Gustav regulator

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Gustav Regulator, 1944

Gustav Regulator (born May 25, 1898 in Merzig , † January 14, 1963 in New Delhi ) was a German writer and journalist . As a communist , he emigrated from Germany in 1933. His books Im Kreuzfeuer (about the commitment to the status quo in the context of the Saar referendum in 1935 ), The great example (about the struggle of the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War ) and The Ear of Malchus as an autobiographical report on the stages in his life and his gradual departure from Stalinism depict on the one hand important phases of anti-fascist engagement in the thirties, but on the other hand also the increasing turning away from the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union , as it was typical for many Western European intellectuals .

Life

Gustav Regulator was born the son of a bookseller. He participated in the First World War as a soldier. He was wounded and poisoned with gas on the Western Front in France . In the post-war years he studied philosophy, French and history in Munich and Heidelberg. In 1922 he became a Dr. phil. doctorate with the dissertation The Irony in the Work of Goethe . In the same year he married Charlotte Dietze, the daughter of a textile entrepreneur, in whose group in Leipzig and Berlin he also worked for a short time. The following year their son Dieter was born (d. 1941). The marriage ended in divorce in 1927. In the mid-1920s, Regulator moved to Nuremberg , where he worked as an editor for the Nuremberg-Fürth Morgenpresse . In 1928 his first work, The Shepherd's Train , was published, which received approval from the critics. On a chance visit to Worpswede in 1928, Regulator met Marieluise (called Mieke) Vogeler, the eldest daughter of the painter Heinrich Vogeler , whose socialist engagement influenced him. In 1929 they both moved to Berlin, to the “Red Block” on Laubenheimer Platz, a residential area of ​​left-wing artists. In 1929 he joined the KPD . “There is no complicated, perhaps ideological, explanation of my joining the Communist Party. All view has been simplified to the sentence: It cannot go on like this! "

After the Reichstag fire in 1933, Regulator fled the Gestapo as public enemy No. 19 via Worpswede and the Saarland to Paris . There he participated in the Munzenberg staff in the Brown Book on the Reichstag fire and Hitler terror . His church-critical novel The Prodigal Son was published by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam, a publisher that is becoming increasingly important for all exile literature. In 1934 he wrote the loyal political agitation novel Im Kreuzfeuer on behalf of the party , but the actual events in the Saar area overtook it. In the voting campaign on the Saar for the status quo with the motto "For Germany, against Hitler", he then had to witness the bitter vote defeat on January 13, 1935 despite great personal commitment (over 90% of the Saarlanders voted for affiliation with the German Reich) ; that same night he fled across the French border. Since November 3, 1934, Gustav Regulator was on the third expatriation list of the German Reich .

Gustav Regulator (right) in 1937 as an interbrigadist in the Spanish Civil War. Left: Ilja Ehrenburg; Middle: Ernest Hemingway

Several visits to the Soviet Union followed. According to Oskar Maria Graf, Gustav Regulator was “a model communist student”. Klaus Mann described him as "such a communist, that one of so much militant zeal is somewhat anxious mood." Starting in 1936, developed with controller an increasingly skeptical of the Communist Party of Soviet-style that eventually the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 led to detachment and officially to leave the party in 1942. His Bundschuh novel from 1936, Die Saat , called as a historical parable (peasant war novel with peasant leader and social rebel Joss Fritz as the main figure) to fight against fascism. As a member of the International Brigades , Gustav Regulator took part in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer, like many other republican or leftist writers . He was political commissioner of the XII. Brigade, took an active part in the fighting and was seriously wounded near Huesca in 1937 . His diary entries are the basis for his novel about the Spanish Civil War, which appeared in the English version The Great Crusade in 1940 , with a foreword by his friend Ernest Hemingway .

Immediately after his recovery, he went on a fundraising trip for the Republican Army Medical Service through the United States . When the war broke out in 1939, he was interned in France in the Pyrenees camp Le Vernet . Following the intervention of prominent advocates such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway , he was released and in 1940 emigrated to Mexico with his wife Marieluise Vogeler via the USA . Here he lived near the writer Lenka Reinerová .

Due to his increasingly distant attitude to the politics of the Soviet Union, he got more and more into conflict. Attacks and slander from his former friends such as Egon Erwin Kisch and Ernst Bloch did not let him calm down. Reinerová, too, maintained a relationship with regulators that was by no means free of conflict. When Regulator distanced himself more and more from the Soviet Union because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, among other things, it came to a break.

"From today's point of view it is difficult to understand, but at the time such a distancing was considered a betrayal," said Lenka Reinerová once. During the war the “watchword” was: stick together! "When Regler's wife Mieke, whom we knew well of course, died, we didn't even send him a letter of condolence," she later regretted.

The longstanding cancer of his wife and her death in 1945 also affected regulators in his literary creative process. He could not find a publisher for his poetry volumes, so they appeared as private prints. The fascination for the cultural and historical diversity of his new home is reflected in his publications Vulkanisches Land and Amimitl . In 1946 he got his third marriage to the American Margret (Peggy) Paul. His homecoming novel Stars of Twilight , published in 1948 by the Gutenberg Book Guild, testifies to Regler's own existential situation with regard to political insights and a certain resignation. His first visit to post-war Germany took place in 1949. From 1952, Regulator returned to Europe regularly. He traveled a lot, worked on various literary projects, gave lectures on the radio, made films. In 1955 his Renaissance novel Aretino came out, a cultural and historical portrait of the famous writer and friend of Titian . His autobiography The Ear of Malchus became his last major work in 1958 . In 1960 he was awarded the 1st Saarland Art Prize (literature).

In 1963 Gustav Regulator died on a study trip to New Delhi / India . His grave is in his place of birth Merzig / Saar.

reception

Memorial stone in Merzig
Gustav-Regulator-Platz in Saarbrücken

As the author of some important key novels of the Western European left of the 1930s and 1940s, Gustav Regulator is still considered to be an important and authentic contemporary witness. His literary oeuvre includes more than a dozen titles - political and historical novels , journalistic works, an art monograph and an autobiographical life story. In addition to his real name, Gustav Regulator also published under the pseudonyms Thomas Michael, Thomas Michel and Gustav Saarländer. He recommended himself as an important contemporary witness due to the numerous personalities who crossed his path in life - including Ernest Hemingway, Klaus Mann , Anna Seghers , André Malraux , André Gide , Maxim Gorki , Wolfgang Paalen and Ilja Ehrenburg .

In Saarland , a number of memorial stones, squares and monuments commemorate Gustav Regulator - including memorial stones on Gustav Regulator Square in Merzig and in the Saarbrücken district of St. Johann . The Saarland city of Neunkirchen has named a street after him. The Gustav-Regulator-Prizes awarded by the city of Merzig and the Saarländischer Rundfunk have been awarded every three years since 1999. In 1978 the research center for Gustav-Regulator research was founded at the Saarland University (integrated into the newly founded literature archive Saar-Lor-Lux-Alsace since 1996 ). In addition, there has been a privately maintained Gustav-Regulator archive since 1975 , managed by Annemay Regulator-Repplinger, the writer's niece.

In 1994 the first volume of the Gustav-Regulator-Werkausgabe was published by Stroemfeld Verlag in Frankfurt. Of this edition, which is based on 15 volumes, 11 volumes have now been published. Based on Regler's autobiography The Ear of Malchus , the 1995 feature film Burning Heart - Diary of an Escape (Director: Peter Patzak ), commissioned by Saarland Broadcasting Corporation . In addition, two documentaries - also commissioned by Saarland Broadcasting Corporation  - deal with Regulator: 1972 Merzig-Moscow-Mexico (Direction: Georg Bense and Günther Halkenhäuser) and 2011 Searching for Heaven on Earth - Gustav Regler's Second Home Mexico (Direction: Boris Penth )

Works

  • The irony in Goethe's work (1923)
  • Train of the Shepherds (1928)
  • But the sons go to the servants (1929)
  • Cockfight. Adventures of a French Girl (1931)
  • Water, Bread and Blue Beans (1932)
  • The Prodigal Son (1933)
  • In the crossfire. A Saar novel (1934)
  • The seed. Novel from the German Peasant Wars (1936)
  • The great example. Novel by an International Brigade (The Great Crusade, 1940, translated into English by Whittaker Chambers with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway ). Published in German in 1976.
  • The bottomless pit. The Well of the Abyss (1943)
  • Wolfgang Paalen. Artist monograph (1944)
  • Amimitl or The Birth of a Terrible (1947)
  • Volcanic land. A book of many festivals and more contradictions (1947)
  • The Tower and Other Poems (1951)
  • Haunted Land Mexico (1954)
  • Aretino. Friend of women, enemy of princes (1955)
  • The ear of Malchus. A Life Story (1958)
  • Juanita. Novel from the Spanish Civil War, Gutenberg Book Guild, Frankfurt am Main (1986) ISBN 978-3-7632-3228-4 .

Letters

literature

  • Alfred Diwersy: Gustav Regulator. Pictures and documents. Saarbrücken printing and publishing house, Saarbrücken 1983.
  • Hermann Gätje: Life and writing life. Gustavs Regler's autobiographical writings: development process - versions - genre discourses. Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2013, ISBN 978-3-86110-524-4 (also dissertation, Saarbrücken University 2012).
  • Max Hewer: From the Saar to the Ebro. Saarland as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. 2., corr. Edition, Blattlausverlag, Saarbrücken 2016, ISBN 978-3-945996-08-9 .
  • Ralph Schock : Gustav Regulator. Literature and Politics (1933-1940). RG Fischer, Frankfurt 1984.
  • Günter Scholdt: Gustav Regulator. Odysseus in the labyrinth of ideologies . Röhrig University Press, St. Ingbert 1998
  • Günter Scholdt: Gustav Regulator. A Saarland citizen of the world . Exhibition catalog. Greetings from Oskar Lafontaine . Joachim Hempel Verlag, Lebach 1988
  • Günter Scholdt:  Regulator, Gustav. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 272 ​​f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Regulator, Gustav . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945. 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition Dietz, Berlin 2008 ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6

Web links

Commons : Gustav Regulator  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gustav Regulator: The Saat. Querido Verlag NV, Amsterdam 1936; New edition 1975, Gutenburg Book Guild, Frankfurt am Main / Vienna / Zurich 1975, ISBN 3-7632-1857-2 , here: blurb.
  2. ^ Oskar Maria Graf: Journey to the Soviet Union 1934. 1974, published from the estate. P. 31
  3. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point. A life story. Frankfurt / M., Hamburg 1963, p. 284
  4. ^ Jobst C. Knigge : Hemingway and the Germans . Hamburg 2009, pp. 42-48.
  5. ↑ Georg Pichler : “Exile encompassed us like a brother.” Gustav Regler's “Enchanted Land Mexico” as a mirror of exile . In: Werner Altmann, Ursula Vences (ed.): Por España y el mundo hispánico. Festschrift for Walther L. Bernecker . edition tranvía, Berlin 2007. ISBN 3-925867-47-3 . Pp. 465-485.
  6. ↑ Quotes from Jung, Wolfgang: Obituary for Lenka Reinerová. In: Saarbrücker Zeitung, local section for Merzig-Wadern, July 5, 2008
  7. ↑ filmportal.de https://web.archive.org/web/20160428204320/http://www.filmportal.de/film/brennendes-herz_842ecbf5ff4e4ee79d89c30e70454e23
  8. ↑ Boris Penth's website
personal data
SURNAME Regulator, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Michael, Thomas (pseudonym); Michel, Thomas (pseudonym); Saarländer, Gustav (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Merzig
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1963
Place of death New Delhi