Friedrich Adler (writer)

Friedrich Adler (no year)

Friedrich Adler (born February 13, 1857 in Amschelberg , Austrian Empire ; died February 2, 1938 in Prague ) was an Austrian and Czechoslovakian writer , translator and lawyer . Adler was one of the leading German-speaking authors of Prague at the turn of the century.

Life

Youth and Studies

Friedrich Adler was born the son of the innkeeper and soap maker Joseph Adler and his wife Marie Fürth. After the death of his parents (probably in 1866), Adler was only able to attend school in Amschelberg sporadically. Nevertheless, he not only made it to a grammar school in Prague, but also enrolled at the Charles University there .

First he studied Romance languages , English, Czech and modern Greek there. Adler later changed his subjects and took law and political science. While still a student, Adler was awarded a prize in a competition for the translation of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . He was a long-time member of the committee and, in 1879, chairman of the reading and speech hall of German students, the largest student organization in Prague. In 1883 he completed his studies with a doctorate in law.

Lawyer, Romance studies and writer

Friedrich Adler, in 1876

After graduating, he completed his legal clerkship, which he finished in 1890. In the same year he passed the admission test as a lawyer and opened his own law firm in Prague on January 1, 1891. In March 1895 he married Regine Wessely from Trebitsch , Moravia . With her he had two daughters: Marie-Elise and Gertrude.

Adler became secretary of the Prague Trade Council in 1896 (he held this position until the outbreak of World War I). At that time he was also a lecturer in Romance philology at the German University in Prague and art and theater advisor at Bohemia . From 1900 he also taught Spanish at the German Commercial Academy in Prague.

After the World War, Adler headed the translation offices of the Czech National Assembly. He was elected a member of the Society for the Promotion of German Science, Art and Literature in Bohemia and, alongside Hugo Salus, was considered a leading representative of the Prague literary scene at the turn of the century. He was a member of the patriotic-liberal-minded German artists' association Concordia , which met in the German Casino ; In addition to Salus and himself, the group also included editors from Bohemia . Adler corresponded a. a. with Richard Dehmel and Gustav Falke .

Friedrich Adler died on February 2, 1938 in Prague at the age of 81. His family fell victim to the National Socialists : Regine Adler was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 , and the trace of the daughters deported from Theresienstadt is lost in 1943 in Zamość in occupied Poland .

His nephew was the internist Oscar Adler in Karlsbad .

Work and poem example

Adler wrote late classicist and early naturalist poems and dramas and emerged as a translator and editor of Czech and Spanish authors (including Calderón de la Barca , Tirso de Molina and Jaroslav Vrchlický ). His play Zwei Eisen im Feuer was premiered in the Vienna Burgtheater , Don Gil in the Munich Court Theater .

Adler saw himself as the successor to Johann Wolfgang Goethe and occupied himself in essays a . a. with Detlev von Liliencron . In some of his works his basic socialist and anti- clerical convictions are evident. He translated Bedřich Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride into German. His poem Ecloge was set to music by Arnold Schönberg .

An example of Friedrich Adler's poetry style:

After the strike (first two stanzas)

We are already silent. You won,

You men of law and justice,

And I'm sure you're crazy

Closely woven in your order.

We are already silent. You can proudly show

How you bend what threatens you:

We are already silent and will be silent

We hunger alone, give us bread!

You tell us a cheeky car

To overthrow the construction of your state -

O believe the grim nagging in us

Very precisely delimits thinking;

We quietly respect what is firm and proper,

And our flag is not red:

We are already silent and will be silent

We hunger alone, give us bread!

Works (selection)

• Poems. Fontane, Berlin, 1893
• New poems. Meyer, Leipzig, 1899
• Sports. Drama, 1899
• Freedom - The Prophet Elias - Carnival. Three one-act plays. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1904
• From the gold collar. Sonnets. Bellmann, Prague, 1907
• The glass master. Play in four acts. Cotta, Stuttgart, Berlin, 1910
• War poems 1914–1916. Poems. Regional Aid Association of the Red Cross for Bohemia, Prague, 1916

Translations and edits

• Jaroslav Vrchlický : Poems. Selected and translated by Friedrich Adler. Reclam, Leipzig 1895.
• Pedro Calderón de la Barca : Two irons in the fire. Comedy in three acts freely based on Calderon. Cotta, Stuttgart 1900.
• Tirso de Molina : Don Gil. Comedy in three acts, based on motifs by Tirso de Molina. Cotta, Stuttgart, Berlin 1902.

literature

• Adler Friedrich. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 6.
• Walter Kunze:  Adler, Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 69 ( digitized version ).
• Adler, Friedrich. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 1: A-Benc. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22681-0 , pp. 39-42.
• Jutta Dick: Adler, Friedrich. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , p. 1f.

Web links

Wikisource: Friedrich Adler  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Friedrich Adler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Selection of poems

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Friedrich Adler: Crescit eundo. A Prague student memory. In: German University. Sheets for German national free-spirited color students in Austria, volume 2, issue 4, (Vienna, 1.1.1912), p. 1
2. ↑ Konstantin Kountouroyanis: Friedrich Adler as translator and mediator between cultures - To Václav Petrbok's lecture about his research on a Prague poet . In: prag-aktuell.cz , April 25, 2015
3. ^ Bibliotheca Augustana. In: hs-augsburg.de. Retrieved January 2, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Richard Faber: Literature of the limit, theory of the limit. Königshausen & Neumann, 1995, ISBN 978-3-8260-1047-7 , p. 72. Restricted preview in the Google book search
5. ↑ pagine di Storia della Musica, Opera lirica. Storia della Canzone italiana e napoletana. Cantautori. Esempi di musica in midi e mp3. (No longer available online.) In: italianopera.org. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on January 2, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ^ Arent, Wilhelm (ed.), Poems, Modern Poet Characters, Friedrich Adler, After the Strike. (No longer available online.) In: zeno.org. Formerly in the original ; accessed on January 2, 2015 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.