Hans Klaus

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Hans Klaus (born September 20, 1901 in Karolinenthal , Austria-Hungary ; died October 3, 1985 in London ) was a German-speaking Czechoslovak-British writer and chemist.

Life

Klaus' parents Simon Klaus (1863-1941) and Johanna Weltsch (1867-1942) married in 1890 and had four sons. The mother, who came from a middle-class background, was related to Felix Weltsch and Robert Weltsch . Klaus attended elementary school in Karolinenthal, which is incorporated into Prague, from 1907 and from 1911 to the K. k. German state secondary school , where he made friends with Rudolf Altschul . In the summer of 1918 he was drafted as unfit and, unlike his three older brothers, two of whom died in the war, he escaped military service. Klaus studied chemistry at the German Technical University in Prague from 1919 to 1923 . In 1919 Altschuls and his first poetic attempts were recited in the “Prague Club of German Women Artists”. Under the name of Protest , a group of German writers came together under Klaus' leadership and published their literary attempts in several short-lived journals. In the journal Avalum Klaus 1921 published the dramatic attempt Zerebrastes .

In 1924, Klaus found a job in a pharmaceutical factory in Prague. In addition, he wrote Prague cultural news for the 8 o'clock evening paper in Berlin and the Hamburg foreign paper . From 1926 he developed a lively literary activity and published poems in the Prager Tagblatt , Otto Pick in the feature pages of the Prague press and in Josef Mühlberger's magazine Witiko . In 1928 his three-act chamber play A Bourgeois Tragedy came out on the Kleine Bühne and at the end of 1929 Satanas on top as a tragic comedy in four acts. Located in Prague's magazine The truth the story in 1930 appeared in sequels Dr. Schourek and, in 1931, part of a manuscript for a novel that was later lost.

After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Klaus only fled to Poland in April 1939 and arrived in England by ship in May . There he taught natural science to Czech refugee children and from 1941 worked again as a food chemist in Tipton and London , where he finally retired in 1968. His literary voice was silent.

Klaus' daughter Brigitte, born in 1931, stayed with her mother, who had meanwhile divorced Klaus, in the Czech Republic in 1939; she survived the persecution of the Jews and her own deportation and emigrated to England in 1946. Hans Klaus' brother, the medical officer Otto Klaus, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and became a victim of the Holocaust in 1944 with his son and his wife , only his daughter Alice (1919–2019) survived.

Works

  • Civil tragedy . Prague: Centrum, 1935

literature

  • Hartmut Binder (Ed.): Prague Profiles: Forgotten Authors in the Shadow of Kafka . Berlin: Mann 1991. In it: Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , pp. 97-252

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, pp. 100-110
  2. ↑ a b Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, p. 120f
  3. ↑ Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, pp. 198–204
  4. ↑ Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, pp. 210-213
  5. ↑ Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, pp. 213-218
  6. ↑ Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, p. 220
  7. ↑ a b Hartmut Binder: The lost generation. Hans Klaus and his circle , 1991, p. 229f
personal data
SURNAME Klaus, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Klaus, Jan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-speaking Czechoslovakian author
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Karolinenthal , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 1985
Place of death London