Franz Xaver Kappus

Franz Xaver Kappus (born May 17, 1883 in Temesvár , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary , † October 8, 1966 in Berlin ) was an Austrian writer and journalist .

Life

Franz Xaver Kappus attended secondary school in his hometown of Temesvár from 1894 to 1898 and the cadet school from 1898 to 1902 . At his father's request, he graduated from the Wiener Neustadt Military Academy from 1902 to 1905 and received the lieutenant's degree in 1905. Two years earlier he had started correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke , which lasted until 1908 , and which he later published in 1929 as a letter to a young poet at the Leipziger Insel Verlag . In the following years, Kappus worked as an officer in Vienna , Pressburg , Dalmatia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. During this time he wrote poems , humoresques , and skits , which were published in newspapers and magazines in Vienna, Munich and Berlin . In 1911 he was employed in the literary office of the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry and edited the military magazine in Vienna. In 1914, Kappus had to go to the Eastern Front, where he was shot in the lung and taken to the hospital . In 1916 he married his nurse Alexandra von Malachowska in Stuttgart . From 1917 he worked as editor of the Belgrader Nachrichten , where he was Otto Alscher's colleague . In 1918 he received the Knight's Cross of the Franz Joseph Order and came to Temesvár in the autumn of the same year.

In order to earn a living, Kappus began to work as a journalist. In 1919 he started at the Banater Tagblatt , in 1922 he switched to the liberal Temesvarer newspaper and in 1923 he became Banat correspondent for the German-language newspaper Bucharest Presse . During this time the newspapers mentioned published around 60 articles by Kappus. He was active as a reviewer of German, Romanian and Hungarian literature, cultivated relationships with Transylvanian-Saxon authors and accompanied journalistic activities in German-language theater. In a newspaper poll, he was named the city's third most popular personality among readers. Timișoara took the most important place in its thematically broad journalistic activity. He described the image of Timișoara and its inhabitants through countless articles in the period between 1919 and 1925, when he lived and worked there and worked as an employee of the Temesvar newspaper . After a five-year stay, Franz Xaver Kappus said goodbye to Timișoara in 1925.

In 1918 his novel The Living Fourteen was published by Ullstein Verlag in Berlin , and in 1922 his novel Der Rote Reiter , which was made into a film in 1923. In 1925 Kappus moved to Berlin, where he accepted a position as a lecturer at Ullstein-Verlag. He reported several times how he tried to make it clear to Berliners, who thought he was Viennese, that he was actually a Banat from Timișoara. Until he was exhausted, he told his friends in Berlin about the Hungarian king Karl Robert von Anjou , the Turkish wars and Prince Eugene , the beach in Timișoara, the Swabian national community and other Banat issues. Between 1925 and 1933 he published a dozen Berlin articles in the Temesvarer Zeitung . In 1926 his novel The Artist's Wife was filmed.

In June 1945, Kappus was one of the founding members of the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD). After a creative break in the Second World War, he published again in Berlin publishers since the end of the war, for example in 1946 in the Aufbau-Verlag Der adventurliche Simplicissimus , an adaptation of Grimmelshausen , and in 1949 in the Tempelhofer Druckhaus the novel Escape into Love about the anti-Nazi resistance. He also reported back to the Temesvar newspaper . At Ullstein-Verlag, Kappus worked as a permanent employee and publisher until he retired in 1960. Franz Xaver Kappus died in East Berlin in 1966 at the age of 83.

Works

• In a black skirt. Cadet sketches, Vienna 1903
• The woman marquise. Comic opera based on V. Leon, 1908
• The favorite king. Comedy, 1912 (with K. Robitschek)
• Your picture. One-act play, 1912 (with K. Robitschek)
• Ha! What pleasure ... military satires, Vienna 1912
• Through the monocle. Military satires, Vienna and Leipzig 1913
• Blood and Iron. War novellas, Stuttgart 1916
• The new gold. Time satire, 1913 (with Siegfried Geyer)
• The Living Fourteen, Roman, Berlin 1918
• The whip in the face. Story of a Drawn, Roman, Berlin 1918
• Der Rote Reiter, Roman, Berlin 1922 (filmed in 1923 and 1935)
• The man with two souls, Roman, Berlin 1924
• The Billion Caesar, Roman, Berlin 1925
• Death in a racing car, Roman, Berlin 1925
• The swapped face, Roman, Berlin 1925
• The ball in the net, novel 1927
• Yacht Estrella missing, Roman, Berlin 1928
• The wife of the artist Oldenburg, 1928
• Rainer Maria Rilke's letters to a young poet, Inselverlag Leipzig 1929 (Ed.)
• Martina and the dancer, Roman, Berlin and Vienna 1929
• Jump out of the luxury train, Roman, Berlin 1929
• One night many years ago, Roman, Berlin 1930
• Remote people. Novellas, Timisoara 1930
• Hamlet von Laibach, Roman, Berlin 1931
• The Aviator's Daughter, Roman, Berlin 1935
• Race for Life, novel 1935
• Bridal trip around Lena, novel 1935
• A yacht has sunk, Roman, Berlin 1936
• What about Quidam, novel 1936
• You are Viotta! Roman, Berlin 1937
• Flaming Shadows, Roman, Berlin 1941
• Escape into love, Roman, Berlin 1949

Screenwriter

• The Red Rider, 1923
• The Woman in Gold, 1926
• Les voleurs de gloire, 1926
• The Red Rider, 1935 remake
• The man whose name was stolen, 1944

literature

• Biographical Lexicon of Banat Germans, Dr. Anton Peter Petri, Breit Druck + Verlag GmbH, Marquartstein 1992
• The unpathetic wanderer. Franz Xaver Kappus, recipient of the Rilke letters to a young poet and his Banat relationships by Franz Liebhard in Menschen und Zeiten, Bucharest 1970
• Banat cultural area. German culture in a European multiethnic region, Walter Engel (Ed.), Klartext Verlag, Essen 2007 (article by Eduard Schneider East-western impressions and reports. On the journalistic articles by Franz Xaver Kappus about Timisoara and Berlin)
• William Totok : Franz Xaver Kappus între isterie de război şi pacifism moderate (German Franz Xaver Kappus between war hysteria and moderate pacifism ). In: Franz Xaver Kappus, Biciul disprețului. Povestea unui stigmatizat / The whip in the face. Story of a drawn man. Prefaţă, tabel cronologic şi ediţie bilingvă îngrijită de William Totok. Traducere din limba germană de Werner Kremm, Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, Bucureşti 2018.

Web links

• Literature by and about Franz Xaver Kappus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Franz Xaver Kappus in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Works by and about Franz Xaver Kappus at Open Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jürgen Dittberner: The FDP. History, people, organization, perspectives. An introduction. Springer-Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-32293-533-5 , p. 145.