Hellmuth Langenbucher

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hellmuth Langenbucher (born July 29, 1905 in Loffenau , † May 18, 1980 in Warmbronn near Stuttgart) was a German literary scholar . After 1933 he got the role of a " literary pope ". He is considered one of the leading Nazi literary historians and was one of the influential journalists and publicists of the NSDAP . He also wrote under the pseudonyms Walther Erich Dietmann (1932–1934, for newspaper articles and reviews), Rudolf Öttinger (from 1942, without publication under this name), Hermann Engelhard (from 1951) and Rudolf Walter Lang (from 1968).

Life

Langenbucher was born into modest circumstances. He was born on July 29, 1905 in Loffenau ( Oberamt Neuenbürg ), a small community near Gernsbach in the Black Forest , as the son of the teacher Melchior Langenbucher and his wife Rosalie. Hellmuth was the sixth of a total of eleven children in the family, two of whom died of diphtheria in infancy . A brother was killed in the First World War . After attending primary school, Langenbucher attended a teachers' seminar in Backnang from 1919. In 1925 he passed the first public school service examination, partly through self-study and completed high school. In Reutlingen he prepared for university studies. Langenbucher studied at the universities of Tübingen , Heidelberg and Berlin . In 1930 he graduated in Heidelberg Friedrich tanks with the promotion from. From October to November 1929 he was a teacher at the boys' middle school in Heilbronn , then until May 1930 he was an assistant teacher at the Stöckachrealschule in Stuttgart . From February to March 1932 he worked as an editor at the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt , from 1932 to 1933 he was head of the press department at Verlag Langen-Müller in Munich.

He had been a member of the NSDAP since 1929, and in the early 1930s he joined the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur . On June 19, 1933 he was a co-founder of the Reich Office for the Promotion of German Literature . From 1933 to 1934 he was head of the overall editing department of the Reich Office for the Promotion of German Literature and Deputy Chairman of the Department of Literature Maintenance. In 1934, until the end of the year, he was head of the aesthetic main editing department and deputy head of the Reich Office for the Promotion of German Literature. From 1935 to 1936 he served as a representative for the entire press system of the Federal Reich German Booksellers. From 1935 to 1938, the avowed National Socialist was an assessor at the film testing center in Berlin. In addition to other offices, Langenbucher also held the post of chief editor of the Börsenblatt for the German book trade from 1933 to 1945, and from 1939 also that of chief editor of the Schwaben magazine . Monthly notebooks for folklore and culture , which - under different names - had previously been headed by August Lämmle for ten years .

For Langenbucher, the confession of "National Socialist cultural criticism" was based solely on instinct: "Instinct is the voice of the blood. He does not need any intellectual rules and laws." Langenbucher saw the intellectual enemies of the new Germany in literary criticism , into which they had withdrawn and which must be cleansed of everything "that was not of the National Socialist spirit."

In November 1946 he was arrested by the American occupiers and spent nine months in the 7th Internee Prison No. 2 interned in Schwäbisch Hall . All of Langenbucher's writings had already been designated in the list of literature to be sorted out in April of that year , with the exception of the 1930 dissertation on minnesong. The judgment chamber ruling of April 10, 1948 in Crailsheim classified him as a follower in the context of denazification . After 1950, Langenbucher was still able to publish birthday addresses and obituaries for members of the National Socialist Swabian circle of poets such as Hans Heinrich Ehrler , Ludwig Finckh , August Lämmle and Auguste Supper in the Schwäbische Heimat magazine . Fetched from the former Nazi cultural functionary and writer Gerhard Schumann , he worked from 1951 to 1970 at the “European Book Club” in Stuttgart, which was founded by the latter in 1949 and which at that time resembled a reception organization for alumni from National Socialist cultural policy first as an external editor, then as program manager.

Publications

  • The face of German minnesang and its changes , Heidelberg 1930 (diss.).
  • The German reputation. Word and work of Georg Stammler. Flarchheim 1932.
  • Folk poetry of the time. Berlin 1933.
  • Friedrich Lienhard and his part in the struggle for German renewal. , 1935.
  • Seal of the young team. Reflections on contemporary German poetry. Hamburg 1935.
  • National Socialist Poetry. Introduction and overview. Berlin 1935.
  • as publisher: Die Welt des Buches. A customer of the book. Ebenhausen 1938.
  • Literary studies and contemporary poetry. In: Württemberg. Swabian monthly books in the service of the people and homeland . 10, 1938, pp. 486-491.
  • The German contemporary poetry. Berlin 1939.

literature

  • Ralf Behre: Hellmuth Langenbucher (1905–1980). Description of a literary political career. In: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 47 (1997) pp. 249–308.
  • Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ralf Behre: Hellmuth Langenbucher (1905–1980). In: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 47 (1997) pp. 249–308, p. 251.
  2. ^ We National Socialists… In: Literaturwissenschaft und Gegenwartsdichtung (see works), p. 486.
  3. ↑ Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 2: H-Q. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 1056-1057.
  4. ↑ Hellmuth Langenbucher: In the service of the people. In: Swabia. Monthly books for people and culture 11 (1939), pp. 1–4.
  5. ↑ quoted from Caspar, afterword in: Hans Fallada : Selected works in individual editions, ed. by Günter Caspar ; Volume 5: Wolf among wolves, Berlin [u. a.]: Structure-Verl. 1979, p. 624
  6. ^ List of literature to be discarded. Preliminary edition from April 1, 1946. Published by the German Administration for Popular Education in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Zentralverlag, Berlin 1946, No. 6877 ( as a transcript online in the database Schrift und Bild. 1900–1960 ).
  7. ↑ Register of the years 1-20 (1950-1969) . In: Schwäbische Heimat 1970, Issue 4, pp. 205-257, p. 233 online as PDF .
  8. ^ Ralf Behre: Hellmuth Langenbucher (1905–1980). Description of a literary political career. In: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 47 (1997) pp. 249–308, p. 281 ( as a preview online at Google Books ).
  9. ↑ 1937 in Austria as a printed work, which includes "a promotion of prohibited parties", banned: Oesterreichische Buchhändler-Correspondenz. No. 10 of April 24, 1937, p. 64 (online)
personal data
SURNAME Langenbucher, Hellmuth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dietmann, Walther Erich; Öttinger, Rudolf; Engelhard, Hermann; Lang, Rudolf Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Loffenau
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1980
Place of death Warmbronn