↑ This and the following quotations: Doris Dohmen, Das deutsche Irlandbild. Imagological studies on the representation of Ireland and the Irish in German-language literature, Amsterdam / Atlanta 1994, pp. 138f.
  21. ↑ All information in this section based on: Terence O'Reilly, Hitler's Irishmen, Cork 2008, p. 64.
  22. ^ Rolf Falter: De Bruxelles Zeitung (1940–1944) in: Historica Lovaniensia 137, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Faculty of History), Löwen 1982, p. 71.
  23. ↑ Henning Repetzky, Article Erich Klahn, Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck, Vol. 12, Neumünster 2006, pp. 253-257, here: p. 254; another., "To plow a world lies ahead of me ..." Erich Klahn. A monograph, ed. from the Klahn-Freundeskreis e. V., Bonn 2001, p. 64 ("close friends").
  24. ↑ Henning Repetzky, "To plow a world lies ahead of me ..." Erich Klahn. A monograph, ed. from the Klahn-Freundeskreis e. V., Bonn 2001, p. 38.
personal data
SURNAME Fromme, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author, journalist and translator
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Lesum near Bremen
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1960
Place of death Bremen