Hans Siemsen

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Hans Siemsen - Where did you hang around? (1920)

Hans Siemsen ( pseudonym : Pastor Silesius , born March 27, 1891 in Mark , Hamm district , Westphalia , † June 23, 1969 in Essen , Rhineland ) was a German journalist and writer .

Life

Hans Siemsen grew up in a Protestant pastor's family with the siblings Paula (1880–1965; married since 1911 to the physician and author Karl Eskuchen ), Anna (1882–1951; pedagogue, politician, author), August (1884–1958; pedagogue, Politician, journalist, publicist) and Karl (1887–1968; lawyer, politician). In 1901 the family moved to Osnabrück . After completing an apprenticeship as a bookseller , Hans Siemsen began to study art history in Munich in 1912 . In 1913 he went to Paris, where he frequented the artistic circles of the « Café du Dôme ». From 1914 he published articles in the magazine Die Aktion , and from 1915 he was part of the editorial team of the magazine Zeit-Echo . In autumn 1916 he was called up for military service. In 1917 he took part in fighting on the Western Front ; he was buried and spent a long time in a hospital. In the final phase of the First World War, Siemsen developed into a socialist and supporter of the Russian Revolution .

From 1919 Siemsen lived as a freelance writer in Berlin. He became an employee of the Weltbühne and did pioneering work , especially in the field of film criticism . During the 1920s he was active in the art trade and maintained contacts with numerous artists from the Weimar Republic. In addition to the Weltbühne , Siemsen also worked for other Berlin newspapers and the satirical newspaper Uhu . In 1930 he went on a six-week trip as a reporter through the Soviet Union ; from 1931 he was a member of the left opposition party SAPD, which he co-founded . After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he accidentally escaped arrest. He stayed in Berlin and did not go into exile to Paris until 1934.

During the following years in exile in Paris he worked a. a. for the communist publisher Willi Munzenberg . In 1935 he published anonymously from France from the estate of his friend Joachim Ringelnatz , published by Rowohlt Verlag in Berlin . From 1936 he wrote articles for the German-language Paris daily newspaper ; In 1937 he was elected to the board of the Association of German Writers at a conference of left-wing authors in exile . After the start of World War II , he applied for a visa to enter the United States of America. However, shortly afterwards he was interned in the French camp Colombes . In 1940 he managed to escape internment, go into hiding and flee to Sanary-sur-Mer . In 1941 he stayed in Marseille . Renewed efforts to obtain a visa for the USA had meanwhile been successful with the help of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom founded by Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein , so that Siemsen reached the USA via Portugal.

In America Siemsen worked again as a journalist for the press and radio. Personal problems such as his alcohol addiction and the constant lack of money, which had already shaped his French exile, became more and more out of hand. Siemsen lived in extremely poor conditions, felt isolated and increasingly lonely. From 1946 he had an urgent wish to return to Europe, but the fulfillment of this was delayed by difficulties with the issue of passports and visas. In 1948 he finally came to France, and from 1949 he lived again in Germany, initially with his brother Karl Siemsen in Düsseldorf. Hans Siemsen was no longer able to work as a writer and was now considered a nursing case. He died in a workers' welfare home in Essen.

Siemsen's work includes film and art reviews , political essays , narrative works, and poetry . Like hardly any other serious German author in the first half of the 20th century, Siemsen has remained known to this day for his celebration of the beauty of boys and young men in lyrical and essayistic sketches and stories, which determine many of his works. While he was known and appreciated in the twenties primarily for his brilliant journalistic work, the years of exile meant a steep personal and literary decline for him, so that he was largely forgotten before he finally fell silent after 1945.

His homosexual orientation influenced his work in many ways. As a journalist, he campaigned for the abolition of Section 175 of the German Criminal Code , which made homosexual acts between men a criminal offense. As a narrator, he wrote erotically tender "boy stories" that were published in the Tiger Ship . Because of these latently homosexual writings, but also because of his political statements (e.g. against the death penalty), he had to leave Hitler's Germany. In exile he wrote the novel The Story of the Hitler Youth, Adolf Goers , which led to different assessments of Siemsen's commitment to homosexuality. While publisher Michael Föster (foreword in Schriften , Volume 1, 1986) praised the novel as an “anti-fascist combat pamphlet”, Armin Nolzen summed up: “Siemsen's novel is permeated by the assumption that the Hitler Youth was a refuge for homosexuality, yes, it is subliminal National Socialism denounced in toto as a homosexual movement. That is why Siemsen, who was himself homosexual, was sometimes said to be 'gay self-hatred' ”.

The publisher Michael Föster collected and edited extensive text, photo and audio material and published three volumes with Siemsen's writings in the 1980s . After Föster's death, the materials were passed on to the Gay Museum in Berlin.

In 1995 a group of gay men from Osnabrück (Siemsen's hometown for many years) created the first and so far only exhibition (“Hans was good!”) About the life and work of Siemsen in order to keep the memory of this author alive.

Siemsen was buried next to his parents and siblings in the Hasefriedhof in Osnabrück, where a plaque commemorates him.

Works

  • I, too, you too . Leipzig 1919
  • Where did you hang around? Munich 1920
  • My brother's story . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1923
  • The tiger ship . Frankfurt a. M. 1923
  • Charlie Chaplin . Leipzig 1924
  • Paul is good . Stuttgart 1926
  • Forbidden love . Berlin 1927
  • Russia, yes and no . Berlin 1931
  • The story of the Hitler Youth Adolf Goers . Düsseldorf 1947; First edition in English: Hitler's Youth , London 1940
  • Fonts . eat
    1. Forbidden love and other stories . 1986
    2. Criticism - essay - polemics . 1988
    3. Letters from and to Hans Siemsen . 1988
  • Hans Siemsen Reader . Compiled and provided with an afterword by Dieter Sudhoff. Cologne 2003 [Nylands Kleine Westfälische Bibliothek 3] lwl.org
  • No! Slowly! Slowly! Collected experiences, feature sections. Edited and with an afterword by Dieter Sudhoff. Berlin 2008

Editing

  • Rudolf Levy : The songs of old Morelli , Düsseldorf [u. a.] 1922

literature

  • Dieter Sudhoff : The literary modernity and Westphalia. Visiting a neglected cultural landscape. Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2002, ISBN 3-89528-347-9 ( publications of the literature commission for Westphalia 3; also: Paderborn, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2001), pp. 452–505.
  • Dieter Sudhoff: Hans was good. A memory of Hans Siemsen (1891–1969) . In: Literature in Westphalia. Contributions to research 8, 2006, ZDB -ID 1288958-1 , pp. 133-186.
  • Dieter Sudhoff: Afterword . In: Hans Siemsen: No - slowly! Slowly! Collected experiences, feature sections . Verlag Das Arsenal, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-931109-53-0 , pp. 155-165.
  • Wolfgang Delseit:  Siemsen, Johannes Hermann Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 383 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Brigitte Bruns: Hans Siemsen. Film critic. edition text + kritik, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86916-184-6 , Film & Schrift, 15, ed. v. Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen, publication by the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation, pp. 11–150
  • Brigitte Bruns: Sanary-sur-Mer as the last refuge using the example of the author Hans Siemsen . In: Escape locations - places of remembrance. Sanary-sur-Mer, Les Milles, Marseille, edition text + kritik, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-86916-603-2 , ed. v. Irene Below, Hiltrud Häntzschel , Inge Hansen-Schaberg , Maria Kublitz-Kramer, pp. 97–110.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cf. Christine Mayer, Siemsen, Anna Marie Emma Henni, married Vollenweider , in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 24 (2010), pp. 381-383 (last viewed: November 21, 2013).
  2. ↑ Armin Nolzen: “Strictly confidential!” The fight against “same-sex misconduct” in the Hitler Youth, in: Susanne zur Nieden (Ed.): Homosexuality and Staatsräson. Masculinity, homophobia and politics in Germany 1900–1945 , Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 253ff.
personal data
SURNAME Siemsen, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pastor Silesius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH at Hamm
DATE OF DEATH June 23, 1969
Place of death eat