Gregor Gog

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Gregor Ambrosius Gog (born November 7, 1891 in Schwerin an der Warthe , † October 7, 1945 in Tashkent , Uzbek SSR , USSR ) was the founder of the Brotherhood of Vagabonds in 1927 . During the Weimar Republic he was known nationwide as the "King of the Vagabonds".

Life

Gregor Gog was the oldest of three children, his father worked as a carpenter and his mother was a maid. Contrary to the hopes of his parents, he did not pursue a career as a civil servant, nor did he become a pastor, as his mother would have liked to see it.

Gog was hired as a sailor at the age of 19 and volunteered in the Imperial Navy. With a trick he managed to get on the list for the foreign squadron. The soldier life did not correspond to his freedom of thought, but it enabled him to move out into the world. He resigned when a mutiny broke out off China in 1912.

In 1913 Gog worked as a gardener in Pforzheim . After the beginning of the First World War, he had to interrupt his work because he was drafted into military service. Without enthusiasm for the war and with a lot of contradiction, he served in the Navy on the tender SMS Fuchs . He was tried twice for mutiny and spreading anti-militarist propaganda before the military tribunal, and three times he was sent to an asylum. He served his sentences under the most adverse conditions, and contracted a chronic kidney disease. He was transferred to Wilhelmshaven and served there as a gardener for the first naval division. During this time he met the writer Theodor Plievier .

In 1917 Gog was dismissed from the Navy as "permanently unfit for war". He then worked as a gardener, first in Pforzheim, then in Munich. During the revolutionary years he did odd jobs, he worked in Stuttgart and moved to Urach . Here Gog lived together with Theodor Plievier and Karl Raichle in the "commune on the Green Way". He came under the influence of the poet- prophet Gusto Gräser from Monte Verità , who encouraged him and his comrades to wander. He came into contact with the life-reforming settlers from Vogelhof near Ehingen, who were close to grasses, and with the Christian revolutionary movement around Karl Strünckmann and Alfred Daniel . Gog spoke at political meetings and was active as a writer. He also got to know Erna Klein. They married, in December 1919 their son Gregor jr. born. When the marriage broke up, Anni Geiger , who had met Gregor Gog in 1923, raised the boy. Erna Klein was later murdered in Auschwitz because of her Jewish descent. Gregor Gog and Anni Geiger married in 1924 and worked as educators in Thuringia. After returning to Stuttgart, Gog wrote for the magazines Anarchist , Der Syndikalist, and reflection and awakening . In 1926 his collection of aphorisms On the Road was published by the publishing house of the “Bund der Brüder” . Diary sheets of the prodigal son and in 1928 in Verlag der Vagabunden the prelude to a philosophy of the country road. From a vagabond's notes .

In 1927 Gregor Gog founded the “ Brotherhood of Vagabonds ”, whose patron saint was Till Eulenspiegel . In the same year Gog became publisher and editor-in-chief of Europe's first street newspaper: Der Kunde . The first public vagabond evening took place in Stuttgart in April 1928, and this was where the intensive collaboration with the painter's vagabond Hans Tombrock began . Together with the painters Hans Bönnighausen and Gerhart Bettermann , they founded the “Artists' Group of the Brotherhood of Vagabonds”. The idea of ​​a first international vagabond congress came up and was realized at Pentecost 1929. Despite massive police barriers, around 600 participants turned up on the Stuttgart Killesberg. Erich Mühsam , Maxim Gorki , Knut Hamsun and Lewis Sinclair sent greetings. Among the congress speakers were Gusto Gräser , Alfons Paquet and Willi Hammelrath . Gog used the slogan “General strike for life” in his famous opening speech.

In 1929 he was fined for blasphemy, which he could not pay. Gog left Stuttgart and went to Berlin, where he attended the premiere of the film "Vagabund" in June 1930: Gog had worked on the silent film by Austrian director Fritz Weiß as an actor and also as a consultant. Then Gog traveled to the Soviet Union. His stay in the Soviet Union changed him abruptly: the anarchist on Landstrasse quickly became a representative of communist views. The magazine Der Kunde also changed its face. After his return from the Soviet Union, Gog continued as The Vagabond . In 1930 Gog joined the KPD and turned to the revolutionary working class. He was now pursuing the goal of "transforming the vagabonds into a reserve army of the proletariat." Several anarchist-minded vagabonds then turned away from Gog and his brotherhood.

When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, there were an estimated half a million vagabonds on the country roads of Germany. In September 1933 a nationwide "beggar raid" took place: the police, the SA and the SS arrested thousands of vagabonds and imprisoned them in the newly established concentration camps. Between 1936 and 1938 vagabonds were persecuted, tortured and murdered as " anti-social pests ". Gregor Gog and his wife Anni Geiger-Gog were arrested by the Gestapo as early as April 1933 and detained separately in the Heuberg and Gotteszell concentration camps.

Gregor Gog suffered from spinal tuberculosis and was denied treatment. Shortly after his arrest, he was almost completely paralyzed. The exact circumstances of Gog's escape from the concentration camp and from Nazi Germany have not yet been fully clarified. Together with a helper - some sources suspect Otto Marquardt - Gog fled to Switzerland on Christmas Eve 1933 over the largely frozen Lake Constance. Anni Geiger-Gog was released and in 1934 the marriage was divorced from Gregor Gog in his absence. Because of his political views, Gog had to leave Switzerland in 1934, Johannes R. Becher helped him to get an entry visa to the Soviet Union. Gog worked as an educator in Odessa, wrote reports, essays and portraits, worked for the German section of Radio Moscow and got a role in Gustav von Wangenheim's Dimitrov film Fighters . From 1939 he lived with Gabriele Haenisch (later Gabriele Stammberger ).

Moscow was forcibly evacuated on October 16, 1941: Gog and his family fled to Uzbekistan from the German troops. He fell ill with pneumonia. He recovered from her, but his generally poor health barely improved. A son they shared with Gabriele Haenisch, Stefan (born November 5, 1940 in Moscow) died on December 16, 1941. Gog received a small monthly pension from the “ Red Aid ”. Erich Weinert and Klara Blum , communist friends who had stayed in Moscow, helped him, but Gog was almost completely cut off from current political life. Major Borissenko, People's Commissariat for Internal Security, claimed the room that Gog and his wife lived in with him and saw to it that the two were mobilized to work in Siberia. The transport with which Gabriele Haenisch was supposed to be sent was dissolved, but Gog came to the Kuznetsk coal district in summer clothes . His spine disease relapsed and he was hospitalized. With the help of Theodor Plievier, who had also emigrated to the Soviet Union, Gog tried to get to Moscow. After the end of the Second World War he was granted relocation. He was to be Johannes R. Becher's successor as head of international literature in Moscow. But the trip was no longer possible because of his poor health. On September 22, 1945, Gog, seriously ill and in severe pain, attempted suicide. The doctors discovered and saved him. Shortly afterwards Gregor Gog died on October 7, 1945 in Tashkent and was buried in the communist cemetery there.

Movie

  • In 1930 the 49-minute silent film Vagabond was released , in which Gregor Gog played a supporting role. Austria 1930, director: Fritz Weiß, distributor: Erdeka-Film GmbH (Berlin).

Graphic novel

  • The graphic novel Der König der Vagabunden , written by Patrick Spät (text and scenario) and Bea Davies (drawings) , was published by Berlin-based avant-verlag , which specializes in comics, in autumn 2019 . The graphic novel is also the first biography about the life of Gregor Gog.

Reception and discount

literature

  • Walter Fähnders (Ed.): Nomadic Existences. Vagabondage and bohemia in literature and art of the 20th century (= writings of the Fritz-Hüser-Institut. 16). Klartext Verlag, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-814-4 .
  • Walter Fähnders, Henning Zimpel (ed.): The era of the vagabonds. Texts and pictures 1900–1945 (= writings of the Fritz Hüser Institute. 19). Klartext Verlag, Essen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89861-655-3 .
  • Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo. About life and survival on the country road. Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-88725-070-2 .
  • Hans Dieter Mück : Red "conspiratorial angle" on the Green Way. Karl Raichle's “Uracher Kreis”: summer retreat for revolutionaries of the word, 1918–1931. Bad Urach 1991.
  • Christina Rast and Ensemble :! I speak! Join me!!! A search for salvation. A four-person piece about Gusto Gräser, Otto Gross, Ludwig Häusser and Gregor Gog. World premiere on May 17th, 2007 in the theater rampe stuttgart.
  • Gabriele Stammberger , Michael Peschke: Arrived safely - Moscow. The exile of Gabriele Stammberger 1932–1954. Basisdruck Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-86163-082-6 .
  • Sergei Tretyakov : The King of Vagabonds. Gregor Gog. In: Ders .: Faces of the avant-garde. Portraits, essays, letters. Aufbau Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 2nd edition 1991, pp. 258–268 [EA 1985].
  • Klaus Trappmann (Ed.): Landstrasse, customers, vagabonds. Gregor Gog's League of the Homeless. Gerhardt Verlag, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-920372-32-8 .
  • Harry Wilde : Theodor Plievier. Zero point of freedom. Publishing house Kurt Desch, Munich u. a. 1965.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gregor Gog in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
  2. ↑ Patrick Spät, Bea Davies: The King of the Vagabonds. Gregor Gog and his brotherhood. avant-verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-96445-015-9 ( avant-verlag.de ).
  3. ↑ rbb Kultur, November 6, 2019 ( rbb-online.de ).
personal data
SURNAME Gog, Gregor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gog, Gregor Ambrosius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Life reformer and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwerin
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1945
Place of death Tashkent