Heinrich Lersch

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Heinrich Lersch (born September 12, 1889 in Mönchengladbach , † June 18, 1936 in Remagen ) was a German working-class poet and boiler maker.

Life

Heinrich Lersch was born in Munich-Gladbach (today Mönchengladbach ). After learning the trade of boilermaker from his father, Lersch went on a hike and worked in various German cities.

When the First World War broke out , Lersch volunteered as a war volunteer. The refrain of his poem “Soldiers' Farewell” made him known as a war poet in 1914: “Germany must live and if we must die!” From mid-1915, Lersch was unfit for service because of the consequences of a burial (asthma, nervous stomach problems). He ran his father's boiler shop until 1924 and then gave it up because of a lung disease. As a result of his illness, there were several recreational stays abroad: 1926 in Davos , 1926 to 1928 and 1931 on Capri and 1931 in Greece . As a writer Lersch was self-taught and is in addition to its socialist orientation as a representative of a Catholic dominated Expressionism .

Obelisk in Putbus with updated inscription by Heinrich Lersch, in September 2010

In 1932 Lersch moved with his family to Bad Bodendorf an der Ahr to be near the naturopath Matthias Leisen.

At the beginning of the National Socialist era , in May 1933, he was appointed to the Prussian Academy of the Arts . In October 1933 he was one of 88 German writers who signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler . After the death of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg , on August 19, 1934, he signed an appeal by the cultural sector on the occasion of the “ referendum ” to unite the office of Reich Chancellor and Reich President in the person of Adolf Hitler. In August 1935 Lersch joined the NSDAP ( membership number 3,701,750), in the same year he received the Rheinische Literaturpreis endowed with 200 marks .

Heinrich Lersch died in Remagen in 1936 at the age of 46 of pneumonia, combined with pleurisy. Several thousand mourners appeared at his honorary funeral.

After the war, were in the Soviet occupation zone Lersch works Germany must live (1914), Heart! Glow your blood! (1916), Blade addition, resounding sound (1940), We workmen (1936) and the poetic work (1944) on the list of auszusondernden literature set, but the were obelisks of Putbus at the land reform in 1945 the words Lersch from the morning song of the new workers :

"What the people's hands create
should be the people's own"

updated in:

"What the people's hands create
is the people's own"

chiseled in.

A Heinrich Lersch archive now exists in the Mönchengladbach city archive. In addition, several streets in Germany (including Mönchengladbach, Bergkamen, Unna, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Herten, Hilden, Cologne, Münster and Zwickau) and a school (the Heinrich-Lersch community secondary school in Mönchengladbach-Lürrip) were named after him. The florist Gregor Lersch , the media historian Edgar Lersch and the painter and draftsman Martin Lersch are among his numerous grandchildren .

In 2011, Heinrich-Lersch-Platz in the Austrian city of Graz was renamed Helene-Serfecz-Platz. While Lersch was close to the Nazis, Helene Serfecz was murdered by the Nazis as a resistance fighter in 1943.

Others

A heavily enriched part of his estate is in the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World in Dortmund .

Artistic creation

In his poems Lersch described the hardship of working life, but also turned to political issues. In some poems he glorified National Socialism . He gave lectures to the Hitler Youth and other organizations. Lersch's saying “Germany must live and if we must die!” Became a battle slogan after 1918. It can be found on numerous war memorials , for example in Hamburg , but also as the motto of the war cemetery in Langemarck . In a modified form, the phrase “Germany must die so we can live” in the song Germany must die was taken up in a satirical way by the German punk band Slime .

Awards

Works

  • Reflection of life . Poems (1914)
  • Brothers (1915)
  • Heart! Glow your blood! Poems in war. (1916)
  • War songs . Volume 2. Secret. Volksverein - Verlag, Mönchengladbach 1917.
  • Forget your brother's misery . Workers poems. Salm - Verlag, Cöln 1917, 14 p. (Rhenish poetry leaflets, R 3, sheet 1).
  • Germany! Songs and chants of the people and the fatherland. 1st - 5th thousand Diederichs, Jena 1918, 141 p. (Also online publication)
  • Shoulder to shoulder . Poems of war and work. Secretion. Soc. Student work, Mönchengladbach 1918, 15 pp.
  • The Prussian musketeer . Three figures. Poem. Secretion. Soc. Student work, Mönchengladbach 1918, 15 pp.
  • The land . Poems from home. Secretion. Soc. Student work, Mönchengladbach 1918, 18 pp.
  • The eternal woman . Love poems. Salm - Verlag, Cöln 1919. 15 pp. (Rhine. Poetry in leaflets. Special issue 7)
  • That's it . Society of Book Friends, Chemnitz 1922.
  • The moment . Immeln, Mönchengladbach 1925.
  • Man in iron . Songs of people and work. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt , Stuttgart 1925, 4th - 5th volume, 1927
  • Capri. Seals . With pictures by Else Seifert . Verlag Jess, Dresden 1926.
  • Manni! . Stories from my boy, written down by the father. German Verlags - Anstalt, Stuttgart 1926. - a children's book for adults, which describes anecdotes and events in the family, Lersch's most successful book
  • The greeting forest . Legends and stories. 1st - 5th day Bühnenvolksbundverlag, Berlin 1927.
  • New stories and poems . Orplid - Verlag, Mönchengladbach 1927.
  • Star and anvil . Poems and chants. 1st - 4th thousand Arbeiterjugend-Verlag, Berlin 1927.
  • Hammer blows . A novel about people and machines. (1930)
  • With a brotherly voice . Poems. (1934)
  • The Eilenburg pioneers . A novel from the early days of the German labor movement. (1934)
  • In the pulse of the machines . Novellas. (1935)
  • Germany must live! (1935)
  • ( posthumously ) Under the hammers . Tales from the world of boilermakers. Series: Berckers kleine Volksbibliothek, 36.Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 1950

literature

  • Ernst Wilhelm Balk: Heinrich Lersch. Munich: German Volksverl. 1939.
  • Rolf Busch: Imperialism and Workers' Literature in the First World War. In: Archive for Social History , Bonn, 14 (1974), pp. 293-350.
  • Ralf Georg Czapla : Catholicism, nationalism, socialism. To the interference of ideological formations in the work of the working-class poet Heinrich Lersch. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann, Roman Luckscheiter (Ed.): Modern and Antimodern. The "Renouveau catholique" and German literature. Contributions from the Heidelberg Colloquium from September 12 to 16, 2006. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2008 (Catholica. Sources and studies on the literary and cultural history of modern Catholicism, Vol. 1), pp. 325–359. ISBN 978-3-7930-9546-0
  • Wolfgang Delseit: Heinrich Lersch. In: Bernd Kortländer (Ed.): Literature from next door (1900-1945). 60 portraits by authors from what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. 1995. ISBN 3-89528-113-1
  • Steffen Elbing: Heinrich Lersch - the worker poet. In: Rolf Düsterberg (ed.): Poet for the "Third Reich". Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology, Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2009. ISBN 978-3-89528-719-0
  • Steffen Elbing: Heinrich Lersch (1889 - 1936): a literary-political biography , Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8498-1047-4
  • Hans Eiserlo: Heinrich Lersch, a poet of the creative people. Würzburg-Aumühle: Triltsch. 1938.
  • Otto Gmelin (Ed.): Choir of Friends. Poets testify to Hein Lersch. Cologne: Staufen-Verl. 1939.
  • Fritz Hüser (Ed.): Heinrich Lersch. Boilermaker and poet. 1889-1936. Dortmund: Municipal public libraries. 1959. (= poets and thinkers of our time; 27)
  • Johannes Kirschweng : Reunion with the Eifel. (with 2 illustrations for Heinrich Lersch). In: Eifel calendar from 1939. pp. 51–53.
  • Johannes Klein (Ed.) :, Heinrich Lersch, Selected Works (with Introduction and Notes), Düsseldorf and Cologne: Diederichs 1966.
  • Edgar Lersch: Everyone who is dead has a brother's face. Reflections of a later born on Heinrich Lersch . In: Clams. Annual journal for literature and graphics , No. 43. Viersen 2003. ISSN  0085-3593
  • Reinhart Meyer:  Lersch, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , pp. 317-319 ( digitized version ).
  • Hans Hermann Schulz: The worker's national experience in the poetry of Gerrit Engelke, Heinrich Lersch and Karl Bröger. A contribution to the morphology of the problem. Würzburg: Triltsch. 1940. (= stadium; 5)
  • Jutta Stratmann (edit.): Directory of the archive holdings on the working-class poets Paul Zech (1891-1946), Gerrit Engelke (1890-1918) and Max Barthel (1893-1975) as well as an overview of the estate of Heinrich Lersch (1889-1936) and Catalog for the exhibition "Worker Poets on War and the World of Work". Estates of working-class poets from the 1920s in the Fritz-Hüser-Institute for German and foreign working-class literature. Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World , Dortmund 1984
  • Claus Weber (= Curt Letsche ): Heinrich Lersch, poet and worker. Freiburg im Breisgau: blacksmith. 1936.

See also

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Lersch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Heinrich Lersch  - Quotes
Wikisource: Heinrich Lersch  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julius Bab : Heinrich Lersch, the singer of the German war . In: Heinrich Lersch: Heart! Glow your blood. Poems in War (Chapter 2). Eugen Diederich, Jena 1916; Project Gutenberg-DE .
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 363.
  3. ↑ Lersch's NSDAP membership only became known in 2012, see City of Münster: Street names - Heinrich-Lersch-Weg
  4. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-l.html
  5. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-l.html
  6. ↑ First published in: Heinrich Lersch: Mit fraternal voice , DVA, Stuttgart 1934
  7. ↑ No “Room for Nazi Poets: Graz Renames Place”, diepresse.com, April 17, 2011
  8. ↑ Here Lersch writes with great pathos about his previous life and experiences
  9. ↑ 32 p. The publisher belongs to the fundamentalist Catholic spectrum and primarily produces devotional items for this place of pilgrimage, as well as books and objects. In the post-war period he published this series of countless numbers (the numbering goes up to over 1000) as an early form of the paperback. One series was about craftsmen, in which Mathias Ludwig Schroeder was published, as well as Philipp Faust and Otto Wohlgemuth . The intention here was a Catholic literature of the world of work. In addition, titles were produced to raise the level of education on the Lower Rhine
personal data
SURNAME Lersch, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German worker poet and boilermaker
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Mönchengladbach
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1936
Place of death Remagen