Grete Trakl

Grete Trakl (1916)

Grete Trakl , actually Margarethe Jeanne Trakl , married Margarethe Langen (born August 8, 1891 in Salzburg , †  September 21, 1917 in Berlin ) was an Austrian musician (pianist) and a sister of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl .

Family and origin

Grete Trakl was born as the youngest of seven children to parents Tobias and Maria Catharina Trakl. Father Tobias Trakl (1837–1910) was an iron trader. As a businessman and owner of a house on Waagplatz , he became a citizen of the city of Salzburg in 1898. This title is a tax-statutory designation and is not synonymous with educated middle class , although the family sought this. Tobias Trakl (originally Trackl) came from Ödenburg ( Sopron ) in Hungary, where, according to documents, his family lived as wine growers until the middle of the 17th century. The mother Maria Catharina Halik (1852–1925) was born in Wiener Neustadt , but her father was from Prague . The Halik family (Hallick, Hawlick) is verifiably completely Czech until the 18th century and worked as gardeners in the New Town of Prague (Nové Mešto).

In addition to these seven children, there was Wilhelm Trakl, son from the father's first marriage.

education

Grete grew up in the very spacious Waaghaus on Waagplatz / Mozartplatz. At the age of six she went to Catholic elementary school. She was a good student and hardly ever sick. In 1901, just under eleven years old, she was sent to the boarding school of the English Miss Congregatio Jesu in St. Pölten . Here, too, she was a good student and rarely sick. It was not until the third year that their performance began to decline. She only got the best grade for three subjects: singing, piano and manners.

Grete was very talented musically; this became evident early on, when she easily outstripped her siblings, who all had piano lessons. Her move to Vienna in 1904 , where she stayed at the Notre Dame de Sion boarding school until the end of the 1908/09 school year , was linked to her later training as a pianist. In the high French school of this boarding school she was able to continue her musical education. In the last school year (1908/09) she also became a student at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and was immediately accepted into the second year of the academy because of her advanced skills. However, it ended this year prematurely.

She had a very close relationship with her brother Georg, who was four years older than her. Georg Trakl saw his image in her, and in his poetry he often referred to his sister. An incestuous relationship is also suspected in many Trakl biographies .

From the autumn of 1909, when she was 18, Grete lived independently in Vienna, where she was presumably tutored by a (previously unknown) private teacher, a common practice among talented pianists. This year she often met her brother Georg and his friend Erhard Buschbeck in the evenings . Buschbeck sometimes bought her opium. A lasting friendship developed between the two. After a brief liaison between the two, Georg Trakl ended his friendship with Buschbeck.

At the end of April 1910, Grete Trakl returned to Salzburg. The father died in June - an event that set in motion the family's rapid economic decline. Half of the estate, half of which went to the children under inheritance law, consisted of a business debt of around 1 million euros (based on 2011 purchasing power). The guardian of Grete, who was still underage, became the half-brother Willy Trakl, who, as Tobias' eldest son, also took over the business.

In the summer of 1910, Grete was chosen as his new student by Ernst von Dohnányi , who had taught at the Royal University of Music in Berlin since 1905 . In October Grete moved to Berlin.

Marriage to Arthur Langen

Grete lived in Berlin in the Linder boarding house at Grolmanstrasse 36 III. Soon she must have met her future husband, the 34 years older civil servant and (as a hobby) theater publisher Arthur Langen , whose sisters ran a boarding school next door at number 37. Arthur Langen is said to have supported Grete financially from March 1911, because the half-brother Willy or the mother had turned off the money and Grete had to leave the university because of it. From this time on, Grete and Arthur were engaged. This can be inferred from the legal proceedings that Arthur Langen initiated against the Trakl family in 1912 in order to force the marriage. During the trial, Willy retired as guardian; Georg was appointed as guardian in his place. He finally allowed the marriage. For its part, the court in Salzburg tried to rule out the appearance of pomposity . Georg, who took care of his sister's well-being and talent from an early age, later considered himself “the finest matchmaker” between her and Arthur Langen. The marriage took place in Berlin on July 17, 1912. Grete Trakl received further private training from the German-American avant-garde pianist Richard Buhlig . In 1912 she gave him no less than 15 poems by her brother Georg, including several that she had copied and four that were completely unknown until 2014: Sensation , Loneliness , Wretchedness and The Dying Forest . A fifth poem copied by Grete, Helian's Song of Destiny , is in the Brenner archives .

In the summer of 1913, when Grete was spending her vacation in Salzburg, she had a brief, stormy relationship with Erhard Buschbeck. In the winter of 1913–1914 she thought she was ready for a concert. However, she became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage in March. Georg traveled to Berlin to look after his sister and tried to bring her to Salzburg. Grete stayed in Berlin, however. The siblings did not meet again afterwards. Georg was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in August and died on November 3, 1914 in Krakow .

heritage

Georg left Grete his inheritance in the amount of 194 kroner and 95 hellers in cash as well as equipment such as clothes, linen and weapons (including a Browning pistol and an officer's sword) worth 100 kroner. The whereabouts of 20,000 kroner from Ludwig Wittgenstein's endowment , which Ludwig von Ficker gave with the condition to support needy artists, is unclear. Grete traveled to Innsbruck with her husband at the end of November 1914 to secure the inheritance for themselves. In order to prevent the Trakl family from taking possession of the inheritance, they appointed Ludwig von Ficker as an agent. Grete initially stayed with the Ficker family for about a month in December 1914 and was then sent by the family to the private clinic of the Sisters of the Cross in Innsbruck. She stayed there for a few weeks and returned to Berlin in March 1915 after completing the probate proceedings. She wasn't happy there, however.

She spent the summer of 1915 in Innsbruck again, where she maintained close contacts with Karl Röck and other members of the Brenner Circle . From October 1915 she was back in Salzburg and was looked after by her family.

Divorce and death

At the beginning of January 1916 Arthur Langen initiated the divorce. On March 10, 1916, the couple were divorced in Berlin because of Grete's adultery; she is said to have maintained relationships with Ludwig Ficker and Richard Buhlig. At the time of the judicial divorce, Grete was already staying in the Neufriedenheim sanatorium in Munich. To cover the cost of the hospital stay, the Trakl family had to take out new loans. Grete probably stayed in Munich until the end of November 1916. Then she returned to Salzburg, where she was very unhappy. In the meantime, the family's iron business had been removed from the commercial register.

In July 1917 the family sent Grete to Berlin to fetch the furniture that she had left behind after her divorce to alleviate the family's financial difficulties. During this trip, on the evening of September 21, 1917, Grete committed suicide at Potsdamer Strasse 134A, the address of the gallery Der Sturm, in absolute financial and health emergency with the pistol from Georg's estate.

A month after her death, the Trakl family's house was sold and the iron business went bankrupt.

With a probability bordering on certainty, Grete was buried in the Old St. Matthew Cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg. In 1938, as part of the National Socialist plans for a world capital Germania, the bones of the deceased whose rest period had expired - that of Grete had expired in 1937 - were reburied in two large collective graves in the Stahnsdorf south-west cemetery.

literature

• Marty Bax: Always too little love. Grete Trakl. Your finest matchmaker. Your family. Amsterdam 2014, ISBN 978-9082362404 .
• Hans Weichselbaum : Georg Trakl. A biography with pictures, texts and documents. Salzburg 2014 (2nd edition), ISBN 978-3701312191 .
• Harald Stockhammer: A 367/14 district court Hall in Tirol - probate proceedings according to Georg Trakl. In: Messages from the Brenner Archive 33/2017, pp. 109–125.

Web links

• Materials for Georg Trakl
• Hilde Schmölzer : Who was Margarethe Trakl? The August 31, 2012 standard .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Weichselbaum (Ed.): Androgyny and incest in literature around 1900. Trakl studies, Volume 23, Müller, Salzburg 2005, ISBN 3-7013-1108-0 , p. 43ff.
2. ↑ A poet of the turning point: Georg Trakl ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 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.  
3. ↑ Hans Weichselbaum: Unknown poems and prose Georg Trakl discovered. In: Uta Degner; Hans Weichselbaum; Norbert Christian Wolf (ed.): Authorship and poetics in texts and contexts by Georg Trakl, Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg 2016, pp. 405–423. ISBN 9783701312429
4. ^ Helian's song of fate in the Brenner archive of the University of Innsbruck.
5. ↑ See Harald Stockhammer: A 367/14 District Court Hall in Tirol - The probate process according to Georg Trakl. In: Messages from the Brenner Archive 33/2017, pp. 109–125, here: p. 121.
6. ↑ Diana Orendi-Hinze: Women around Trakl. In: Eberhard Sauermann, Sigurd Paul Scheichl (ed.): Investigations on the "Brenner". Festschrift for Ignaz Zangerle on his 75th birthday. Müller, 1981, ISBN 3-7013-0629-X , pp. 381-388, here: p. 383.