George Kaiser

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Georg Kaiser (before 1921)
Record by Georg Kaiser (Berlin 1907)

Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser ( November 25, 1878 in Magdeburg – June 4, 1945 in Ascona ) was a German writer . Georg Kaiser was the most successful playwright of the Expressionist generation. As an author he created 70 dramas, many of which have been forgotten.

Life

Kaiser was born in 1878 as the fifth of six sons of a merchant. He attended the pedagogical school of the Magdeburg monastery of Our Lady . After high school , he began an apprenticeship in a bookstore and an export and import business, but dropped out. From 1898 to 1901 he worked for AEG in Buenos Aires . After his return to Germany, he spent several months in a mental hospital in Berlin and then lived with various family members.

In 1908 he married Margarethe Habenicht, a wealthy merchant's daughter. Now financially independent, he settled in Seeheim on the Bergstrasse . Artistically, Kaiser was very active at this time, but without gaining public recognition.

In 1912 Kaiser created his first socially critical work From morning to midnight . Here he represented the hero ending in suicide as a role model. This work was later staged by Karlheinz Martin and also filmed in 1920 .

With his drama Die Bürger von Calais (1912/13), performed in Frankfurt am Main in 1917 , Kaiser achieved his first major success. This piece is about the moral attitude of "overcoming hatred... through philanthropy and vicarious sacrifice" ( King's Explanatory Notes ). In the next few years, Kaiser's works were performed throughout Germany.

Commemorative plaque at Luisenplatz 3, in Berlin-Charlottenburg

However, from 1918 Kaiser got into financial difficulties, which led to an arrest for embezzlement in 1920 and a corresponding conviction in 1921. In 1921, the Gustav-Kiepenheuer-Verlag took over a guarantee for Kaiser and made it possible for him to live in Grünheide (Mark) near Berlin. He maintained contacts with Ernst Toller , Kurt Weill , Lotte Lenya and Bertolt Brecht . Between 1921 and 1933 Kaiser was the most performed playwright in Germany. His plays have also been performed in New York , London and Rome , among others .

On February 18, 1933, his play Der Silbersee had its premiere on three German stages ( Erfurt , Magdeburg and Leipzig ). All three productions had to be canceled because of protest demonstrations and boycott threats; the directors of the theaters were subsequently dismissed in the spring. After that, no more Kaiser plays were played in Germany. Although he had signed a declaration of loyalty from the poetry department within the Prussian Academy of Arts on March 22, 1933 , Kaiser was expelled on May 5, 1933. His works fell victim to the book burning of May 10, 1933 . Nevertheless, he tried to stay in Germany. He joined resistance circles and wrote leaflets. Shortly before a Gestapo house was searched, he fled to Switzerland via Amsterdam in 1938, leaving his wife and children in Germany. Together with Maria von Mühlfeld and their daughter Olivia, Kaiser went into exile in Switzerland in 1938 . Kaiser didn't have to live in an emigrant camp in Switzerland like most of his friends. He owed this to the support of rich friends, who temporarily enabled him to stay in hotels in various places in Switzerland.

On November 2, 1940, his censorship-approved play The Soldier Tanaka , directed by Franz Schnyder and starring Karl Paryla in the title role, premiered at the Zurich Schauspielhaus . The play, which exposed Japanese militarism, received good reviews. Under pressure from the Japanese ambassador in Bern , Yutaka Konagaya , the Swiss federal government persuaded the theater to cancel the play. The management agreed on November 9th, but the performances on the 10th and 12th could not be canceled at short notice. Kaiser was extremely bitter about the dismissal. The first performance of the - now forgotten - play in Germany took place after Kaiser's death on February 13, 1946 in Berlin 's Hebbel-Theater . His last work was a mythological trilogy of verse dramas, Twice Amphitryon , Pygmalion , and Bellerophon (1948).

Kaiser, who had been staying on Monte Verità in Ascona since November 1944 , died there on June 4, 1945 of an embolism . On the same day, his friend and representative Julius Marx in Zurich signed a contract with the Artemis publishing house , which was intended to give Kaiser financial security against the transfer of all rights to future works. Kaiser was buried in the Morcote cemetery near Lugano.

honors

The city of Magdeburg named Georg-Kaiser-Strasse after him. Saxony-Anhalt has been awarding the Georg Kaiser Promotional Prize since 1996 . The municipality of Seeheim-Jugenheim named its town hall square after him.

sound documents

Record by Georg Kaiser (Berlin 1909)

Georg Kaiser left a few records on Berliner Records (Berlin 1900), G&T (Berlin 1904), Lyrophon (Berlin 1907) and Jumbo (Berlin 1909).

factories

See Wikisource for a list of all works

plays (selection)

  • Schellenkönig (1895/96;1902/03)
  • From Dawn Till Midnight (1912)
  • The Burghers of Calais (1912/13; 1923)
  • King Cuckold (1913)
  • The case of the student Vehgesack (1914).
  • Rector Kleist (1914).
  • The Coral (1917).
  • gas (1918).
  • The Dornfelds .
  • The protagonist. A Play (1920). The same text was used as the libretto in the opera of the same name by Kurt Weill (UA 1926)
  • gas II . 1920. The Coral, Gas I and Gas II form a trilogy .
  • The Jewish Widow (1920).
  • David and Goliath (c.1920, G. Kiepenheuer Verlag); Comedy in three acts.
  • Kanzlist Krehler , tragicomedy in three acts, published 1922, G. Kiepenheuer Verlag (Potsdam).
  • Colportage (1924, Verlag Die Schmiede).
  • The Tsar has his photograph taken (1927). Opera buffa. Music (1927/28): Kurt Weill. UA 1928
  • The Silver Lake (1933). Piece with music (musical). Music (1932/33): Kurt Weill. UA 1933.
  • Rosamunde Floris (1936/37). Opera version by Gerhart von Westerman with music by Boris Blacher 1960.
  • Alain and Elise (1937/38).
  • The Gardener of Toulouse (1938). Querido Verlag, Amsterdam.
  • The Soldier Tanaka (1940), play, Zurich, New York, Oprecht Verlag.
  • The Music Box , 1942.
  • The Raft of Medusa (1940–1943). EA 1945.

Other works

  • Gesa M. Valk (ed.): Georg Kaiser in the matter of Georg Kaiser: Letters 1916-1933 . Leipzig 1989.
  • Georg Kaiser: Villa Aurea. Novel. Querido Verlag 1940, Amsterdam, previously published in English:
    • A villa in Sicily . Translated by R. Wills Thomas, Dakers, London 1939 and under the title Vera in an Alliance Book Corporation edition at Longmans, Green & Co, New York 1939.

See also

literature

radio adaptations

web links

Commons : Georg Kaiser  – Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Georg Kaiser  – sources and full texts

itemizations

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The cultural encyclopedia of the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 282.
  2. ↑ Werner Mittenzwei: Exile in Switzerland , Frankfurt 1979.
  3. ↑ Gerhard Krebs: Tennō insults during the Third Reich . German Society for Natural History and Ethnology in East Asia (OAG), Tokyo 1992, p. 15ff.
personal data
SURNAME Kaiser, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaiser, Friedrich Carl Georg (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
BIRTH DATE Nov. 25, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH June 4, 1945
PLACE OF DEATH ascona