Fritz Picard

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Fritz Picard (born Ernst Friedrich Pickard November 18, 1888 in Wangen near Konstanz ; died October 24, 1973 in Paris ) was a Franco-German bookseller.

Life

Fritz Pickard was the son of the cattle dealer Daniel Pickard (1844–1921) and Rebekah Pickard (1856–?). He attended grammar school in Konstanz and did an apprenticeship in Strasbourg from 1909 . He became a soldier in the First World War. In the November Revolution of 1918 he became a member of a workers 'and soldiers' council and in 1919 found a job as a sales representative, initially for the book publisher of Jakob Hegner , and from 1921 for the publishers of Bruno Cassirer and Lambert Schneider . After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, as a Jew, he was only allowed to work for approved Jewish publishers and became a representative for Schocken Verlag . He used his activity as a traveler to mediate contacts between resistance groups against National Socialism.

After an interrogation by the Gestapo in September 1938, Picard fled to France. He had to leave his private library with 7000 books in Berlin and was lost. Picard was expatriated from the German Reich in 1939 . In France, after the outbreak of war in 1939, he was interned as an enemy foreigner in La Braconne and in 1940 in Saint-Germain-les-Belles and in Camp de Gurs , where he remained after the German occupation of northern France. The Vichy administration moved him to Bessines-sur-Gartempe , from where he escaped to Switzerland in 1942 . There he worked with Ruth Fabian, Walter Fabian's wife , in international refugee aid. After the end of the war, Picard and Ruth Fabian emigrated to France.

Picard worked again as a bookseller and in 1951 founded the bookstore Librairie Calligrammes in Paris , which primarily dealt with, initially still antiquarian, German-language books. Outside the shop there was a clock designed as a calligram , its digits being formed from the twelve letters of the word calligram. The bookstore developed into a meeting place for French and German intellectuals and writers. In May 1968 the bookstore experienced its first economic crisis due to the closure of the universities, which was overcome with the help of German publishers and newspapers. After Picard's death, Annette Antignac, a daughter of Ruth and Walter Fabian, continued to run the business.

After 1945 Picard was also involved in international refugee aid in France. In 1958 he regained his German citizenship and was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class .

Picard was first married to Lilli Benedick (1899–1994), known as a painter and journalist under the name Lil Picard , after the divorce from 1925 to Elisabeth Greitsch, teacher and writer (1889–1972), and in third life partnership with Ruth Fabian. He had three children.

Fritz Picard

Fonts (selection)

  • How I got into the book trade. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, October 14, 1967.

literature

  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Volume 2.2. Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 902.
  • Dieter Sander: Fritz Picard: a life between Hesse and Lenin. Mirabilis, Klipphausen 2014 ISBN 978-3-9814925-9-0 .

Movie

Ulrike Ottinger's autobiographical documentary Paris Calligrammes , completed in 2020, is also a homage to Picard's bookstore, the owner of which the filmmaker was well known. The bookstore itself is the central location of the film, in which a “secret main actor [..] Picard's long-lost guest book [is] with entries and drawings by Raoul Hausmann , Max Ernst , Hans Arp or Paul Celan , which Ottinger only opens at the end of the Shooting unexpectedly fell into the hands ”.

Web links

Commons : Fritz Picard  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Flügge : Calligrammes has given up. In: The world. March 23, 1999 ( welt.de ).
  2. ^ Daniel Kothenschulte: Poetry and Politics. "Paris Calligrammes": The great filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has created a grandiose documentary portrait of the Parisian bohemians of the early sixties. , Frankfurter Rundschau , March 5, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Picard, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pickard, Ernst Friedrich (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-French bookseller
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Wangen (Öhningen)
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1973
Place of death Paris