Helmut Weiss

This article deals with the writer Helmut Weiß. For other people see Helmut Weiss .

Helmut Weiss (born May 13, 1913 in Dresden ; † August 18, 2000 in Narva , Estonia ), called Helmut Weiss-Wendt since 1937 , was a communist writer and musician of Jewish descent.

Life

Helmut Weiß grew up as the son of Jewish parents - the father came from Galicia , the mother from Leipzig  - in the Striesen district of Dresden in a middle-class family. His parents made it possible for him to attend the König-Georg-Gymnasium and gave him musical training. At the age of 16 Helmut Weiß broke out of the petty-bourgeoisie quite abruptly. He left the Jewish community and joined the Communist Youth Association of Germany . He read a lot and soon showed unusual linguistic talent. The inclination and talent for communist agitation brought him out of school in the upper second. The KPD parliamentary group used this and the almost simultaneous break in school of Weiß 'little older comrade Max Zimmering at the Wettiner Gymnasium in Dresden in the Saxon state parliament for a fundamental discussion of the "capitalist education system". Helmut Weiß was dismissed from two apprenticeships in quick succession because of communist agitation.

With numerous small prose pieces and poems for socialist newspapers and as a piano teacher, he tried to stay afloat. The Dresden group of the union of proletarian revolutionary writers accepted him. He received a prize for a short story from the federal organ, the Left Curve . He went to Berlin and the West for some time and got to know a number of socialist writers, including Franz Carl Weiskopf , Fritz Erpenbeck , Ludwig Renn and Hans Marchwitza ; some supported his writing. In order to survive, he soon wrote so much that he had to hide behind pseudonyms, including the name Hans Wendt (Bremen).

White joined the KPD and the Red Aid in 1930 , became a valued agitator, but did not do any further party work. With the beginning of the Nazi era, he immediately lost all opportunities for publication because, as a Jew and communist, he could not become a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer . He illegally brought texts to Czechoslovakia that were printed in German-language newspapers in Charkow and Odessa and distributed via a Prague and a Swiss broadcaster. Without a party mandate, he brought illegal KPD publications with him from Prague.

When his situation became untenable and most of his comrades were arrested, Weiss had unparalleled success with an idiosyncratic attempt at emigration. In response to an application made to the Soviet embassy, ​​he was granted naturalization in the Soviet Union and a Soviet passport in autumn 1934 . With that he legally traveled to Kharkov. There followed rapid disillusionment: Weiss could not prove his party membership, raised suspicions about his own transport of materials, was not recognized as an emigrant because of his Soviet citizenship and was not allowed to publish anything. A hectic marriage quickly failed. White was only allowed to go to Moscow in 1936 ; his party membership was eventually recognized. He got a rather humiliating job as a music accompanist in a movie theater.

Apparently ignorant of Helmut Weiß’s precarious situation, the State Publishing House of National Minorities in Kiev published a collection of “Stories from Hitler Germany” under Weiß’s pseudonym Hans Wendt with the title “Heer im Dunkeln”. In November 1937, Herbert Wehner (under his code name Kurt Funk) published a very angry review of this book in the Deutsche Zentralzeitung , the newspaper of the KPD, which is published in Moscow . He accused the author of setting "monuments for traitors" with a compassionate portrayal of a KPD functionary who was tortured and abused by the Gestapo . With this author, so demanded Wehner, “the appropriate authority must deal”. Weiss was then arrested and sentenced on December 29, 1937, at the height of the Stalinist purges , to ten years of camp and subsequent perpetual exile by a “special consultation” at the NKVD ; the conviction was followed by expulsion from the KPD, which Wilhelm Pieck , Walter Ulbricht , Wilhelm Florin and Herbert Wehner decided , as is customary in Soviet emigration .

Weiss served imprisonment and exile in the KarLag in Karaganda / Kazakhstan under the name Weiss-Wendt given to him by the NKVD, which he retained. In the camp Weiss-Wendt met his Estonian wife Lilly Luigas, whom he was allowed to marry at the end of his prison term in 1947. The family had to stay in Karaganda until 1957 with their son Juri, who was born in the camp. Weiss-Wendt had made it to the choirmaster and music teacher there after his imprisonment. After rehabilitation and release from exile, the family went to Estonia in 1957 . Helmut Weiss-Wendt saw no livelihood in Germany, which had become alien to him. In Narwa he remained active as a music educator, choir director and composer until old age. Although he repeatedly visited his German homeland in the 1970s and 80s, he did not put down any roots there. He has not published any new texts since 1937. Several poems by Helmut Weiß appeared in anthologies in the GDR ; Michael Hahnewald from Dresden paid tribute to his birthday anniversaries in the press. Helmut Weiss-Wendt died in Narwa on August 18, 2000.

Works

• Army in the dark. Stories from Hitler Germany. Kiev 1937.
• Diamonds at Sumidouro. Radio play. 1934, broadcast by the Prague and Swiss radio.
• The tobacco proletariat. In: The left turn . No. 6/1930.

Exhibitions

View of the exhibition in the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr

From December 6, 2019 to April 14, 2020, an exhibition on the life of Helmut Weiß took place in the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden. The title of the exhibition was “ GULAG. WHAT GRANDFATHER DIDN'T TELL. The story of the Dresden resident Helmut Weiß ”.

literature

• White, Helmut. In: Lexicon of socialist German writers. Leipzig 1964, pp. 541-542 (with bibliography, p. 542).
• Dream of Soviet Germany. Tales of German writers 1924–1936. Berlin 1968 (short biography and proof of printing).
• We are the Red Guard. Socialist literature 1914 to 1935. Second volume. Leipzig 1974 (short biography and proof of printing).
• Bibliography of articles, reviews, stories and poems by Helmut Weiß, compiled by the “Working Group for Research into Proletarian Revolutionary Literature in Germany”, Academy of the Arts of the GDR (unpublished manuscript).
• Wilhelm Mensing : A German Soviet citizen is weaned from writing with Stalin. From the life of the Dresden Jewish writer Helmut Weiß. In: Exile Research. Findings. Results. No. 2, 2003, p. 34ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Helmut Weiß in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ GULAG. WHAT GRANDFATHER DIDN'T TELL. Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr, accessed on January 21, 2020 .