Hans Kaempfer

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Hans Kaempfer (born December 21, 1896 in Braunschweig , † June 27, 1974 in Cologne ) was a German writer and literary translator .

Life

Hans Kaempfer was married to Lisa, b. Rupp and had three children, Renate, Edith and Wolfgang Kaempfer , who also became a writer. After he was the managing director of his father's marble quarry in Weißenburg / Bavaria and thus had to file for bankruptcy in 1927, he lived with his family in his parents' Braunschweig city villa until 1933 (in Spielmannstraße, destroyed by the war, today part of the campus of the TU Braunschweig ) .

In 1934 the family went to Berlin, where they moved into an apartment on Luitpoldstrasse in the so-called Bavarian Quarter in Berlin-Schöneberg and where Kaempfer was able to survive the Nazi period in material terms as a subordinate official in the Schöneberg town hall . His father, the physicist and later manufacturer David Kaempfer (1859–1940), came from a Poznan family of Jewish faith. In an episode of his unpublished novel Die Moabiterin , Hans Kaempfer describes his horror at the evacuation of the Jewish roommates of the tenement house in October 1942, including the Aron family of the former répétiteur of the German State Opera with his wife and twelve-year-old daughter, who are being transported with their suitcases in trucks and were deported to death camps.

plant

Most of the published works by Hans Kaempfer date from the late 1920s and early 1930s. His last publication from before the end of the Second World War was the novel Daniele Dorer from 1941, which had a second edition in 1942 and was also translated into Hungarian. Since the Nazi regime recognized "pacifist tendencies" in this , Kaempfer was subsequently banned from writing .

After the war, Hans Kaempfer published the novel Die Brücke bei Silverdale , but was unable to successfully resume his literary work. However, he made a name for himself as a translator from American English and worked for many years as an art consultant and art director in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. His last place of residence in Berlin was in the so-called Berlin Artists' Colony in what was then the Wilmersdorf district in West Berlin.

Stage works and novels (selection)

  • Werlhof , play, 1927
  • Comrade Larsen , drama, Chronos Verlag, Stuttgart / Berlin 1932
  • African Army Voyage , radio play, 1933
  • The real Rosita , comedy, S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1935
  • Der Gutsherr von Blachta , story, S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1936; also appeared as a sequel to the magazine Koralle
  • Daniele Dorer , Roman, Rowohlt Verlag, Stuttgart 1941 (2nd edition 1942)
  • The bridge at Silverdale , Roman, Universitas Verlag, Berlin 1948

Translations (selection)

  • Ladislaus Forbath: The new Mongolia. Based on Joseph Geleta's diary , Schützen-Verlag, Berlin 1936
  • George Du Maurier: Peter Ibbetson , 1936, 2nd edition 1948
  • Francis Stuart: The Youngest by Rosaril , Roman, Schützen-Verlag, Berlin 1937
  • Louis Bromfield : The Great Rain , Propylaeen-Verlag, Berlin 1939 (first translation)
  • Francis Griswold: A Life in Carolina , German Book Association, Berlin / Darmstadt 1951 (2 volumes)
  • Irving Stone : Stranger in your own house. Biographical novel , Gutenberg Book Guild, 1953
  • Irving Stone: Michelangelo. A life of greatness and suffering. Biographical novel , Universitas Verlag, Berlin 1961
  • Siegfried Stander: Trek of the Seven Hundred. African novel , Universitas Verlag, Berlin 1962
  • Agnes Savill: Alexander the Great , Athenaeum Verlag, Frankfurt / Bonn 1963
  • Frank Yerby : A world at your feet , German Book Association, Darmstadt / Berlin / Vienna 1965

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Schuder (Ed.): Kürschner's German Literature Calendar . Fifty-seventh vintage. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1978, Nekrolog, p. 1133 .
  2. ↑ Kürschner's German Literature Calendar, 54th year (1963), p. 308.
  3. ↑ https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20212/2/Bendig_Volker.pdf , p. 192
personal data
SURNAME Kaempfer, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and literary translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1974
Place of death Cologne