Gottfried Kapp

Johann Gottfried Kapp (born March 27, 1897 in Mönchengladbach ; † November 21, 1938 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German writer who “strived for balance” and whom the critics count among the “tendencyless” workers' poets. Nevertheless, he became a victim of fascism .

life and work

The son of an iron caster and a weaver attended teachers' seminars in Odenkirchen and Linnich after primary school . There he negotiated the expulsion from school after attending a reading with the working-class poet Heinrich Lersch without permission. Kapp was spared active participation in the First World War due to unsuitability. He initially lived in Lippstadt , Westphalia , and from 1923 in Berlin . The acquaintance with the Catholic social preacher Carl Sonnenschein opened the columns of the Germania magazine for him . In 1927 he made up his Abitur at the Berlin School of Politics. In the same year he married Luise Windmüller, a Jew from Lippstadt, whom he had met in 1920.

Kapp saw himself as a full-time writer. His role models were Jean Paul , Gottfried Keller , Adalbert Stifter , Gerhart Hauptmann , Heinrich Mann and especially Jacob Burckhardt . So it is not surprising that, in addition to a visit to Paris, he was drawn to Italy and the island of Capri several times . One of the fruits of this was Kapp's diary from Italy , which, like so much of his, was published long after his death. After lyrical attempts and the 1915 drama Kain , which testifies to his interest in biblical subjects, the narrator Kapp had his first small success in 1928 when Reclam published his story Melkisedek in Leipzig . Here, religious themes and biblical milieu are combined with motifs from the Orient, as Sabina Becker notes. A year later, Kapp's first novel, Das Loch im Wasser , was published by the same publisher. It describes the path of a worker's son to an architect and "means the first implementation of Kapp's idea of ​​the unhistorical hero ". For Becker, Kapp took over the structure of the development novel in succession to Goethe and Stifters. She writes:

Current political aspects are only dealt with incidentally, as literature “should not be judged from a social and political point of view” and should be written. In addition, instead of an objective-realistic narrative style, he calls for a representation based on “compassion, feeling and poetic fantasy”, which is intended to contribute to the “animation of things”. In addition to his resolute rejection of Expressionism , which he accused of “desecration of nature and the destruction of forms”, Kapp also turned against the currents of workers' poetry and the New Objectivity . He opposed contemporary modernism anachronistically to “harmony, the norms of nature” and “love as a means of knowledge”.

In 1934, Kapp and his wife settled in Kronberg im Taunus , where they were able to build a house on the edge of the forest with financial help from Kapp's mother-in-law. From here the view went "over the entire Maine plain to the Odenwald", as Kapp assured the Krefeld painter Kurt Beyerlein in 1936 . Close by, in Frankfurt, lived Luise Kapp's sister "Hete" with her family. Apart from that parental support, the couple was never a bed of roses, often lacking money. The new rulers of the “Third Reich” regarded Kapp as an “ enemy of the people ” because of his contacts with Jews . He has suffered raids, library ransacks, and other harassment. In 1938 his last two diaries from 1933–1938, in which he spoke out against hatred of peoples and national pride, were confiscated - something the Gestapo found fodder. Both spouses were briefly arrested several times. During a Gestapo interrogation in Frankfurt, Kapp was killed (from an unexplained fall or jump out of a window). The widow emigrated to England in 1939 and tried all her life to look after Kapp's work, as far as it was saved. She later lived in Lisbon , following her sister's family , where she wrote her memory book In Your Name and also died (at 71).

In Lippstadt and Mönchengladbach streets are named after Kapp. A stumbling block was set in Kronberg .

Works

• War poems. New Verses , 1916
• The experiences of the priest Jucundus , story, 1920
• Kain , Drama, 1920, published in Dülmen 1964
• Orpheus und Mänas , 1921, appeared in Dülmen in 1961
• Landscape and town pictures , 1925–31 (Soest, Jülischer Land, Lippstadt, Wolfenbüttel, Aachen, Weißenfels, In Adalbert Stifter's home, Trier, Capres Spring)
• Caesar to the druid Diviciacus , satire, 1925
• The mother , narrative, 1926
• The lion and the donkey , fable, 1926
• Essays on Writers and Literary Problems , 1926–35
• The shepherds , narrative, 1927
• The man with death on his back , story, 1927
• The wreckers , short story, 1928
• Melkisedek , story, Leipzig 1928, re-edition Dülmen 1962
• The Hole in the Water , Roman, Leipzig 1929
• The evening sacrifice , narrative, Berlin / Zurich 1930, re- edition Dülmen 1961
• The van Laac brothers , story, 1931, appeared in Dülmen in 1961
• Changeless gods , story and diary from Italy , 1932–38, published together in Dülmen 1960
• Poor Franz , novella, 1938

Published posthumously

• The mother of the mountains , story, Stuttgart 1956
• Youth memories from the Lower Rhine , 1959
• Peter van Laac , Roman, Dülmen 1960
• Poems , Dülmen 1961
• The strong helmet , Singspiel, Dülmen 1961
• Letters , with a foreword by W. Huder, Dülmen 1963

literature

• Luise Kapp: ... in your name. Life picture of the poet Gottfried Kapp , Dülmen 1960
• Walter Huder : About Gottfried Kapp. A contribution to the knowledge of his work , in: GK: kain. drama , Dülmen 1964
• Alfred Kantorowicz : German fates. Intellectuals under Hitler and Stalin , Vienna 1964
• Franz Menges:  Kapp, Gottfried. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 136 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Doris Sessinghaus-Reisch: Life and work of the Mönchengladbach writer Gottfried Kapp , Mönchengladbach 2001

Individual evidence

1. ^ Franz Menges in Neue Deutsche Biographie 11, 1977, p. 136
2. ↑ Kapp was a lifelong friend of Lersch, who also came from Mönchengladbach. However, his reservations about Lersch grew steadily. One year after his untimely death (1936) he expresses his suspicion in a letter to the Paul List publishing house in Leipzig that the friend had submitted too much to the zeitgeist instead of putting a stamp on his time with an original work ( Letters , 1963, page 470).
3. ↑ According to Exilclub ( Memento of the original from October 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed on November 15, 2011, Luise (1898–1966) was the daughter of the Lippstadt entrepreneur Sally Windmüller, whose factory still exists today and has grown under the name Hella from the bicycle and car lantern factory to one of the largest automotive suppliers and main employer in the city . Incidentally, Kapp joined the football club Borussia Lippstadt in defiance of his unfit for military service , and he turned out to be an excellent player. As he mentioned in a letter in 1923 ( Briefe , 1963, page 49), he was even offered “a coaching post in Cernowitz”, which he turned down because of insufficient pay (4,000 lei per month). By the way, from his numerous letters to his wife it is striking how much he loved her, even if he sometimes displays a breathtakingly hearty irony. 
4. ^ Franz Menges in New German Biography
5. ↑ In Killy Literature Lexicon , Volume 6, page 236
6. ↑ In addition Kapp's essay Dicht und Zeit , first published by Germania 1927
7. ↑ Sabina Becker in the Killy literature dictionary
8. ↑ Letters , 1963, page 459
9. ↑ As Kapp's letters show, he literally had to save himself small trips from his mouth, for example from Mönchengladbach to Cologne or from Kronberg to the Frankfurt hospital. Often he waited longingly for an outstanding newspaper fee of 10 or 20 marks.
10. ↑ Kronberg ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed November 15, 2011 
11. ↑ A new edition of the relatively short novel (130 pages) in Dülmen 1961 also contains the stories Das Abendopfer and Die Brüder van Laac . The title of the book says on page 127 that the Italians have a popular phrase “from the people who make a hole in the water. That’s what you’re like. ”This is the son of a weaver Richard Stadeler, who later, as an architect, built a textile factory for his father’s former boss. The title of the solemn, at times somewhat enthusiastic prose of this short novel reveals, perhaps unintentionally by Kapp, the “quality” of Stadeler's motives, which are never really comprehensible. Speaking for it - and an ironic affirmation of the title - is Stadeler's self-chosen ending: in the sea.
12. ↑ Kapp's sympathetic letters are always imaginative and humorous, even though they reinforce his literary stance that references to time, especially political ones, are largely left out. This even applies to his stay in Italy in 1925, where he (in Milan ) experienced the Duce and the mass enthusiasm for him. But he hardly touches on philosophical questions in his letters either.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gottfried Kapp in the catalog of the German National Library
• Detailed portrait, written in 2001 by students from Lippstadt
• Portrait by Henner Reitmeier, 2012
• Gottfried Kapp archive in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin