George Forestier

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(1952)

George Forestier (born January 13, 1921 ) was allegedly a Franco-German poet whose books were extremely successful from 1952. In 1955 it turned out that his life and work by Karl Emerich Krämer had been invented freely.

Life

According to his official biography, Forestier was born in Rouffach , Alsace . After a difficult childhood, he began studying in Strasbourg and Paris . In 1941 he volunteered for the Waffen SS and took part in the battles for Vyazma , Voronezh and Oryol during the German war against the Soviet Union .

In 1945 he was temporarily taken prisoner by the US. After being convicted as a collaborator in France , he stayed in Marseille under an assumed name . Provided by the police, Forestier volunteered for the Foreign Legion in 1948 and was assigned to French Indochina . Assigned to a group of outposts, he has been missing since the fighting for the Song-Woi in November 1951. It remained unclear whether Forestier had fallen or been captured.

His German poet colleague Karl Schwedhelm describes him in 1952 as follows: “The skin of the face is tanned by the sun and the fine sanding in the Moroccan garrisons. The figure sinewy and medium-sized perhaps, probably dark-haired. "

plant

(1954)

In September 1952 the Diederichs-Verlag in Düsseldorf published a narrow volume of poetry (48 pages) for Forestiers with the expressive title: I write my heart in the dust of the street. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung immediately recognized the “first-rate lyrical talent” and printed two poems and Forestier's curriculum vitae in its feature section. The previously unknown author also received excellent reviews from his colleagues. Stefan Andres wrote: “We Germans haven't had a Rimbaud yet , with Forestier we have one.” Karl Krolow praised him as “poetic down to the nuance.” And Gottfried Benn said: “Wonderfully tender, muted, melancholy verses ... he saw his own Fame no longer, not even its first alluring appearance, but his name will be linked to the series of the delicate and beautiful, the early vanquished ”.

1954 followed under the title Strong as death is the night is love another volume of poetry with 18 poems and repeated the success of the previous book. Eight editions (with a total of 21,000 copies sold) were printed from the first volume, and 6000 copies of the second volume had already been sold after two months. In 1955, another volume with letters, poems and diary notes from Forestier from 1940 to 1943 appeared with Letters to an Unknown Woman.

"The Forestier frenzy reached its climax," wrote publisher Peter Diederichs in autumn 1955. "The foreign legionnaire who wrote poetry became the talk of the day, enthusiastic youths decided to look for his grave, the myth began to live." Even more Forestier publications seemed possible: There was supposedly an unprinted story from the Russian War, and a search was made for Forestier's field baggage, which was suspected of further major work. But production stopped.

Work history

The poems were offered to Eugen Diederichs Verlag by a “friend” of Forestier, Karl Friedrich Leucht, who then appeared as editor of the works. Forestier's impressive curriculum vitae, printed in the first volume, also came from him.

But since 1953, the publisher Diederichs knew that behind the name Forestier was actually Karl Emerich Krämer, his own production manager and member of the editorial board . He had revised some old poems from the war in the style of Federico García Lorca and sold them to his own publishing house via Leucht as a middleman. But blinded by the sales success, Diederichs continued to play along.

It was only when Krämer left the publishing house and published the third Forestier volume in his own Georg Büchner Verlag that Diederichs revealed the secret. A storm of indignation broke out in the book trade and in literary criticism. Krämer was insulted as an impostor and in future ignored as an author. In 1959, Friedrich Sieburg summed up “the living being resentful that the dead did not exist” .

Krämer also published poems under the name George Forestier over the next few decades , albeit largely unsuccessfully.

analysis

The poems owed their success less to their lyrical quality than to the preceding biography of George Forestier. The mystification and exoticism of this life served the expectations of readers and critics of the 1950s, burdened with their own war experiences , and served them as a projection surface for their own emotional states. The legend was timely and therefore also in line with the market. In his review of the new volume of poetry, the writer Heinz Piontek gave another indication of the reasons for its success: "In almost every poem there appear erotic motifs, sensually heated metaphors, stammered out uncontrollably, you can feel the sexuality of the land servant behind them."

A legionnaire with an SS past who was lost in the Indochina War sold better than a production manager from the German province. Krämer knew that himself: “I belong to a generation that knows exactly what management is. Therefore forestier instead of forester. A new type of publisher is on the rise who asks himself with every book: Can I sell this to get my money back or not. ”(1955) With this, Karl Emerich Krämer has not only proven himself to be a good advertising psychologist, but also to be an early one The forerunner of the modern publisher, for whom a book is only a commodity.

From today's point of view, “Forestier's” success seems rather surprising: “Kramer was a busy, cunningly calculating, but not particularly talented, unpoetic, half-educated writer who handled crooked metaphors and for reasons such as loneliness, the big wide world, commercial love and alcohol touched a cloudy brew that is less reminiscent of the admired late Benn than of Freddy Quinn's successes like Burning Hot Desert Sand, which were made at about the same time, "said the writer Michael Buselmeier , citing the most famous Forestier poem:

I write my heart
in the dust of the street
from the Urals to the Sierra Nevada,
from Yokohama to Kilimanjaro,
a harp made of telegraph wires ...

Publications Forestiers

  • I write my heart in the dust of the street Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1952; Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden / Munich 1986, ISBN 3-8090-2236-5 .
  • Strong as death is, night is love. Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1954.
  • Letters to a stranger. Ed. U. introduced by Karl Friedrich Leucht. Georg Büchner Verlag, Zurich / Darmstadt 1955.
  • Only the wind knows my name. New songs and poems. Georg Büchner Verlag, Darmstadt / Düsseldorf 1961.
  • Glass shape and night railing (= Bechtle-Lyrik. Vol. 13). Bechtle, Munich / Esslingen 1966.
  • Biblical poems (= Bechtle-Lyrik. Vol. 16). Bechtle, Munich / Esslingen 1968.
  • Collected poems. Edited by Christian Sturm. Bechtle, Munich / Esslingen 1969.
  • As if my fingertips had eyes. Bläschke, Darmstadt 1972.
  • Report on the child, the coffin and the dog. Argus-Verlag Laufenberg, Opladen 1973, ISBN 3-920337-14-X .
  • Cain, Moses and others. Argus-Verlag, Opladen 1973, ISBN 3-920337-09-3 .
  • Where is the freedom that you speak of. Orion Heimreiter Verlag, Heusenstamm 1974, ISBN 3-87588-084-6 .
  • Everyone is left alone at the end of the street. Selected poems. Argus-Verlag, Opladen 1974, ISBN 3-920337-16-6 .
  • Your face won't leave me New poems. Gilles and Francke, Duisburg 1979, ISBN 3-921104-57-2 .
  • If I had the word that means truth. New poems. Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1985, ISBN 3-8090-2228-4 .

literature

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ cit. in: Hans-Jürgen Schmitt: The George Forestier case. In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Reinbek 1992, p. 322. Schwedhelm had never seen Forestier
  2. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . November 8, 1952, cit. in: Hans-Jürgen Schmitt: The George Forestier case. In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Reinbek 1992, p. 322
  3. ↑ Andres u. Krolow quoted. in: Werner Fuld: George Forestier. In: Ders .: The Lexicon of Forgeries. Frankfurt 1999, p. 78
  4. ↑ Gottfried Benn: Autobiographical and mixed writings (= Collected Works. Vol. 4). Edited by Dieter Wellershoff. Wiesbaden 1961, p. 315
  5. ↑ Peter Diederichs: On the Forestier case. In: Christ and the world . November 3, 1955, cit. in: Hans-Jürgen Schmitt: The George Forestier case. In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Reinbek 1992, p. 324
  6. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 1, 1959, cit. in: Werner Fuld: George Forestier. In: Ders .: The Lexicon of Forgeries. Frankfurt 1999, p. 80
  7. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . April 2, 1954
  8. ↑ Behind a fresh corpse . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1955, pp. 39-45 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Michael Buselmeier : Burning hot desert sand . In: Friday . No. 51, December 13, 2002