Franz Herwig

Franz Herwig

Franz Herwig (born March 20, 1880 in Magdeburg , † August 15, 1931 in Weimar ) was a German writer and critic .

Life

Herwig was born the son of a civil servant in Magdeburg in 1880. From 1912 he lived in Weimar. After attending high school, he worked as a journalist, bookseller and editor. In the First World War he fought as a front soldier.

Create

Franz Herwig worked as a literary critic for the magazine Hochland .

Herwig was a Catholic narrator with a social attitude. In his works he was concerned with the traces of the eternal in urban misery and he himself became a representative of the problematic poetry shaped by the Catholic faith.

In his better-known work St. Sebastian vom Wedding , for example, he was concerned with the Christ word “Go and teach…”. He meant looking for those who are most alienated from God, the city crowds, in order to bring them closer to the faith again.

He then continues this process in a certain way in his psychologically influenced urban novel “ Die Eingegten ”. The title characters are the urban poor, shaped by fate, whose will is limited by internal and external circumstances. Their religious decisions are also pushed and cramped by these circumstances, so that the novel has fatalistic and pessimistic features, since many of the characters in the novel also fail mentally. However, the “hero” of the novel (Daniel Löffelholz) dies reconciled with the Church after a life marked by erotic and alcoholic excesses.

Herwig's novel Hope for Light also describes the life of a God-shaped woman who carries her helping love among the poor and sinful of a big city.

The novels The Confined People , Hope for Light and Escape Attempts form a trilogy .

Seen overall, Herwig's works seem like a rousing of conscience, an invitation and a sermon, but they are more overwhelming than uplifting. In addition, his fictional characters give the impression of a terrible exposure instead of a feeling of security in divine providence.

Works

• Duke Heinrich am Finkenherd (1903), drama (performed in the Bergtheater Thale in 1904)
• The Last Zielinski (1906), novel
• Wonders of the World (1910), novel. Revised in 1922.
• The hour is coming (1911), novel
• Heinrich the Lion , drama (performed in the Bergtheater Thale in 1911)
• Jan von Werth (1913), novel
• The Faithful Deserter (1913), short story
• The pastor on horseback (1917), short story
• Pinz and the Holy War (1919), novel
• The battlefield (1920), novel
• The Burial of Hate (1921), novel
• Darkness over Prussia (1921), novel
• St. Sebastian of Wedding. A Legend (1921), novel
• The Sextet in the Kingdom of Heaven (1921), novel
• The heart of Brandenburg (1923), novel
• Stars Fall and Rise (1925), short stories
• The fine Ingeborg / Jabusch, two stories (1925)
• The Confined (1926), novel
• Willy Wins (1927), novel
• Hope for Light (1929), novel
• Escape Attempts (1930), novel

literature

• Lore Lawnik: Franz Herwig based on personal memories, letters and his works . At the same time: Münster, Phil. Dissertation, 1933. Munich: Verlag Josef Kösel & Friedrich Pustet, 1933, 63 pages.
• Hermann Lechner: History of literature in the German-speaking area , Innsbruck 1956, pp. 416–417 ISBN 3-85049-666-X .
• Anselm Salzer : Illustrated history of German literature from the oldest times to the present . Volume 5. Regensburg 1932, p. 2368ff.
• Karl Schaezler:  Herwig, Franz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 726 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Franz Herwig in the catalog of the German National Library