Hans Christoph Kaergel

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Hans Christoph Kaergel (born February 6, 1889 in Striegau , Silesia ; † April 24 or May 9, 1946 in Breslau ) was the head of the Lower Silesian Regional Chamber of Culture and a member of the Bamberg poets' circle .

Life

The son of a teacher spent his childhood in Sophienau and Fellhammer in Silesia. He attended the preparatory school in Schmiedeberg . From 1910 to 1921 Kaergel was a primary school teacher in Weißwasser (Upper Lusatia). In 1919 his first novel The Savior's Second Face was published .

In 1920 Kaergel opposed the separation of Upper Silesia from the German Empire . In 1921 he was appointed to Dresden as organizer and head of the Saxon People's Theater Association. This office, which was connected with a regular income, enabled him to leave the school service.

In 1923 he met Heinrich Zerkaulen in Dresden . Probably on his behalf, he went on a lecture tour to America in 1925 and devoted himself to “the great love and propaganda work of the Association for Germanness Abroad ” - said Zerkaulen. Kaergel has been a freelance writer in Dresden since 1926. There he was also an employee of the daily newspaper Dresdner Nachrichten . In 1933 he became state director for Saxony of the VDA, he was a member of the NSDAP and in the Reich Association of German Writers . In 1936 he returned to Silesia, where he lived in his house "Hockewanzel" in Hain . The house was named after the 1934 drama Hockewanzel , a work about a “genuine leader personality” in the fight against “fanatical Czech elements”, according to a contemporary advertising text. In Hain he wrote stories from home, novels, radio plays and works about other Silesian poets such as Hermann Stehr and the Saxon writer Kurt Arnold Findeisen .

In 1934 Kaergel received the Saxon State Prize for Literature, although it was on a list of prohibited books; this was "but probably not due to anti-fascist content, but rather on the disagreement within the then literary politics." In the same year his Hitler biography appeared people's chancellor , in which he Adolf Hitler stylized for easy man of the people, without interfering with the objectives of National Socialism to deal with. In 1939 Goebbels called on literary criticism to pay more attention to the poets of the Ostmark and the Sudetenland , and expressly recommended Kaergel's book Ein Sudetendeutscher does not surrender for discussion .

After Silesia was administratively divided into Upper and Lower Silesia in 1942, Goebbels appointed Kaergel head of the Lower Silesia Chamber of Culture. After the war was Kaergel who did not want to flee from Silesia, was arrested and died, according to the former national head of the Reich Chamber of Hesse-Nassau, Wilhelm Meridies , in a prison in Wroclaw on hunger typhus .

plant

Kaergel saw himself as a “bloody and soil poet connected to clods” and emphasized his affiliation to the rural world of Silesia with reference to his origins from a miller's family. His work shows a development, beginning with the romance of the homeland and the search for God to that of a staunch National Socialist, for whom the admiration of Hitler, demands for the reorganization of German border areas as well as the justification and glorification of the war are characteristic. For the anthology Dem Führer published by Karl Hans Bühner . Kaergel contributed the following verses to poems for Adolf Hitler :

Because if someone asks us where the Führer stands,
everyone points to his own heart:
Here he stands rooted in the blood,
here he must stand and walk on,
now through our blood sex to sex!

In addition to this classification, reference should be made to his drama "Andreas Hollmann - Tragedy of a People", which is about borderland Germans in the Sudeten region after the First World War. This involves a possible revision of school policy in favor of the German minority, whose school is to be closed according to the applicable regulations. This work was staged 36 times and premiered in Dresden in 1933. But it was only allowed to appear in print in 1937. The Reich Propaganda Ministry exerted influence: first it was about weakening certain passages of the text, then, in 1938, the work seemed useful for propaganda. Behind the described, tense situation of the minority hid a position that is actually indisputable for the Nazi system: Because the hero, Andreas Hollmann, tries to achieve the desired improvement by negotiation against resistance from his German minority - while recognizing the Czech legal situation while his son refuses military service there, rebels and flees. Hollmann even went to prison on behalf of this for a while. Such a solution, which was bound by the law in force there, did not correspond to the brutally implemented policy of conquest of the Nazi regime. In this respect, this piece does not fit into Kaergel's other ideological world, but it comes from him and reached the public. Presumably it was canceled later.

After the end of the war, many of Kaergel's works were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone and in the German Democratic Republic .

literature

  • Martina Biedenbach: Hans Christoph Kaergel. In: Wulf Segebrecht (Ed.): The Bamberg Poet Circle 1936-1943. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-8204-0104-0 , pp. 179–185 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • German Literature Lexicon (DLL), founded by Wilhelm Kosch, 1971, Francke Verlag Bern and Munich.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Biedenbach, Kaergel , p. 185.
  2. ↑ a b c Quoted in Ernst Klee : Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 290.
  3. ^ German Institute for Newspaper Studies Berlin (ed.): Handbook of the German daily press. (4th edition), Carl Duncker Verlag, Berlin 1932, p. 316.
  4. ↑ Das Deutsche Führerlexikon , Verlag Otto Stollberg, Berlin 1934, p. 219.
  5. ↑ Biedenbach, Kaergel , p. 180.
  6. ↑ Biedenbach, Kaergel , p. 179.
  7. ↑ Biedenbach, Kaergel , p. 180.
  8. ↑ See Jörg Fligge: "Beautiful Lübecker Theaterwelt". The city theater during the Nazi dictatorship . Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 2018. ISBN 978-3-7950-5244-7 . Pp. 249f., 568.
  9. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-k.html
  10. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-k.html
  11. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-k.html
personal data
SURNAME Kaergel, Hans Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German local poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Striegau , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1946 or May 9, 1946
Place of death Wroclaw