Heinz Kindermann (literary scholar)

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Heinz Kindermann (born October 8, 1894 in Vienna ; † October 3, 1985 ibid.) Was an Austrian theater and literary scholar and cultural historian . He is one of the prominent representatives of the ideology of National Socialism in his subject and is considered "one of the most important literary scholars of the ' Third Reich '". After the Second World War , Kindermann was therefore temporarily banned from teaching before he was reappointed head of the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of Vienna . From then on he avoided any discussion of the Nazi era and advocated an "objectivist" humanities . Kindermann's oeuvre astonished contemporaries both through its monumental scope (his theatrical history of Europe comprises 10 volumes) and through its thematic variety.

Life

Heinz Kindermann studied German , Romance , Scandinavian and philosophy at the University of Vienna and Berlin . After receiving his doctorate in 1918 about the writer Hermann Kurz , he worked within the framework of public education and was a speaker at the Ministry of Education with the agendas of the Burgtheater in charge. As a pupil and assistant to Walther Brecht , he submitted a habilitation on Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz ("Lenz and European Romanticism") in 1924 and was appointed associate professor for German language and literature in 1926. In 1927 he went to the Danzig Technical University as a full professor .

National Socialism

In 1936, by order of the Reich Ministry of Education - against the will of the philosophical faculty - Kindermann was given a full professorship in the newly established chair for German literary and theater history at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster . In 1937 he became director of the German Department there.

Kindermann, who had been a member of the NSDAP and a supporting member of the SS since 1933 , represented a "popular life science" that excluded "non-German literature" and thus corresponded to the ideology of the National Socialists, which was reflected in many of his publications between 1933 and 1945. In November 1933 he signed the professors' declaration of Adolf Hitler at German universities and colleges . In 1933 Kindermann published the text “Des Deutschen Dichters Sendung im Gegenwart”, a compilation of Nazi authors and Nazi top officials. In the foreword to the festschrift for the 60th birthday of the Reclam publishing house in 1936, Kindermann praised National Socialist literature and the “racial idea” and emphasized the role of Nazi culture. His scientific work was characterized by an anti-Gypsy, anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic attitude. He ventured into the field of scientific empiricism: The "biological evaluation of the literature" "because of our racial hygiene insights" was a "national biological process" ( poetry and folkhood , 1939).

After the “ Anschluss ” of Austria, in 1939 he published an extensive “Anschluss anthology” with the title Heimkehr ins Reich. Greater German poetry from Ostmark and Sudetenland 1866–1938 for the Leipzig Reclam publishing house . Kindermann wrote as editor in the introduction: "With the return of the Ostmark and the Sudetenland to the Greater German Reich, a thousand-year law of German blood was fulfilled ".

In 1939 Kindermann's anti - Semitic book about the Vienna Burgtheater, Das Burgtheater, was published. Legacy and broadcast of a national theater in the Adolf Luser- Verlag, in which he analyzed, among other things, the “Jewish influence” on the Burgtheater, which later led to violent reproaches. Kindermann was able to prove after the war that at least parts of it had been changed by the " Rosenberg Office " against his will and he was denazified as "not charged" .

In 1943 Kindermann was appointed full professor at the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of Vienna, which had been founded in the course of National Socialist cultural policy under the aegis of Reich Governor Baldur von Schirach . Like Adolf Bartels , Franz Koch , Hellmuth Langenbucher , Walther Linden (1895–1943), Arno Mulot , Josef Nadler and Hans Naumann, Heinz Kindermann was one of the leading literary scholars of the “Third Reich”, who repeatedly contributed to a “new 'National Socialist poetry' “Called.

post war period

In 1945 Kindermann had to vacate the chair because of the Nazi Prohibition Act. After the interim management of the institute by Eduard Castle (until 1949) and Friedrich Kainz (until 1954), he was given the position back before the occupying powers withdrew in 1954 and held it until his retirement in 1966. In the late 1940s, a donation account was set up by the “Friends of Heinz Kindermann” in order to support him financially during the period of his professional ban.

Kindermann was soon rehabilitated. As early as 1954, he was appointed as an extraordinary professor of theater studies at the University of Vienna and director of the Institute for Theater Studies. In 1959 he became a full professor and in 1970 he retired.

In the Soviet occupation zone and in the German Democratic Republic , numerous writings written by Kindermann and some of the works he edited were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

After Kindermann had mainly written about cultural-political writings during National Socialism, after the war he devoted himself exclusively to cultural history and wrote a monumental work that is still fundamental in some respects today, a broad ten-volume history of the theater of Europe . He also founded a multi-volume handbook of cultural history , later edited by Eugen Thurnher, Martin Block, and CC Berg, and wrote about the theater audience of the Middle Ages and antiquity.

Two and a half months after the Burgtheater reopened, Heinz Kindermann discussed thoughts about “Burgtheater problems - today and tomorrow” in the New Year's edition of the Neue Wiener Tageszeitung in 1956. With more moderate words, he continued a missionary millennialism that he had also advocated during the Nazi era. Ten years after the end of the “millennial empire”, Kindermann conjured up the “giant reservoir of the two thousand year old world drama”: “In this area, however, the Burgtheater's dramaturges are faced with a task that, as difficult as it may seem, has to be solved when the Burgtheater is set up should not only move in extended paths. Each age makes a different selection principle from the two thousand year reservoir. ”.

Later works by Kindermann were sometimes interpreted as “attempts to make amends”, but as such were neither explicit nor were they declared as such. Kindermann avoided the dialogue about the Nazi era until the end. He wanted to make his past forgotten and characterized his years of denazification as an “embarrassing time in between”.

Kindermann had three sons, the political scientist Gottfried-Karl Kindermann , the long-time domestic policy editor of the Kronen Zeitung , Dieter Kindermann (1939-2014), and the opera director Heinz Lukas-Kindermann .

Awards

Publications

  • Hermann Kurz and the German Art of Translation in the Nineteenth Century. Literary historical investigation , Stuttgart 1918
  • JMR Lenz and German Romanticism. A chapter from the history of the development of romantic nature and creativity , Vienna a. a. 1925
  • The literary face of the present , Halle 1930
  • Goethe's human design. Attempt at a literary historical anthropology , Berlin 1932
  • Klopstock's Discovery of the Nation , Danzig 1935
  • The German contemporary poetry in the construction of the nation , Berlin 1936
  • Poetry and folk. Basics of a new literary study. Berlin 1937, 2nd edition 1939
  • The Burgtheater . Legacy and mission of a national theater , Vienna a. a. 1939.
  • The world war poetry of Germans abroad , Berlin 1940
  • Ferdinand Raimund . Life's work u. Area of ​​activity of a German folk dramatist , Vienna a. a. 1940
  • Contemporary German poetry in the struggle for the German way of life , Vienna 1942
  • Theater and Nation , Leipzig 1943
  • Hölderlin and the German Theater , Vienna 1943
  • Theater history of the Goethe era , Vienna 1948
  • The Goethe image of the XX. Century , Vienna a. a. 1952, 2nd edition 1966
  • Hermann Bahr . A life for the European theater , Graz a. a. 1954
  • European Theater History , 10 vols., Salzburg 1957–1974
  • The theater audience of antiquity / the Middle Ages / the Renaissance , Salzburg 1979–1984

literature

  • Margret Dietrich (Ed.): Direction in documentation, research and teaching. Festschrift for Heinz Kindermann on his 80th birthday in 1974 . O. Müller, Salzburg 1974.
  • Klaus Dermutz : The Burgtheater 1955-2005 . Deuticke in Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2005. ISBN 978-3-552-06022-7
  • Wolfram Nieß: On the chances and limits of academic self-determination under National Socialism: On the establishment of the Institute for Theater Studies 1941–1943 , in: Mitchell G. Ash, Wolfram Niess, Ramon Pils (ed.): Humanities in National Socialism: The example of the University of Vienna . V&R unipress, Göttingen 2010, 225–246, excerpts online
  • Andreas Pilger: National Socialist Control and the "Irritations" of Literary Studies. Günther Müller and Heinz Kindermann as opponents at the Münster German Studies Seminar. In: Literary Studies and National Socialism, ed. v. Holger Dainat u. Lutz Danneberg. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2003. pp. 107-126. (= Studies and texts on the social history of literature; 99) ISBN 3-484-35099-7
  • Andreas Pilger: German studies at the University of Münster. From the beginnings around 1800 to the time of the early Federal Republic. Synchron, Heidelberg 2004. ISBN 3-935025-48-3
  • Dagmar Wiltsch: Heinz Kindermanns theater writings in the Nazi era. Master's thesis Erlangen-Nuremberg 1994.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eva-Maria Gehler: Female Nazi Affinities: Degree of affinity for the system of women writers in the "Third Reich". Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010, p. 30.
  2. ↑ Catalog slip at the University Library Vienna
  3. ^ Roman Pfefferle, Hans Pfefferle, Glimpflich: Denazisiert. The professorships at the University of Vienna from 1944 in the post-war years . Writings from the Archives of the University of Vienna, Vienna 2014, p. 293
  4. ↑ Confession, p. 132
  5. ↑ Late NS processing http://science.orf.at/stories/1706253/
  6. ^ In: Klaus Dermutz: Das Burgtheater 1955–2005 , Deuticke in Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2005.
  7. ^ Letter from the theater scholar Margret Dietrich to Heinrich Schnitzler, the son of the writer Arthur Schnitzler , from October 10, 1952, Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance 15948/17.
  8. ^ Jan-Pieter Barbian : Literary politics in the Nazi state. From synchronization to ruin. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 390.
  9. ↑ Uwe Baur, Karin Gradwohl-Schlacher: Literature in Austria 1938–1945: Handbook of a literary system. Volume 3: Upper Austria. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2014, p. 270.
  10. ^ Institute for Theater Studies, History ( Memento from April 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Institute for Theater Studies, 50 Years Institute for Theater Studies ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 29 kB)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / tfm.univie.ac.at
  12. ↑ Late NS processing http://science.orf.at/stories/1706253/
  13. ^ Roman Pfefferle, Hans Pfefferle, Glimpflich denazisiert. The professorships at the University of Vienna from 1944 in the post-war years, v & r unipress, Vienna 2014, p. 293
  14. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-k.html
  15. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-k.html
  16. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-s.html
  17. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-i.html
  18. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-k.html
  19. ↑ Quoted in Dermutz: Das Burgtheater , Vienna 2005.
  20. ^ Hilde Haider: 50 Years of the Institute for Theater Studies , Vienna 1993.
  21. ^ Roman Pfefferle, Hans Pfefferle, Glimpflich denazisiert. The professorships at the University of Vienna from 1944 in the post-war years, v & r unipress, Vienna 2014, p. 23
  22. ^ Obituary in the Kronen Zeitung.
personal data
SURNAME Kindermann, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian theater researcher, literary scholar and cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 1985
Place of death Vienna