Hans Egon Holthusen

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Hans Egon Holthusen (born April 15, 1913 in Rendsburg ; † January 21, 1997 in Munich ) was a German poet , literary scholar , essayist and critic .

Life

Hans Egon Holthusen attended the Andreanum high school in Hildesheim , Lower Saxony , from 1924 to 1931 , where his father Johannes Holthusen was a Protestant pastor in St. Andreas Nord . After graduating from high school, he studied German, history and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen , Berlin and Munich . In Munich he received his doctorate in 1937 on The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke , on which he also oriented himself in his own lyrical works.

In 1933 Holthusen joined the SS ; he belonged to the SS standard Julius Schreck . According to his own information, this led to conflicts with his national-conservative father, who rejected National Socialism. As SS-Obersturmführer in Amt III of the Reich Security Main Office (SD-Inland) he was active in the fight against ideological "enemies" in art and culture. From 1937 Holthusen was also a member of the NSDAP . In Munich he worked as a university lecturer for foreign students and as a private tutor. In 1939 he was drafted as a soldier in the Wehrmacht and deployed as a news helper on the Eastern Front. In April 1940 he tried to justify the attack on Poland as a historical tradition in the monthly Eckart : “The meaning of our march was a millennium old. 'We want to ride to Ostland', the Low German knights and settlers of the Ottonian and Hohenstaufen Middle Ages had sung, and today it was the same song that guided us ... "

After 1945 he exerted a strong influence on the West German literary scene as an author and critic. The title of his essay collection Der unhauste Mensch (1951) became the catchphrase for the attitude towards life of the war generation in Germany in the 1950s. Holthusen analyzed the human situation in modern times a. a. with recourse to texts by Rilke and Kafka ; occasionally he was called a representative of a "Christian existentialism ".

In the USA he taught from 1959 as a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh , the University of Chicago , Indiana University and most recently from 1968 to 1981 at Northwestern University . From 1961 to 1964 he headed the Goethe-Institut (then still Goethe House ) in New York City . In Germany in 1963 he accepted a teaching position at the University of Munich. Until 1963 he headed the literature department of the Academy of Arts (Berlin) . There, in 1960, there was a public discussion of his political past: Holthusen was on the jury for the award of the Fontane Prize , and the designated winner, the poet Mascha Kaléko , who emigrated during the Nazi era , refused to accept an award from the Hand of a long-time SS man. As a result, Kaléko did not receive the Fontane Prize. In 1966, Holthusen published a memory report in the Merkur magazine entitled Freiwillig zur SS , to which Jean Améry, who was tortured by the SS, responded with an open letter: "You went to the SS, voluntarily," Améry wrote to Holthusen. "I came elsewhere, quite involuntarily."

From 1968 to 1974 Holthusen was President of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts . In the academic year 1981/1982 he was a fellow at the newly founded Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin . He resigned from the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 1983 after the academy members Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll had, in his opinion, been too politically active (for example through their criticism of the NATO double decision ).

The estate of Hans Egon Holthusen is in the library of the University of Hildesheim . His sister Mechthild Raabe created a bibliography of his texts.

Honors, memberships

Works

Poetry

  • Complaint for the brother. Cycle of poems. Hamburg 1947. (Memory of the brother who died in the war)
  • Here in time. Poems. Munich 1949.
  • Labyrinthine years. New poems. Munich 1952.

Literary criticism, essays, narrative prose

  • Rilke's “ Sonnets to Orpheus ”. Neuer Filser-Verlag, Munich 1937.
  • The late Rilke. Zurich 1949.
  • The world without transcendence. Essay on Thomas Mann . 1949.
  • The homeless person. Motives and Problems of Modern Literature. Essays. Piper, Munich 1951. 3rd edition 1955, new edition 1964.
  • Yes and no. New critical attempts. Munich 1954. (also online: https://archive.org/details/jaundneinneuekri0000holt )
  • The ship. A passenger's records. 1956. (Description of a trip to the USA)
  • Rilke in self-testimonies and photo documents. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1958.
  • The beautiful and the true. New Studies in Modern Literature. 1958. (About TS Eliot and Gottfried Benn )
  • Critical understanding. New essays on literature. 1961.
  • Avant-gardism and the future of modern art. 1964.
  • Hannah Arendt , Eichmann and the Critics. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 13, 1965, pp. 174–190. (also online: [1] ; PDF; 737 kB)
  • Voluntary SS . In: Mercury. German magazine for European thinking. Vol. 20 (1966), H. 7, pp. 921-939, H. 8, pp. 1037-1049.
  • A plea for the individual. Critical contributions to the literary discussion. 1967.
  • Indiana campus. An American diary. Munich 1969.
  • Eduard Mörike . 1971.
  • Gyrocompass. Critical attempts at the literature of the epoch. 1976.
  • Chicago: Bauhaus of the New World. In: Geo-Magazin. Hamburg 1979, 10, pp. 8-32. ISSN  0342-8311
  • Choir leader of the new Enlightenment. About the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger . In: Merkur , 34, 1980, pp. 896-912.
  • Birthday greetings to Erich Heller on March 27, 1981. In: Merkur, 35, 1981, pp. 340–342.
  • Chicago - Metropolis on Lake Michigan. Munich / Zurich 1981.
  • Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In: Die deutsche Lyrik, 1981, pp. 331–343.
  • Farewell to the seventies. On the Crisis of the New Enlightenment in Contemporary Literature. In: Yearbook of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 1981/82, pp. 165-184.
  • Pastor to St. Andreas Nord . In: Martin Greiffenhagen: Pastor's children. Stuttgart 1982. pp. 82-99.
  • Sartre in Stammheim . Two themes from the years of great turbulence / utopia and catastrophe: The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1957–1978. 1982.
  • WH Auden 75 years. In: Neue Deutsche Hefte, 29, 1982, pp. 212-217.
  • Magic and objectivity. In: Ensemble, 13, 1982, pp. 173-188.
  • Counterpoint thinking. To Friedrich Sengles "Biedermeier period". In: Merkur, 37, 1983, pp. 332-337.
  • Opus 19. Speeches and contradictions from 25 years. Munich / Zurich 1983.
  • Gottfried Benn : Life, Work, Contradiction. 1886-1922. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986. (A planned 2nd volume has not been published)

literature

  • Bernd Wildermuth :  Hans Egon Holthusen. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 1009-1010.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • John Joseph Rock: Toward Orientation: The Life and Work of Hans Egon Holthusen . Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University 1980. (unpublished?)
  • Mechthild Raabe: Hans Egon Holthusen. Bibliography 1931–1992 . Hildesheim 2000.
  • Dirk Kemper, Nora Burda, Andrea Schindelmeier (Hrsg.): Hildesheim Literature Lexicon from 1800 to today . Olms 1996.
  • Dirk Kemper: Zero point, choice of tradition and religion. Alfred Döblin and Hans Egon Holthusen on German literature after 1945. In: Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv 29, 2010, pp. 113–126.
  • Hanna Klessinger: Commitment to poetry: Hans Egon Holthusen, Karl Krolow , Heinz Piontek and the literature policy of the Merkur magazine in the years 1947 to 1956 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0874-9 .
  • Nicolas Berg: Jean Améry and Hans Egon Holthusen. A Mercury debate in the 1960s. In: Mittelweg 36 , journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, issue 2/2012, pp. 28–48.

Web links

Wikiquote: Hans Egon Holthusen  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holthusen reports on his father in Martin Greiffenhagen : Pfarrerskinder. Stuttgart 1982. He reports on his youth in Hildesheim in: Irreplaceable City. In: yes and no. 1954.
  2. ^ A b Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 265.
  3. ^ Hans Egon Holthusen: Freiwillig zur SS. Merkur, Vol. 20, 1966, pp. 921, 1037.
  4. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office . Hamburg 2003, p. 797-813 .
  5. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 265.
  6. ^ Mascha Kaléko: The shining years. In: tagesspiegel.de , December 22, 2012.
  7. ↑ Holthusen: Freiwillig zur SS. Merkur, Vol. 20, 1966.
  8. ↑ Quoted from: literaturkritik.de
  9. ↑ Kulturkreis.eu: 1953-1989 sponsorship awards, honorary gifts (accessed on March 30, 2015)
  10. ^ Winner of the Jean Paul Prize ( Memento from June 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art.
personal data
SURNAME Holthusen, Hans Egon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Rendsburg
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1997
Place of death Munich