Hans Natonek

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Hans Natonek (born October 28, 1892 in Königliche Weinberge , Prague , Austria-Hungary ; died October 23, 1963 in Tucson , USA) was a German-Czech writer and journalist.

Life

Natonek was the grandson of Rabbi Josef Natonek . His father was an insurance director at Triester Lloyd. Natonek studied one semester in Vienna after attending the Prague Business School. In the biographical literature, Berlin is also mentioned as another place of study and a doctorate, which is very doubtful, the doctorate possibly came into play when it came to his naturalization in the USA. He lived in Leipzig from 1917, was baptized and married Gertrude Hüther in 1918. From this marriage his son Wolfgang Natonek (1919–1994) and daughter Susanne Natonek (1924–2014) emerged.

First texts appeared in 1913 in Franz Pfemfert action , in a target -Jahrbuch of Kurt Hiller and in the satirical weekly The dragon . Natonek had been doing a traineeship at the Saale-Zeitung in Halle an der Saale since 1913. Here he welcomed World War I in many patriotic texts. But as early as 1914 he expressed strong doubts about the legality of slaughtering and dying in the trenches in contributions to the Schaubühne (which later became the world stage ). Imperial censorship came on the scene, and only the protection of Siegfried Jacobsohn prevented criminal action.

During the Weimar Republic, he was probably the feature editor of the liberal Neue Leipziger Zeitung, which belongs to the Ullstein group, since 1926 . In addition to his journalistic work, Natonek published three novels in a row, which were highly praised by the features section: The man who never had enough (1929); Money rules the world (1930) and children of a city (1932). In 1931 he received the poet's prize of the city of Leipzig, endowed with 750 Reichsmarks (often incorrectly referred to as the Goethe Prize).

As early as April 1933, he was fired from the Neue Leipziger Zeitung, and his books, at least in Leipzig, were on the list of harmful and undesirable literature . Natonek initially believed that he could stay in Germany and continue to publish under various pseudonyms. But a personal campaign of revenge by his constantly betrayed and now utterly desperate wife forced him to leave Germany in 1934 after a quick divorce. In 1935 he was also expelled from the Reich Association of German Writers eV , i.e. the practical professional ban in German-speaking countries. First he settled in Prague with his second wife, Erica Wassermann, the daughter of a Hamburg patent attorney and co-founder of the law and political science faculty of the University of Hamburg. In 1939 he fled to France, meanwhile divorced again. In Paris he joined Joseph Roth , with whom he had had collegial ties since the twenties. Together with Walter Mehring , Herta Pauli and Ernst Weiß, he sent a telegram to Thomas Mann asking for rescue . It actually came. Varian Fry's papers included “the czech humorist Hans Natonek”. He reached Spain via the Pyrenees and was able to climb the “Excambion” in Lisbon. Arrived in New York in January 1941, at the instigation of Bartold Fles he wrote down his first impressions in the USA, which, translated by Fles, were published by Putnam's Sons in New York in 1943 under the title “In search of myself” in an edition of only 300 copies appeared. In 1944 he moved to Tucson / Arizona with his later third wife Anne Grünwald, a dancer and dance teacher who emigrated from Frankfurt am Main to the United States in 1936. In 1946 he became an American citizen.

In exile in the USA, shortly before his death, he burned a considerable part of the manuscripts he still had, and a large part of the remaining writings was destroyed by termites. He worked as a freelance writer for the emigrant newspaper Aufbau in New York and published irregular articles (especially poems) in various American daily newspapers. In the first post-war years, Natonek was considered forgotten on the German book market, apart from two reprints of his exile novel “Der Schlemihl” in 1949 at Behrendt in Stuttgart and under the title “Der Mann ohne Schatten” in Bertelsmann Lesering 1957.

In the 1980s, attempts at rediscovery were made in both German states. In 1982, Wolfgang U. Schütte published letters, journalism and “Straße des Verrats” for Der Morgen in Berlin, and Jürgen Serke's “Bohemian Villages” contains the first and only biographical essay on Natonek. It was also thanks to Serke that in 1987 and 1988 the Zsolnay Verlag dared to reissue the novel “Children of a City” and the first edition of the novel “Bluebeard's Last Love”. A selection of Natonek's journalistic work from 1914–1933 was published for the first time in 2006 by Lehmstedt Verlag Leipzig. It was followed in 2013 by an edition of Natonek's exile journalism and the first biography.

Since 2001, a small street in the Gohlis district of Leipzig has been called Natonekstraße.

Works

  • Make-up and everyday life. Colorful prose. - F. Krick, Leipzig 1927 (including about Charlie Chaplin)
  • The man who never has enough. Novel. - Zsolnay, Vienna 1929
  • Money rules the world or: the adventures of conscience. Novel. - Zsolnay, Berlin 1930
  • Children of a city. Roman - Zsolnay, Berlin 1932
  • The Schlemihl. A novel from the life of Adelbert von Chamisso . Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1935 (first edition of the exile book dedicated to the "homeless of the world")
    • again in: HN: The man without a shadow , also with: The expulsion, The child from Hameln, Bad homecoming or two kinds of shoes, The magic hat, Corinna or adventure in France, Seven Mile Boots, In old age you have plenty or The silent man. - Bertelsmann 1958
  • We, the survivors. Poem. In: Aufbau , New York No. 52, 1962
  • The road of betrayal. Journalism, letters and a novel. Ed. & Epilogue WU Schütte. The morning, Berlin 1982
  • Children of a city. Novel series: Books of Bohemian Villages. Edited by Jürgen Serke. Paul Zsolnay, Vienna 1987
  • Bluebeard's last love. Novel. - Nachw. Dsb. Row: as above. ibid. 1988
  • In the sound of time. Journalism from 1914 to 1933. Ed. Steffi Böttger. Lehmstedt, Leipzig 2006. ISBN 978-3-937146-35-5
  • Hans Natonek / Wolfgang Natonek, Correspondence 1946–1962, edited and commented by Steffi Böttger, Lehmstedt, Leipzig 2008. ISBN 978-3-937146-65-2
  • Last day in Europe. Journalism from 1933 - 1963. Ed. Steffi Böttger. Lehmstedt, Leipzig 2013. ISBN 978-3-942473-69-9

literature

  • Susanne Jäger:  Natonek, Hans. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , pp. 750 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 / International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Vol II, 2 Munich: Saur 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 847
  • Jürgen Serke: Bohemian Villages. Wanderings through a deserted literary landscape . Paul Zsolnay, Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-552-03926-0 , pp. 86–129 (detailed, literary biography).
  • Natonek, Hans. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 17: Meid – Phil. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-22697-7 , pp. 262-272 (detailed, annotated bibliography).
  • Steffi Böttger: Forever foreign. The life of the Jewish writer Hans Natonek . Lehmstedt Verlag, Leipzig, 2013, ISBN 978-3-942473-75-0
  • Viera Glosíková, Sina Meißgeier, Ilse Nagelschmidt (eds.): "I dreamed: I was in the school of the emigrants ..." The Jewish writer and journalist Hans Natonek from Prague. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-7329-0271-2
  • Ivana Galková: Natonek, Hans. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 386-388.
  • Meißgeier, Sina: In Search of Himself: The writer and journalist Hans Natonek between memories of Europe and language identity in exile in the USA . In: Probst, Inga and Torsten Erdbrügger (Ed.): Connections. Women - GDR - literature . Frank & Timme, Berlin 2018, pp. 379–394.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Renate Heuer: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors. Volume 17: Meid – Phil. Published by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-22697-7 , p. 262 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  2. ↑ Natonek, Yosef , at Yivo
  3. ↑ Information in Hans Natonek: In the noise of time . Different with Jürgen Serke: Bohemian villages . P. 95. According to BHdE (1983) he studied in Vienna and Berlin. According to the Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors (2009), he received his doctorate as Dr. phil.
  4. ↑ Steffi Böttger: Forever foreign. The life of the Jewish writer Hans Natonek . 1st edition. Lehmstedt Verlag, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-942473-75-0 .
  5. ↑ Steffi Böttger: Forever foreign. The life of the Jewish writer Hans Natonek . 1st edition. Lehmstedt Verlag, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-942473-75-0 , p. 243 .
  6. ^ André Loh-Kliesch: The Natonekstrasse in Leipzig. Retrieved July 1, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Natonek, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Czech writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 1963
Place of death Tucson