Harry Wilde

Harry Wilde (born July 16, 1899 in Zwickau ; † February 22, 1978 in Hohenbrunn near Munich ; actually Harry Paul Schulze , therefore also known as Harry Schulze-Wilde ; other pseudonyms : Harry Schulze-Hegner, HS Hegner) was a German journalist and writers.

Live and act

Youth and the Weimar Republic (1899 to 1933)

Wilde was born the son of the Protestant butcher and innkeeper Paul Schulze (1870–1937) and his wife Klara Hegner (1875–1947). After completing a commercial apprenticeship, Harry Wilde took part in the First World War. After the war he earned his living in a wide variety of professions. Around 1920 he appeared in Weimar and Erfurt for the first time as a city and museum guide and as a youth association leader. As an enthusiastic supporter of the Bündische Jugend , he joined the “ inflation saints ” Friedrich Muck-Lamberty and Ludwig Christian Haeusser . In 1920 he gave his first lecture as "Harry Schulze-Hegner" on The Banner of the German Young Workers . Around 1922/23 he was friends with Theodor Plievier , with whom he led the Christian Revolutionary group . Then he went on a journey. In Hamburg - after an adventure with a construction worker - he made contact with Walter Serno and Werner Helwig . Afterwards he was an actor on the Junge Aktion stage in Düsseldorf . He also worked as an actor for Erwin Piscator . In 1926 Schulze, who belonged to the Communist Party of Germany until 1932 , began working as a journalist for the left press. From 1928 he concentrated on supporting Plievier as a private secretary and ghostwriter. In December 1928 the friendship with Golo Mann began, which reached its climax in the spring of 1932 - while hiking together through the Odenwald .

Nazi period and emigration (1933 to 1947)

After the Reichstag fire (February 27, 1933) he was arrested and interrogated. According to his information, he used the unexpected release to escape. Via Dresden - where he was expected by a quirky aunt of Ludwig Renns - he traveled to Vienna and Prague. According to Peter Becher and Sigrid Canz, although "already arrested" in Berlin, he managed to board a passenger train that brought him close to the border. There he managed to use stolen catalogs and order forms to pretend to be a representative of a radio company and was led by a local social democrat to escape in the Ore Mountains over the Green Border into Czechoslovakia . In Prague he got in touch with the Moscow Comintern around Johannes R. Becher and Willi Munzenberg . This probably gave him the order to do research in Amsterdam about Marinus van der Lubbe , who they mistakenly believed to be a homosexual vicarious agent of Ernst Röhm and other Nazi figures. In Amsterdam he experienced a deep eight-month friendship with Jef Last . Together with him he wrote the van der Lubbe novel Kruisgang der Jeugd (1939), which strayed far from the stereotypes given by Münzenberg and other Braunbuch authors. He also belonged to the inner circle around Klaus Mann , with whom he shared some sexual and erotic experiences. On January 7, 1935, he noted that he had met “a very dear child” in Last's room, and added: “The nicest thing in a long time.” Overall, Wilde lived in Austria, France, Holland and Belgium in these years (1936), Luxembourg (1937), again in France, where he was taken to the Camp de Gurs internment camp in southern France in 1940 before he was able to escape German-occupied France to Switzerland in 1942. After the war, he summarized his social-psychological experiences in the camp in a small paper in which he also wanted to give advice on setting up emergency social camps in the post-war period. Here he makes a sharp distinction between temporary camp homosexuality (today: situational homosexuality ) and innate homosexuality , which he describes as incurable “drive deviation”.

Later years (1947 to 1978)

After his return to Germany, Wilde founded the magazine Echo der Woche in Munich in 1947 and, with Rolf Kauka, founded the Munich publishing house Harry Schulze-Wilde & Co. in 1948 , which mainly sold crime literature. As Harry Wilde , he wrote a series of pictorial biographies for Rowohlt Verlag . In his rororo monograph on Walther Rathenau , published in 1971, he interprets his suppressed homosexual inclinations as the key to the overall personality. For this reason the publisher had the second edition produced by a different author, who ignored all of Wilde's results. His work The fate of the ostracized (1969) is the first literary examination of the persecution of homosexuals by the National Socialists . The work The Reich Chancellery, 1933-1945 offers a columnist overview of this period of German history. In his private life he lived in seclusion with Plievier's family, the widow Margret Plievier and Plievier's daughter Cordelia, as well as with his “chauffeur” Joachim Klose. He was unable to complete his last work on the inflation saints of the Weimar Republic and shortly before his death handed over the materials he had inherited from Plievier to Ulrich Linse , who processed them into the monograph Barefoot Prophets (1983).

Evaluation and criticism

Wilde's historical accounts and biographies can, on the one hand, take advantage of the fact that they are written in a journalistic, fluent style and are therefore easy to read and understand even for a group of non-specialists. His reports on the historical events of the 1920s and 1930s also have a high degree of immediacy and authenticity insofar as they are written from the point of view of a man who witnessed the events described himself and not just from written sources and stories from third parties reconstructed; Especially since Wilde can claim that he really consciously followed the political events that he reported in retrospect at the time when it happened due to his job as a journalist. Like relatively few authors, Wilde is able to retell the frequently reflected events of the period from 1919 to 1945 based on direct personal experience and enrich it with the knowledge of a well-informed journalist.

On the other hand, Wilde tends not to deal critically with his sources in his historical accounts, and much of what he learned as a journalist in Weimar and later while emigrating from hearsay or as rumors, unchecked as reliable knowledge in his historical accounts . A contemporary review from the 1960s summed this up as follows: "Where the actual story ends and where the stories of the author Hegner (alias Schulze-Wilde) begin", "no reader can say".

Individual evidence

1. ^ University of Political Sciences: Politische Studien Jg. 18, 1967, p. 128.
2. ^ Bruno Jahn: The German-language press. MZ, Register , 2005, p. - page 976
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller: Man for Man - A Biographical Lexicon , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-518-39766-4 , "Schulze, Harry (" Wilde, Harry " ) ", P. 650
4. ↑ Ulrich Linse : p. 95 (illustration of the lecture poster ), it is unclear which book:
   a.) Barefoot prophets. Savior of the twenties. , Siedler, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-88680-088-1 (more likely)
   b.) The commune of the German youth movement: an attempt z. Overcoming d. Class struggle from d. Spirit d. bourgeois utopia; the communist. Blankenburg settlement near Donauwörth 1919/20 , Beck, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-406-10805-9
5. ↑ Golo Mann: Memories and Thoughts. A youth in Germany. Autobiography , S. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 1986, p. 425
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Harry Wilde: Theodor Plivier: Zero Point of Freedom. Biography , Desch, Munich-Vienna-Basel 1965, escape: p. 291ff .; Lubbe: p. 337; Private: p. 443
7. ^ Peter Becher / Sigrid Canz: Hub Prague. German emigrants, 1933-1939 , 1989, p. 28.
8. ^ Klaus Mann: Diaries II , Spangenberg, Munich 1989; Reinbek, Rowohlt 1995, p. 89 (January 6, 1935), p. 90 (January 7, 1935)
9. ↑ ^{a b} Yearbook for International German Studies , 1975, p. 159.
10. ^ Harry Wilde: Social psychological experiences from camp life. Problems of the social post-war period (Volume 3 by Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (Ed.): Reconstruction and Education. Series of publications ), Europa-Verlag, Zurich 1946, pp. 54f.
11. ↑ Harry Wilde: Walther Rathenau in self-testimonies and picture documents , Reinbek 1971 (rm180)
12. ^ Die neue Gesellschaft J. 8, 1961, p. 69.

Fonts

• Guide through Central Germany (Thuringia and its border areas). Mt 1 overview map , 1923. (published under the name Harry Schulze-Hegner)
• Guide for the wandering youth , 1924
• Political secret societies in international affairs , 1932 (with Eugen Lennhoff)
• Social psychological experiences from camp life , 1946.
• The seizure of power. A report on the technology of the National Socialist coup , 1958. (together with Hans-Otto Meissner )
• Political murder , 1962.
• China. Fate of Our Children , 1963.
• Theodor Plievier. Zero point of freedom , 1965.
• The Reich Chancellery, 1933-1945. Beginning and end of the Third Reich , 1959. (published under the name HS Hegner)
• Political Murders of Our Time , 1966.
• Leon Trotsky in personal testimonies and pictorial documents , 1969.
• From Negro Slavery to Black Power Movement , 1969.
• The real winner: the Russian Revolution and Leon Trotsky
• The fate of the ostracized: The persecution of homosexuals in the “Third Reich” and their position in today's society , 1969.
• Rosa Luxemburg, I was - I am - I will be , Molden, Vienna 1970
• Walther Rathenau in personal testimonies and photo documents , 1971.

literature

• L. Kurowski: Book of Friends. Published by the Harry Schulze 70th Birthday Committee , 1969.

Web links

• Literature by and about Harry Wilde in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://www.literaturland-thueringen.de/haben/harry-wilde/