Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt

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Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt (Literaturhaus Cologne, March 6, 2007)
Excerpt from the reading by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in the Literaturhaus Cologne on March 6, 2007

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt (born May 2, 1928 as Jürgen Arthur Goldschmidt in Reinbek near Hamburg ) is a French - German writer , essayist and translator . He lives in Paris .

Life

family

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt came in 1928 in Reinbek near Hamburg as the son of the higher regional judge Arthur Goldschmidt (1873-1947) and Toni Katharina-Maria Jeanette Horschitz, called Kitty (born February 9, 1882 in Kassel; † June 2, 1942 in Reinbek near Hamburg ), to the world. His birth name was Jürgen Arthur Goldschmidt. The originally Jewish family had already converted to Protestantism in the 19th century and Jürgen Arthur was accordingly baptized Evangelical-Lutheran. But also the Goldschmidts were not spared from the anti-Semitism of the emerging National Socialism . As early as 1937 Jürgen Arthur in Reinbek was excluded from the children's church service by the local pastor Hartung as "non-Aryans".

The persecution of the Jews in National Socialist Germany forced the parents in May 1938 to bring Jürgen Arthur and his older brother Erich to safety abroad. The first-born daughter Ilse-Maria (1907–1967) was deported to Belgium with her husband, the philosopher Ludwig Landgrebe , in 1940; Subsequently, the Landgrebe couple returned to Reinbek and Landgrebe had to earn a living doing commercial auxiliary work in Hamburg. The parents who remained in Reinbek were expelled from the Protestant Church in February 1942. The Reinbek pastor refused to bury the mother, who died in 1942, because she was a "non-Aryan Christian". The father was arrested; he survived internment in the Theresienstadt ghetto and died in 1947 at the opening ceremony of a community college in Reinbek, which he had co-founded. Erich became an officer in France and died in Draguignan in 2010 . The brothers never saw their parents again.

Childhood and Youth in Exile

Jürgen Arthur and Erich Goldschmidt were first brought to Florence by a courier , where Jürgen Arthur found shelter with Paul Binswanger . In March 1939, the brothers had to flee again from the Nazi thugs and, at risk of death, they reached the French Savoy , where Georges-Arthur stayed in a boarding school near Annecy . The experiences of violence there, which traumatized and conditioned him for a long time, he later processed in his story Die Absonderung (1991) and in many of his other works. During the German occupation of Savoy (1943–1944) he was kept hidden by mountain farmers, which saved him from deportation . Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt spent the first years after the liberation in a Jewish orphanage in Pontoise near Paris.

Living in France as a teacher, translator and writer

In 1949 he became a French citizen and converted to Catholicism. After graduation in 1948 he participated in the Sorbonne , a German studies in 1957 he put the French teaching exam , and taught from then until his retirement in 1992 at various schools in and around Paris.

Goldschmidt first became a writer in the 1960s. He began to write for well-known magazines, partly in collaboration with his wife Lucienne Geoffrey, followed by his first essays and novels in French. In addition to his work as a writer, Goldschmidt also made a name for himself as a literary critic and translator . The authors and philosophers he has translated include Friedrich Nietzsche , Walter Benjamin , Franz Kafka , Adalbert Stifter , Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his Austrian friend, Peter Handke , who in turn translated some of Goldschmidt's works into German.

Since 1995 he has been a member of the Darmstadt Academy . In 1997 Goldschmidt was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Osnabrück , an award which, according to the Department of Linguistics and Literature at the University of Osnabrück, is intended to honor his commitment as a “unique border crosser and bridge builder” between Germany and France. The department also states about Goldschmidt's literary work:

“Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt made the historical responsibility of Germany and the crime of anti-Semitism in their extreme consequences visible for the individual. His autobiographical prose shows in a shocking way the dimension of the inner danger of those who get caught in the machinery of persecution. "

In 2009 he was offered the honorary citizenship of his hometown Reinbek.

Language and translation thinking

For Goldschmidt, the French language is the language of hospitalité , of receptiveness. One reason for him to translate his French texts back into his native German is to

“Because with the horror of that time everything could not be said, because the German language says so completely different and it was spoken so wonderfully by people like Hans or Sophie Scholl [...]. Through the language of protection, my mother tongue came back to me, preserved, as if it were not wounded and not spoiled, as if not affected by the vocabulary of murder, what remained for me was the language of Joseph Eichendorff or Heinrich Heine. "

The culture-mediating translation, in the sense of hospitalité , ultimately, means showing the other one's humanity:

“Nothing is more unpleasant than a conversation in a foreign language that you cannot understand because speaking urges you to understand, to the humanity of the other, because I am a person precisely because of understanding, not of signs, but of speaking, and only people speak. "

For Goldschmidt, translating, consciously or unconsciously, opens up a moment of understanding one's own identity. Goldschmidt seems to feel the tension between his identities spatially:

"The deeper you sit in a language, the more you become obsessed with it and the more you need another language to keep your distance."

And he experiences this tension as a positive, enriching moment that guarded against falling into Nazi German.

Awards

The jury's justification for awarding the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize: “This year the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize is awarded to a book with which its author has found his way back to the German language after two thematically similar works. The story 'The Isolation' traces the experiences of a child who has become a victim of the arbitrary measures of a dictatorship in a very impressive way. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt uses oppressive images to illustrate the experience of a victim who cannot help but gradually accept the role of the victim. Experience and language are perfectly combined in the text. It bears witness to the proximity of both in the author's consciousness, of which the author himself speaks in the isolation: 'When he passed the scout vehicle and pretended it was none of his business, he heard two soldiers talking about him. He almost greedily listened to the sound of his mother tongue. He hadn't heard him for years, and yet he understood every word. ' We owe it to the poet Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt if we understand a little more about our mother tongue and about ourselves. "

Works

Literature and essay (German-language selection)

  • The mirror day. (“Le miroir quotidien”, 1981). Translated into German by Peter Handke . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1982.
  • A garden in Germany. (“Un jardin en Allemagne”, 1986). Translated into German by Eugen Helmlé . Ammann, Zurich, 1988.
  • The interrupted forest. (“La forêt interrompue”, 1991). Translated into German by Peter Handke. Ammann, Zurich, 1992.
  • The secretion. Narrative. Ammann Verlag, Zurich 1991.
  • The punished Narcissus. ("Narcisse puni", 1990). Translated into German by Mariette Müller. Ammann, Zurich, 1994.
  • The suspension. Ammann, Zurich, 1996.
  • When Freud saw the sea. Freud and the German language. Translated into German by Brigitte Große . Ammann, Zurich 1999.
  • Across the rivers. Autobiography, Ammann, Zurich, 2001. Translated into German by the author.
  • In the presence of the absent God. (“En Présence du Dieu absent”, 2001). Translated into German by Brigitte Große. Ammann, Zurich, 2003.
  • The stuff of writing. Essay. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-88221-862-6 .
  • Freud is waiting for the word. Freud and the German language II. Translated into German by Brigitte Große. Ammann, Zurich 2006.
  • The Liberation. Narrative. Ammann, Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-250-10508-4 .
  • The fist in the mouth. Essay. Translated by Brigitte Große. Ammann, Zurich 2008 ISBN 978-3-250-30021-2
  • Most of the time, the one you are looking for lives next door. Read Kafka. Essay. Translated by Brigitte Große. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-10-027824-1 .
  • A return. ("L'esprit de retour", 2011). Narrative. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-10-027825-8 . (Self-translation)
  • The way out . ("Le recours", 2005). Narrative. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-002209-7 . (Self-translation)
  • The Belleville Hills . ("Les collines de Belleville", 2015). Narrative. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2018, ISBN 978-3-596-70202-2 (self-translation).
  • From post-exile. Wallstein, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-8353-3590-5 .

Translations (selection)

literature

Life, work, individual aspects
  • Wolfgang Asholt (Ed.): Studies on the work of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Osnabrück 1999.
  • Klaus Bonn: On the topic of house, garden and forest, sea. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 3-89528-395-9 .
  • Michaela Holdenried: The end of sincerity? On the change of autobiographical dispositive using the example of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. In: Archives for the Study of Modern Languages ​​and Literatures . 149. Jg. (1997), Vol. 234, H. 1, pp. 1-19.
  • Günther Rüther : Living between languages: the German-French author Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Introduction to life and work. In: French contemporary literature (= encounters with neighbors. Volume 3). Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Sankt Augustin 2004, ISBN 3-937731-33-4 , pp. 127-137 ( short version online ; PDF file, 39 kB).
  • Tim Trzaskalik: Counter languages. The memory of the texts. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-86109-178-3 .
  • Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt (= Culture & Ghosts Edition 5), designed by Tim Trzaskalik. Textem Verlag, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-938801-40-6 .
  • Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt (= text + criticism . H. 181). edition text + kritik, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88377-993-5 .
  • Renate Göllner: Masochism and Liberation: Georges-Arthur Goldschmit. In: Gerhard Scheit , Manfred Dahlmann (Ed.): Sans phrase . Journal of ideological criticism. Issue 8, spring 2016. ca ira, Freiburg / Vienna, 2016, pp. 180–191
  • Patrick Suter, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer (ed.): Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Crossing, surviving, translating. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2018.
Interviews and discussions

Web links

Commons : Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

proof

  1. ↑ Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: Vom Nachexil. Wallstein, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-8353-3590-5 , p. 20.
  2. ^ Arthur Goldschmidt: History of the Protestant Congregation Theresienstadt 1942–1945. New ed. by Thomas Huebner. In: Detlev Landgrebe, Kückallee 37, Rheinbach, CMZ-Verl., 2009, ISBN 978-3-87062-104-9 .
  3. ↑ https://www.abendblatt.de/region/stormarn/article134245167/Ehre-fuer-einen-grossen-Reinbeker.html
  4. ↑ In the presence of the absent God. (Blurb)
  5. ↑ Newspaper article from the University of Osnabrück on the award of an honorary doctorate (1997) ( Memento from February 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Cf. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: How green should be red or the metamorphosis of translation. In: Alberto Gil , Manfred Schmeling: Translate culture. On the science of translation in the German-French dialogue. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2009, p. 13 f.
  7. ↑ Ibid., P. 9.
  8. ↑ Ibid .; see. for the artistic adaptation of this movement “between the rooms” the volume of poems Zweiraum by Marlon Poggio, with drawings by Ursula Krimm and a foreword by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. scaneg-Verlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-89235-514-4 .
  9. ↑ cf. B. Pierre Deshusses, Irène Kuhn : The translator: a tightrope walker over the abyss of languages. In: Alberto Gil, Manfred Schmeling: Translate culture. On the science of translation in the German-French dialogue. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2009, p. 49 ff.
  10. ↑ See the conversation between Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt and Franziska Augstein in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the weekend of January 21, 2012 on German as a "subject language" .
  11. ↑ German-French program for young literary translators from three countries: D, F, CH Quelle or UEbersetzerPOrtal, uepo
  12. ↑ Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt receives the Breitbach Prize 2005
  13. ^ Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy and History. October 11, 2017, accessed July 23, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Awarding of the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize 1991 ( Memento from April 19, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Living with shame - Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt describes his liberation from destruction and dictatorship. In: Die Welt , November 24, 2007
  16. ↑ das-beste-lesen.de ( Memento from July 10, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
personal data
SURNAME Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldschmidt, Jürgen-Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-German writer, essayist and translator
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Reinbek