Henri Guilbeaux

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Henri Guilbeaux (born November 5, 1884 in Verviers , Belgium; died June 15, 1938 in Paris ) was a French journalist, writer, pacifist and communist.

Noël Dorville : Henri Guilbeaux (1919?)
Guilbeaux's pass in the Russian Soviet Republic, issued by Lenin himself on November 11, 1920
Lenin's departure from Switzerland in 1917

Life

Henri Guilbeaux came from a conservative-clerical French family. He attended school in Charleville and studied in Liège . Also because of his rejection of the widespread Germanophobia , he continued his studies in Berlin in 1904. One result of this stay was the collection of poems Berlin: carnet d'un solitaire ..., published in 1907 in what was then the German city of Strasbourg . Then he tried his hand at Paris as a literary publicist and critic for various magazines of the literary and artistic avant-garde, the "Mouvement Anarchist" and the trade unions.

Guilbeaux found his literary models in Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine ; he wrote portraits of Walt Whitman , Jules Laforgue and Émile Verhaeren . In 1910 he translated the death of Titian by Hugo von Hofmannsthal into French. In 1913 he published an anthology of contemporary German poetry in France, where he himself translated some of the works and wrote the introductory essays; he became Rainer Maria Rilke's first translator into French.

Politically, he joined the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière and wrote a paper on German social democracy, but also had contact with anarchist and syndicalist circles. Like Romain Rolland , with whom he was in correspondence, and Stefan Zweig , he was an internationalist and European. The outbreak of war in 1914 deprived this thinking and its efforts to promote European understanding with a society of literary figures. Guilbeaux was drafted as a soldier, but soon dismissed as unfit . At the end of April 1915 he went to Switzerland and initially worked in Geneva for the Red Cross prisoner of war aid .

Guilbeaux defended the pacifist and European Rolland, who had come into the line of fire of the nationalists. The magazine Demain , which he published between January 1916 and October 1918 , became an organ of the socialist opponents of the war, who first met in September 1915 at the Zimmerwald Conference . Rolland, Pierre Jean Jouve , Marcel Martinet , Edmund Dene Morel , the Russians Lenin, Kalinin , Kamenew , Lunacharsky , Martov , Zinoviev , Sokolnikov and Leon Trotsky , and Stefan wrote for the magazine, which was promptly banned in France because of its pacifist attitude Zweig , Karl Radek and Ernst Meyer .

In April 1916 Guilbeaux took part in the Kiental Conference, which affirmed the course of the Zimmerwald Conference against the war. Guilbeaux met the Russian exile Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov there , returned to Geneva “Leninized” and from then on was in close personal contact with him. After the February Revolution in 1917 , he supported Lenin's trip from Switzerland to Russia through Germany . On his departure from Switzerland on April 6, 1917, Lenin invited Guilbeaux, Charles Naine or Ernest-Paul Graber and Rolland to Russia. Guilbeaux stayed in Switzerland and became the Pravda correspondent in the summer of 1917 . In 1917 he published another small volume of anti-war poetry: Du champ des horreurs . After the October Revolution of 1917, he was feared as a revolutionary in France and spies were set up against him. The French government had documents forged in order to accuse him of collaborating with the Germans, which was enough to have him sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal after the end of the war on February 21, 1919. Under French pressure, Guilbeaux was imprisoned in Switzerland by the Aliens Police for the first time in July 1918 for five weeks, then again on November 9 for two months. In order to avoid this unsafe situation, he accepted Soviet citizenship. Because of the Spartacus uprising in Germany, his deportation from Switzerland was delayed until February 15, 1919, when he was able to travel with a sealed suitcase on an ICRC Russian transport through Germany to Moscow, where he was greeted by Lenin on March 5, in good time, in order to still sign the founding manifesto of the Communist International .

Guilbeaux lived in the Soviet Union for three years. In 1921, as a member of the Parti communiste français, he was a French delegate at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in Moscow and St. Petersburg . In July 1922 he received a temporary residence permit for the German Reich and traveled to Berlin with his second, Russian wife Nina Leontieva, where he not only wanted to convey the development of Russian avant-garde art, but also to revitalize the cultural relations between Germany and France . In 1923, before Lenin's death, Guilbeaux's work Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was published: A true picture of his being , Lenin's first biography, initially in an edition translated into German by himself and Rudolf Leonhard .

Guilbeaux was now the Berlin correspondent for the communist daily L'Humanité and also wrote for the world stage . After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1924 he distanced himself more and more from its cultural policy after the theater director Meyerhold, whom he valued, had become a victim of politics. In 1930 Humanité terminated his employment contract. As early as 1924, Rolland tried in a public initiative to have the death sentence overturned in France. An appeal initiated by Bertolt Brecht with the signatures of Alfred Döblin , Albert Einstein , Sigmund Freud and others was printed in 1929 in the magazine Die Menschenrechte of the German League for Human Rights . Neither had any effect. Impoverished and poor health, Guilbeaux and his wife went illegally to Paris in August 1932, thirteen years after the verdict, where he turned himself in to the police. After several months of pre-trial detention in Cherche-Midi , his lawyer Henry Torrès obtained his acquittal in January 1933 in a four-day trial before a Paris military court . Herbert Ihering welcomed the release in a small tribute to the writer Guilbeaux in the Berlin stock exchange courier on January 28, 1933.

In France, Guilbeaux published the Perspectives series. Faits Documents Commentaires de notre temps , in which he tried to find answers to current political questions. He criticized both National Socialism in Le National-socialisme allemand: L'Etat totalitaire Charte du Travail: Que veut le Troisième Reich? (1934) as well as the terror of Stalinism and the popular front policy in La fin des soviets (1937). Mussolini's politics seemed to him to be a hope, and in the end he was caught between all stools. Guilbeaux died unnoticed in 1938.

Fonts (selection)

Guilbeaux's biography of Lenin (1923)
  • Berlin: carnet d'un solitaire . Strasbourg, 1907
  • Walt Whitman . Paris: H. Fabre, 1910
  • La social-democratie allemande . Historique du mouvement socialiste allemand. Paris: Petite bibliothèque des "Hommes du jour", 1910
  • (Ed.): Anthologie des lyriques allemands contemporains depuis Nietzsche; choix de poèmes traduits, précédés de notices bio- et bibliographiques et d'un essai sur le lyrisme allemand d'aujourd'hui . Preface by Émile Verhaeren . Paris: E. Figuière & cie 1913
  • La Poésie dynamique . Paris: éditions de la Revue, 1914
  • Pour Romain Rolland . Genève, J.-H. Jehaber 1915
  • with Romain Rolland, P.-J. Jouve, Marcel Martinet, Frans Masereel: Salut à la Révolution russe, 1917 . Geneva: Édition de la revue Demain
  • Le mouvement socialiste et syndicaliste français pendant la guerre: esquisse historique . Preface Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Petrograd: Ed. de l'Internationale communiste, 1919.
  • Joseph Solvaster . From the French Ms. trans. from Hermynia from zur Mühlen . Dresden: Kaemmerer, 1920
  • Kraskreml et autres poèmes . Linocuts by Albert Daenens . Paris: Les Humbles 1922
  • Le Portrait authentique de Vladimir Ilitch Lénine . Paris: Libr. De l'Humanité, 1924
    • Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A true picture of his being . Transfer to Ger. u. Mitw. V. Rudolf Leonhard . Berlin: Die Schmiede publishing house, 1923
  • Où va l'allemagne, va l'Europe, va le monde . Paris, Mignolet & Storz 1933
  • You Kremlin au Cherche-Midi . Paris: Gallimard 1933 (autobiographical)
  • Lénine à Zimmerwald: "La tâche des représentants de la gauche de Zimmerwald dans le parti socialiste suisse" . Paris 1934
  • Perspectives; faits, documents, commentaires de notre temps . Paris: G. Mignolet et Storz 1934
  • Marche sur Rome: L'Etat fasciste: Corporatisme: Expansion mondiale du fascisme . Paris: G. Mignolet et Storz 1934
  • La fin des soviets. Les soviets partout . Paris, Société française d'éditions littéraires et techniques, 1937

literature

  • Klaus-Dieter Krabiel : Bertolt Brecht's “Appeal for Henri Guilbeaux”: an unknown text, a forgotten author and a memorable affair . In: Etudes germaniques. - Paris, Volume 55 (2000), No. 4 (Oct.-Déc.), Pp. 737-761
  • Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: An early Hofmannsthal transmission: Henri Guilbeaux, "La mort du Titien" (1911) . Freiburg: Rombach, 2001.
  • Nancy Sloan Goldberg: En l'honneur de la juste parole: la poésie française contre la Grande Guerre . New York [u. a.]: Lang 1993
  • Nicole Billeter: "Words against the desecration of the spirit!" War views of writers in the Swiss emigration 1914/1918 . Lang, Bern 2005, p. 112, ISBN 978-3-03910-417-8 (also dissertation at the University of Zurich , 2003).
  • Maurice Parijanine: Des Francais en Russie; Quelques souvenirs sur la Révolution russe (1919-1920) et sur notre ami Henri Guilbeaux . Les Humbles, Paris 1931.

Web links

Commons : Henri Guilbeaux  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Text of the telegram: partons demain midi allemagne platten accompagne train priere venir immediately frais couvrirons amenez romain rolland s'il est d'accord en principe. Faites possible for amener naine ou graber. telegraphiez volkshaus oulianoff
  2. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's “Call for Henri Guilbeaux” , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, pp. 737–761
  3. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 741
  4. ^ Nancy Sloan Goldberg: En l'honneur de la juste parole , 1993, pp. 211-230. There a short biography, an appreciation of his poetry and a selection of poems.
  5. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: An early Hofmannsthal transmission: Henri Guilbeaux, "La mort du Titien" (1911) , in: Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch 9 (2001), pp. 7–32
  6. ↑ Stefan Zweig later remembered him in The World of Yesterday .
  7. ^ A b Henri Guilbeaux: Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin: A faithful picture of his being , Berlin 1923, p. 131
  8. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 742
  9. ↑ Demain , at WorldCat
  10. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 744
  11. ^ Bernard Degen : Kiental Conference. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  12. ^ Henri Guilbeaux: Quelques souvenirs sur la seconde conférence de Zimmerwald (Kienthal, 24-30 April 16). Bifur, juillet 1930
  13. ^ Henri Guilbeaux: Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin: A true picture of his being , Berlin 1923, p. 133
  14. ^ Lenin's telegram from Bern to Geneva was written in French. It was first printed by Henri Guilbeaux: Lenin (1923), photo after p. 48, (incorrect) translation p. 138. Reproduction in German translation also in: Lenin, Werke, Vol. 36, Berlin 1962, p. 418. The original was auctioned at Christie's in 2013 for £ 49,875 .
  15. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 747
  16. ↑ digitized version
  17. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 745
  18. ↑ Nicole Billeter: "Words against the desecration of the spirit!" , 2005, p. 111
  19. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 750
  20. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 753
  21. ↑ Text and signatures with: Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brechts “Call for Henri Guilbeaux” , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 738
  22. ^ Romain Rolland and others: Liquidation de l'affaire Guilbeaux . Humbles, revue littéraire des primaires. sér. 18, cahier no 2/3. Paris: Humbles, 1933
  23. ^ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 758
  24. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Krabiel: Bertolt Brecht's "Call for Henri Guilbeaux" , in: Etudes germaniques, 2000, p. 760
personal data
SURNAME Guilbeaux, Henri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist, writer, pacifist and communist
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Verviers
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 1938
Place of death Paris