Fritz Hampel

Fritz Oskar Hampel , pseudonym Slang , (born April 24, 1895 in Crimmitschau , † August 10, 1932 in Koserow ) was a satirical German writer , journalist and cartoonist .

Life

Hampel was the son of an Austrian printer who was naturalized in the Kingdom of Saxony . 1908-1914 he attended a teacher training college in Waldenburg (Saxony) . Initially unfit for use in the war, he worked as an assistant teacher in the Leipzig area, but was called up in 1916 and, after an operation in early 1918 , declared fit for garrison use .

After the war he passed the second state examination and became a teacher at an elementary school in Neuschönefeld . In 1919 he began to write articles for the Leipzig satirical newspaper Der Drache , whose owner Hans Reimann was his first role model and initial mentor in journalism. Hampel gave a lecture to the freethinkers , was a member of the Monistenbund , the SPD and the USPD before becoming a KPD member in 1922 . In 1921 he met Erich Weinert , who also wrote for the dragon , in Leipzig.

In 1923 - until its dissolution - he was a member of the Proletarian Hundreds . In 1924 Hampel went to Berlin and wrote and caricatured for the Rote Fahne , which gave him some popularity. During this time he took on the pseudonym "Slang" based on Paul Schlesinger who called himself "Sling". Over the next three years, Hampel wrote numerous articles and caricatures on behalf of the party, such as propaganda pieces such as The Living Newspaper and Battleship Potemkin , a film advertisement for Eisenstein .

In 1927 he was appointed occasional editor-in- chief by the Rote Fahne editorial staff and was thus one of the seat editors in the Weimar Republic, who made it possible for further publications to be published even if the “responsible person” was imprisoned. He already had this function with the kite . In 1928 he was a co-founder of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers .

In 1929 he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison or imprisonment in a fortress in Moabit , Gollnow , Leipzig and Auerbach / Vogtl for "defamation", "attempted treason" and "literary treason" . dismounted. As a prisoner in the fortress, he was able to write two uncensored agitation brochures for the party. Released from prison in 1932, he took part in the KPD's election campaign for the July 1932 Reichstag election .

tomb

Hampel died of heart failure while bathing. He was buried in the central cemetery in Friedrichsfelde with the participation of 1,000 KPD comrades and speeches by Albert Norden and Erich Weinert . A stone in the grave complex for the victims and persecuted of the Nazi regime commemorates him.

plant

Like Tucholsky , Hampel was a “master of the small form”, in which he could express his views and thoughts with virtuosity through satire, puns, apt comparisons and allusions. As an admirer of the Soviet Union , as expressed in his prison letters, he was at an early stage a warner of the emerging danger posed by National Socialism . In order to draw attention to the mistakes of individual, often high-ranking people, but also to the entire social order, Hampel used all genres of the small form, e.g. B. the poem, short scenes, made up letters, interviews or reports, even the crime story or the film exposé. Many of the glosses he wrote for newspapers have been collected in book form.

Caricatures and satirical pictorial poems are also part of his work.

The best-known non-satirical prose work Hampels is the Battleship Potemkin. The 1905 Odessa Sailors Uprising , which came about in connection with the performance of Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin . This is a composition of documentation and narrative episodes.

chronologically

• Satirical magazine Der Drache , Leipzig, Chemnitz. 1919-1925, article
• Our way , amateur play. Ido-Verlag Leipzig 1923
• Red flag , articles, cartoons. 1924
• The living newspaper . KPD propaganda piece. 1925
• Armored cruiser Potemkin . KPD propaganda pamphlet. 1926
• Cabaret scenes for Erich Weinert's Rote Raketen . 1927
• All nine! Nine SPD heads to bow . Poems 1927
• This is what they look like! An election revue in 7 pictures
• Getting married or paying taxes? KPD agitation brochure. 1929
• What does the swastika bring you? KPD agitation brochure. 1929

literature

• Slang. A selection of poetry and prose. Edited by Rudolf Hoffmann and Elisabeth Simons. Publishing house of the Ministry of National Defense . Berlin 1958.
• Panopticon from the day before yesterday. Satires, humoresques and feature pages. Edited and with an afterword by Wolfgang U. Schütte. Verlag Tribüne, Berlin 1980.

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Hampel in the catalog of the German National Library