Gertrud Fussenegger

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Gertrud Fussenegger (born May 8, 1912 in Pilsen , Bohemia , Austria-Hungary , † March 19, 2009 in Linz ), (full name Gertrud Anna Fussenegger , also Gertrud Dietz or Dorn , pseudonym Anna Egger ) was an Austrian writer who was controversial due to her work in the time of National Socialism until her death.

Life

Fussenegger was born as the daughter of the Austro-Hungarian officer Emil Fussenegger and grew up in Neu Sandez ( Galicia ), Dornbirn and Telfs , before moving back to Pilsen (at that time Czechoslovakia ) after her mother's death in 1926 , where she graduated from high school in the summer of 1930 dropped. She then studied at the University of Innsbruck and Munich history, art history and philosophy, and in 1934 in Innsbruck at Harold Steinacker Dr. phil. PhD .

In May 1933 she joined the Austrian NSDAP . After she sang the Horst-Wessel-Lied and performed the Hitler salute at a demonstration in Innsbruck in May 1934 , she was sentenced to a fine. In February 1935 she was still a member of an Austrian group of Nazi students, but moved to the German Reich in November of the same year . In 1938, after the " Anschluss of Austria ", she rejoined the NSDAP (membership number 6.229.747) and paid homage to Hitler with a hymn.

She later lived in Munich , from where she moved to Hall in Tirol in 1943 because of the bombings with the children . In 1961 she moved to Leonding near Linz .

Her first marriage was to the sculptor Elmar Dietz from 1935 until the divorce in 1947, and her second marriage (from 1950) to the sculptor Alois Dorn .

“ Since my second marriage was only civil, I was excluded from the sacraments for a very long time. I felt that as deeply painful, but it was a pain that has also become very fruitful for me. Only in this way did I become aware of all the preciousness of the Eucharist. I cannot regret that I often shed bitter tears during that time. Strictly speaking, I was gifted by the ban . "

She had four children - Ricarda , Traudi, Dorothea and Raimund - from their first marriage and a second son, Lukas, from their second marriage.

Gertrud Fussenegger was a member of the Austrian PEN Club , the Humboldt Society , the Sudeten German Academy and an honorary member of the Austrian Writers' Association . From 1977 to 1979 and 1984 to 1985 she was a member of the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt . In 1991 she was a member of the jury for the Franz Grillparzer Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation FVS , which led to heated controversies about her and the founder’s past. In 1978 she received the Humboldt plaque as an honorary gift.

The estate of her works is in the Upper Austrian Literature Archive in the Stifterhaus in Linz.

Artistic creation

Fussenegger began with historical novels set in different eras. Their stories were influenced by their Catholic origins. The author was aware of her dependence on the Renouveau catholique , which is also expressed in her novel Zeit des Raben, Zeit der Taube .

Gertrud Fussenegger wrote a work comprising more than 60 books, which was published in 25 publishers and translated into eleven languages.

Fussenegger and the Third Reich

Her relationship to National Socialism was formative for the beginning of her writing and the later controversies about her person. In 1933, Fussenegger joined the Austrian NSDAP and then the German NSDAP in 1938 . In 1939 she became a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK). She took part in the Weimar poet meetings in 1938 and 1939 and had contact with well-known folk authors such as Ina Seidel , Lulu von Strauss and Torney-Diederichs , Will Vesper and Wilhelm Pleyer . Despite her commitment to the Nazi regime, the Office for the Maintenance of Literature, under the direction of Hans Hagemeyer , expressed literary objections to her works in the Rosenberg Office . Die Mohrenlegende (1937), one of her first books, was ostracized two years after it was published by the Nazi experts as a criticism of racial ideology and a “Catholic concoction”. The discussion about this very work revived in 1993 when Fussenegger was to be awarded the Weilheim Literature Prize and the Jean-Paul Prize of the Free State of Bavaria.

Many of Fussenegger's other, mostly religiously conceived novels, poems and reviews were, however, distributed in important NSDAP organs. Your poem "Voice of the Ostmark" was printed in 1938 in the Völkischer Beobachter . This poem earned her massive criticism in 1945 because it was seen as a celebration of the “Anschluss” of Austria and as a glorification of Hitler. Around 50 years later, Fussenegger declared that she was sorry to have “wasted a lot of good thoughts” “on something that was then an abomination”.

Her behavior continued to be highly controversial during the National Socialist era , when she published texts in the Völkischer Beobachter (27 articles between 1937 and 1941) and other National Socialist magazines such as Wille und Macht and Das Reich , glorified Adolf Hitler as a figure of salvation and under the title “ From travel records "(1943) wrote down the following impressions from Prague :

“ Once there were five Jews out of ten people who were selling garters and timetables, strolling for business and pleasure in expensive furs or dandy suits; and next to them the street was populated by beggars [...] Such nonsense has long since disappeared in Prague today [...]. [In contrast to] earlier, because the alienation by Artandere and Degenerate people, which was willingly tolerated, gave Prague a look that was sometimes grotesque to the point of distortion . ”
And a few sentences further she described the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague in an anti-Semitic manner with the following words:
“ Cemetery is this place called? We find ourselves placed in a wild maze, in a dark and ugly labyrinth of innumerable corpse stones piled on top of each other, which in irregular masses, crooked and straight, upright and overturned, as it happens, occupy the black, ungreened ground like a dragon seed. Seven times - they say - the dead are lying on top of each other, seven times the narrow spot has been crammed with corpses. Poisoned by the terrible crowd, the earth seems to have lost its gift here to dissolve the bodies given to it into its own pure original form and thus to reconcile the decayed with itself. [...] But here we are touched by the breath of a strange, hostile world, a secretly lurking power, and we leave the unhappy place with a shudder . "

1942 won Fussenegger with her short story collection Eggebrecht the contest "The amendment to the XX. Century ".

post war period

In the Soviet zone of occupation , her writings The Robbery of Brides (1939) and Bohemian Enchantments (1944) were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out. In Vienna, too, some of her works were put on the “List of Blocked Authors and Books” in 1946.

In 1952, Fussenegger wrote - in the terminology of National Socialist racial doctrine - that she belonged to a race that appeared to be “fair-skinned, fair-eyed, sensitive to the effects of light, a mixed type of Nordic and Dinaric features”.

In the post-war period, Fussenegger repeatedly grappled with the German question of guilt. The literary scholar Klaus Amann described her autobiography from 1979 A mirror image with a pillar of fire as "all in all an embarrassing document of repression and obduracy". In this work, the author took up the above description of the Jewish cemetery again - “but in a contemporary, adjusted” version. Here she only reports of overcrowded tombs, but nothing of 'other species' or 'degenerate', the tendency of the text is completely different. "

Your Mohr legend , on the one hand vilified by Nazis as "Catholic concoction" and "compassion advertise Anders bred" that was "incompatible with our views on the racial laws", on the other hand, in the course of dealing with the past in Austria later condemned as "racist", was in the BRD reissued unchanged and filmed in 1988 by Gernot Friedel . In the following years, Fussenegger also published poems, short stories and plays. Pilatus , an oratorio with music by Cesar Bresgen , was premiered in 1979 at the Carinthian Summer in Ossiach . In 1996 the opera Kojiki - Days of the Gods by Mayuzumi Toshirō , for which Fussenegger edited the libretto, took place at the Landestheater Linz .

Awards and honors

Fonts (selection)

  • ... how do you resemble water . Novellas. Munich 1929
  • Community and community building in the rose novel by Jean Clopinel von Meun. Dissertation University of Innsbruck 1934 (digitized version)
  • Gender in Advent. Early German novel . Potsdam 1936
  • Moorish legend . Potsdam 1937
  • The bride robbery . Stories. Potsdam 1939
  • The people on Falbeson . Jena 1940
  • Eggebrecht . Stories. Jena 1943
  • Bohemian enchantments . Jena 1944
  • The Lasawa brothers . Novel. Salzburg 1948
  • The house of the dark pitchers . Novel. Salzburg 1951
  • Put in your hand . Novel. Düsseldorf / Cologne 1954
  • The buried face . Novel. Stuttgart 1957
  • Time of the raven, time of the dove . Novel. Stuttgart 1960
  • The tobacco garden, 6 stories and a motto . Stuttgart 1961
  • The trip to Amalfi . Radio play. Stuttgart 1963
  • The powder mill . Detective novel. Stuttgart 1968
  • Bible stories . Vienna / Heidelberg 1972
  • Resistance to weathercocks. Lyric abbreviations and other texts . Stuttgart 1974
  • A Long Stream Journey - The Danube. Line, spaces, nodes . Stuttgart 1976
  • A reflection with a pillar of fire. A life story . Autobiography. Stuttgart 1979
  • Pilate. Sequence of scenes around the trial of Jesus . First performed in 1979, published by Freiburg i. B./Heidelberg 1982
  • Maria Theresa . Vienna / Munich / Zurich / Innsbruck 1980
  • Kaiser, King, Kellerhals . Cheerful stories. Vienna / Munich / Zurich / New York 1981
  • They were contemporaries . Novel. Stuttgart 1983
  • The wave lifts us. Love, sex and literature . An essay. Vienna / Freiburg i. B./Basel 1984
  • Countercall . Poems. Salzburg 1986
  • Jonah . Youth book. Vienna / Munich 1987
  • Rulers. Women who made history . Stuttgart 1991
  • Jirschi or the escape to the piano . Graz / Vienna / Cologne 1995
  • One game after another . Stories. Stuttgart 1996
  • Shakespeare's daughters . Three novels. Munich 1999
  • Bourdanin's children . Novel. Munich 2001
  • Gertrud Fussenegger. A conversation about her life and work with Rainer Hackel . Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2005

literature

  • Friedrich Denk: The censorship of the later born . Think, Weilheim i. OB 1995, ISBN 3-9800207-5-4 .
  • Rainer Hackel: Gertrud Fussenegger. The narrative work. Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 2009.
  • Frank-Lothar Kroll (Ed.): Crossing borders. Festschrift for Gertrud Fussenegger . Langen-Müller, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7844-2712-X .
  • Norbert Langer : Something like a prayer. Notes on Gertrud Fussenegger's religious poetry. In: Sudetenland: European cultural magazine. Bohemia. Moravia, Silesia, Volume 29 (1987), pp. 342-344.
  • Helmut Salfinger: Gertrud Fussenegger. Bibliography . Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-205-99461-2 .
  • Sonja Segerer: An experiment on the novels of Gertrud Fussenegger . Master's thesis, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 1993 (unprinted).
  • Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (ed.): Poets for the Third Reich: biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Volume 4, Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2018, pp. 185–212.

Web links

Databases
Content

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Compare the information in the catalog of the German National Library
  2. ↑ Helmut Salfinger: Gertrud Fussenegger , Böhlau, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-99461-2 , p. 60.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 172.
  4. ^ Franz Fend on cultural and political continuities that should be remembered on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany
  5. ↑ Stefan Meetschen: The great happiness of writing. ( Memento from February 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Die Tagespost. Catholic newspaper for politics, society and culture. May 7, 2002.
  6. ↑ Provincial correspondence No. 66 of March 20, 2009: LH Pühringer: "Fussenegger's literary estate in the hands of the province of Upper Austria"
  7. ↑ Hannelore Schlaffer: Time of the Raven, Time of the Dove. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. No. 106, May 10, 2010, p. 14.
  8. ↑ a b Between horror and love. Gertrud Fussenegger is dead. ( Memento from March 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: Kurier. March 19, 2009.
  9. ↑ Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4: Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2018, p. 193f.
  10. ↑ Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4: Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2018, p. 202f.
  11. ↑ Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4: Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2018, p. 199.
  12. ↑ Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4: Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2018, p. 185.
  13. ↑ "Leader of the people, to whom it was given to
    draw tears of joy from long blind eyes" ". [...] From: “ Hymn to Hitler ”, quoted from Ernst Klee: The Cultural Lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 172.
  14. ↑ During the Nazi era, at least 217,000 Jews were murdered on the territory of Czechoslovakia. See the fascist occupation policy in Austria and Czechoslovakia 1938–1945 . Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-326-00293-9 .
  15. ↑ From travel records. In: The Inner Kingdom . 10th year, 1943/44, pp. 65–68.
  16. ↑ Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4: Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2018, pp. 207f.
  17. ↑ a b List of literature to be discarded . Zentralverlag, Berlin 1946 Fussenegger, Gertrud: The robbery of the bride . Rütten & Loening, Potsdam 1939.
  18. ↑ a b List of literature to be discarded. Second addendum . Deutscher Zentralverlag, Berlin 1948 Fusseziegger [sic!], Gertrud: Bohemian enchantments. Diederichs, Jena 1944.
  19. ^ Die Presse, Vienna online March 19, 2009
  20. ↑ Gertrud Fussenegger: “Statement of fate that happened. A self-portrait ”. In: Welt und Wort. Literary monthly. (1952), p. 84. Quoted in Steeger (2018), p. 207.
  21. ↑ see letter from Fussenegger to Manès Sperber v. Dec. 1977 In: Mirjana Stancic (Ed.): Selected letters to Manès Sperber. Institute for German Research, Ruhr University Bochum, online sightings January 11, 2002.
  22. ↑ Klaus Amann: The poets and politics. Essays on Austrian literature after 1918. Edition Falter / Deuticke, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85463-119-7 , p. 295.
  23. ↑ Carina Steeger: Gertrud Fussenegger - author in contradiction? In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4: Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2018, p. 207.
  24. ↑ Gertrud Fussenegger. Portrait. Wilhelm Stölting
  25. ↑ Peter Gstettner : Racism - first socially acceptable, now worthy of a prize? Comments on Gertrud Fussenegger's »Mohrenlegende«. In: FORVM. 480, 1993, pp. 57-60.
  26. ↑ The Linz State Theater brings together what belongs together
  27. ↑ see the comment by Willi Winkler “Die Jubelseniorin” as an OCR version (partially missing text) and as a PDF (scanned original) . In: Die Zeit No. 44 of October 29, 1993.
  28. ↑ with objection of the Central Council of Jews in Germany to the Bavarian Minister of Education
  29. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
  30. ^ Extended dissertation with Dieter Borchmeyer , University of Heidelberg. Hannelore Schlaffer: Time of the Raven, Time of the Dove. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. No. 106, May 10, 2010, p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Fussenegger, Gertrud
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fussenegger, Gertrud Anna (full name); Dorn, Gertrud; Dietz, Gertrud; Fusseneggerová, Gertrud; Egger, Anna (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Pilsen , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 2009
Place of death Linz