Franz Lennartz

Franz Lennartz (born March 20, 1910 in Rheydt , Rhineland ; † January 16, 2003 in Salem , Baden-Württemberg ) was a writer , publicist , lexicographer , literary historian and collector .

life and work

Franz Lennartz was born as the son of a businessman in Rheydt, Rhineland, and grew up there as the youngest of five children. After graduating from high school in 1929, he studied German, philosophy and history in Bonn , Cologne and Berlin . He emerged early as an author, columnist and literary critic and wrote for newspapers and magazines. In Berlin he met his wife Gudrun Dux, whom he married in 1935, and worked as a lecturer for radio and film ( Universum Film (UFA) ).

Lennartz was particularly interested in contemporary literature, collected materials, corresponded with authors and wrote accounts of their lives and works. His volume “Poets of Our Time. 275 individual presentations on contemporary German poetry ”(1938) was published and expanded several times as a“ literary guide for everyone ”. In 1941 the 4th edition appeared. In line with the political context at the time, the work consistently lacks all authors who were ostracized as "Jewish" or "Crypto-Jewish" or who were undesirable as democrats in the "Third Reich", for example Franz Kafka , Thomas and Heinrich Mann , Lion Feuchtwanger , Arnold Zweig , Stefan Zweig , Alfred Döblin and many others. The Bochum literary scholar Uwe-Karsten Ketelsen referred to these omissions in the sense of the National Socialist cultural policy as "literary-historical desk perpetrators". In his review of the book Literatur in Nazi-Deutschland by Hans Sarkowicz and Alf Mentzer (2003), Marcel Atze explicitly dubbed Lennartz a "Nazi literary scholar". Sarkowicz himself names Lennartz as a representative of Nazi literary historiography in a series with Heinz Kindermann , Josef Nadler , Hermann Pongs and Paul Fechter and cites in several places the true-to-line assessments of authors such as Stefan Andres , Hermann Hesse and Herybert Menzel in the von Lennartz during the Representations written during the Nazi era .

During the Second World War , Lennartz was an officer and most recently stationed in Breslau , where he was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1945, from which he returned in 1950. From then on he devoted himself entirely to the further work on his author lexica German Poets and Writers of Our Time (eleven editions) and Foreign Poets and Writers of our Time (five editions), which he thoroughly revised - now in a democratic sense - and which soon became standard reference works each literary interested people and became the most widely read literary encyclopedias in German-speaking countries. In 1952 the first "Post-War Lennartz" appeared. Of course Heinrich Anacker and Baldur von Schirach were no longer there, but around eighty authors who were already represented in 1941. In his private copy of The Poets of Our Time from 1941, Lennartz noted: "The foreword and the text about Schirach come from the editorial staff, the publisher made concessions to the party-official examination commission in order to get the printing permission and paper." - Editions that had been published at the time ignored democratic and Jewish authors had now been included without this change having been expressly commented on.

Lennartz, whom Marcel Reich-Ranicki called a “master of concise characteristics”, treats the authors and works in his depictions in the context of their epoch and in the polyphonic “mirror of criticism”. He illuminates their characteristics in many layers and in a linguistically brilliant form in “essayistic” Kabinettstückchen “(according to the Bergische librarian, local historian and Lennartz expert Wilhelm Richard Schmidt). He researched biographical and bibliographical details with great care, which led Reich-Ranicki to speak of "Lennartz" as the "reliable lexicon". Even Uwe Johnson praised the completeness of encyclopedias: "Everything is there."

Lennartz moved from Berlin to Kirchhofen near Freiburg in 1960 and from there to Salem on Lake Constance in 1967. He had close friendships with Bruno Hillebrand and Dino Larese . In 1987, the German Literature Archive of the Schiller National Museum acquired the correspondence between Franz Lennartz and authors such as Robert Musil , Franz Kafka , Ernst Jünger , Gerhart Hauptmann , Gottfried Benn , Paul Celan , Bertolt Brecht , Heinrich Böll orer Carl Zuckmayer, comprising around 1,700 items . In addition to his literary work, Lennartz maintained his decades-old archive on literary and contemporary history topics (including special collections on Goethe , Napoleon and Picasso, among others ) and, in addition to thousands of books, collected an almost incalculable number of articles, notes, reviews and contributions from German-speaking and international publications. With the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Hessian Cultural Foundation for Science and Art and the S. Fischer Verlag , the City and University Library of Frankfurt am Main acquired this important part of his life's work in 1990. Today it forms part of the archive center there ( Franz Lennartz collection on German literature , with the option to visit). The fund is around 900 meters, around three quarters of which are scientifically developed. An exhibition on the occasion of Franz Lennartz's 85th birthday was shown in 1995 in Frankfurt am Main and in 1996 at the University of Konstanz . Franz Lennartz died on January 16, 2003 in his house in Salem-Beuren.

Awards

• Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon (1999)

Works

• The poets of our time. Individual representations of contemporary German poetry . Kröners Taschenausgabe Volume 217. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag 1938. 2nd edition 1939. 3rd edition 1940. 4th edition 1941. (contains 300 authors in 391 pages) 1952 - without an explanation from Lennartz - presentation of a completely revised one 5th edition of 573 p. (Many National Socialist authors are missing, but there are democratic and Jewish authors who were previously missing completely.)
• Poets and writers of our time. Individual presentations on beautiful literature in German . Kröner's pocket edition volume 217. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag 1954 (6th edition). 7th edition 1957
• German poets and writers of our time. Individual presentations on beautiful literature in German . Kröner's pocket edition volume 217. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag 1959 (8th expanded edition). 9th ext. Ed. 1963. 10th extension. 1969 edition
• German contemporary writers. Individual presentations on beautiful literature in German . Kröner's pocket edition Volume 217. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag 1978 (11th expanded edition)
• Foreign poets and writers of our time. Individual presentations on beautiful literature in foreign languages (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 217). Kröner, Stuttgart 1955, DNB 452804701 (2nd extended edition 1957, 3rd extended edition 1960, 4th extended edition 1971 and 1976).
• German writers of the 20th century in the mirror of criticism . 845 individual representations with work index and documentary appendix. With a foreword by Imma Klemm. 3 volumes in Kass. and register tape. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag 1984

literature

• Sabine Homilius, Wilhelm R. Schmidt: Franz Lennartz. Contemporary and collector, lexicographer and columnist. Book accompanying the exhibition at the City and University Library Frankfurt am Main, November 15 to December 15, 1995, Frankfurt am Main 1995.
• Wilhelm R. Schmidt: Wallpaper folder, cucumber box and banana box: the lexicographer Franz Lennartz is dead. In: Uni-Report, vol. 36 (2003), issue 2, p. 11.

Source / web link

• Wilhelm R. Schmidt: Franz Lennartz . Short biography for the exhibition in the Frankfurt University Library from March 1 to March 31, 2010, accessed on October 17, 2016.
  Note: The author of the accompanying book Schmidt also wrote the texts on the Internet. Information and quotations that are not individually documented in the article come from Schmidt's short biography and are documented there.
• Description of holdings UBA Ffm holdings Sa 2 ("Franz-Lennartz Collection on German Literature") of the archive center of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main with brief biographical notes and bibliographical information, accessed on October 17, 2016.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Uwe-Karsten Ketelsen: Literature and Third Reich . SH-Verlag, Vierow bei Greifswald 1994 (2nd edition), ISBN 3-89498-012-5 , p. 80.
2. ↑ Marcel Atze: In the völkischen glass house. In: literaturkritik.de rezensionsforum of July 7, 2002, accessed on October 6, 2016.
3. ↑ Hans Sarkowicz, Alf Mentzer: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon. Extended new edition. Europa-Verlag, Hamburg / Wien 2002, p. 61 (Lennartz as a representative who “had propagated the National Socialist view of literature”), p. 76 (judgment on Stefan Andres, 1938), p. 217 (judgment on Hermann Hesse, 1938) , P. 309 (Review of Herybert Menzel's novel Controversial Earth , 1941).
4. ^ Franz Lennartz - Exhibition in the Frankfurt University Library from March 1 to March 31, 2010