Henry L. Mencken

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Henry L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken , in American mostly HL Mencken , (born September 12, 1880 in Baltimore , Maryland , † January 29, 1956 ibid) was an American writer and journalist , literary critic , columnist , satirist and cultural critic of German origin.

Life

Mencken was the son of the German-American cigar manufacturer August Mencken. As an autodidact, he developed extraordinary writing skills and, along with Dorothy Parker and Walter Lippmann, was one of the most important journalists in the USA in the first half of the 20th century. As early as the 1920s, he was considered one of the most influential literary critics there .

At first he reluctantly worked in his father's company and began a career as a journalist and writer in 1899, immediately after his father's death. In 1906 he went to the Baltimore Sun as a political columnist . In 1908 he was co-editor and author of The Smart Set magazine , which appeared until 1923. In 1920 he founded the pulp magazine Black Mask with George Jean Nathan in order to at least partially finance the publication of the Smart Set ; they sold Black Mask, however, as early as 1922. In 1924 he founded the magazine The American Mercury with Nathan , which soon gained national importance. Mencken boasted of his German ancestry and was violently attacked because of the sympathies he expressed for Germany in both world wars. Wolf Lepenies judged: "Mencken was not a Nazi, but he played down the crimes of the Nazis with fatal frivolity ... Many of his readers did not like what he wrote, but almost everyone was full of admiration for the way he wrote."

In 1948 he suffered a stroke that left him silent as a writer until his death in 1956. Best known today are The American Language and its satirical reports on the monkey trial that took place in Dayton , Tennessee in 1925 . The last work published was his diary, which covers the period 1930–1948. Mencken had bequeathed it to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore during his lifetime with the stipulation that it should not be made accessible to the public until 25 years after his death in order not to hurt the friends and antagonists mentioned in the diary with his sometimes shocking tirades . As some of the people mentioned by Mencken in the diary were still alive in 1981, the Pratt Library had concerns about having it published for a long time until it finally appeared in 1989. The appearance of the diary attracted a lot of attention because it also contained some anti-Semitic and racist passages.

plant

Mencken was a defender of freedom and civil rights and an opponent of Anglo-Saxon puritanism . His basic views - u. a. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche , whose book The Antichrist he translated - were considered libertarian , sometimes also elitist.

Due to the protests in the USA following the hurray patriotism of the First World War and the expanded state repression ( Palmer Raids ), his satire reached its journalistic peak in the 1920s. The critical view with which Mencken viewed the American living conditions was strongly influenced by his family German roots. He was distantly related to Otto von Bismarck .

Mencken criticized the values ​​of the American bourgeoisie (which he called "booboisie"), the churches and state institutions in his newspaper columns, which number in the thousands, and in numerous books, and was one of the most widely read authors in the United States for decades. Because of the two world wars of the 20th century , according to his own admission, only between 1925 and 1940 were there relatively unhindered publication opportunities.

With his work The American Language he has achieved an achievement for American that is no less than that of Samuel Johnson for English - he has fixed it as an independent language. In 1936 he predicted that English would soon be viewed as a dialect of American, just as it was once considered an English dialect.

The culture and literary magazine Perlentaucher says: “Henry Louis Mencken [...] was probably the most influential American critic of the first half of the 20th century. A keen satirist and bold prose-style writer, he enjoyed his greatest fame and influence in the 1920s while editing the 'Smart Set' (1914–24) and the 'American Mercury' (1924–33) ”.

Already during Donald Trump's election campaign for US President, a statement by Mencken from 1920 was quoted and spread worldwide: “... all chances are on the side of the man who is actually the most absurd and mediocre - the idea that his mind is a virtual vacuum, can best disperse. The presidency tends towards such men more and more every year. With the perfection of democracy, this office reflects more and more the inner soul of the people. We are moving towards a lofty ideal. One great and glorious day, the heart's desire of the simple people will finally be fulfilled and the White House will be adorned with a downright debauchery.

Fonts

English

  • The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)
  • In Defense of Women (1917)
  • A Neglected Anniversary (1917)
  • Prejudices, in six series (1919–1927)
  • The American Language (1919)
  • Notes on Democracy (1926)
  • Autobiographical:
    • Happy Days 1880-1892 (1940)
    • Newspaper Days 1899–1906 (1941)
    • Heathen Days 1890-1936 (1943)

German

  • Defense of the woman. Transferred from Franz Blei . Georg Müller, Munich 1923
  • The American language . Heinrich Spies, BG Teubner, Leipzig 1927 (Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden)
  • Democrat mirror. Resistance Publishing House, Berlin 1930
  • Collected prejudices. Insel Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 2000
  • Selected works in 3 volumes. Edited by Helmut Winter. Manuscriptum, Waltrop 1999-2002
    • Volume 1: Kulturkritische Schriften 1918–1926 ( The Defense of Women / The American Credo (Preface) / Democratic Mirror )
    • Volume 2: Autobiographical 1930–1948 ( Autobiographical storytelling / diary 1930–1948 / Germany 1938. A travel report )
    • Volume 3: Commentaries and Columns 1909–1935 ( What it means to be American / What an American national literature might look like / How to make prejudices plausible / "Incurably German" / Irritations )

literature

  • Terry Teachout: The Skeptic . A Life of HL Mencken. Harper Collins, New York 2002.
  • Hermann Boeschenstein: HL Mencken and the Puritans. American heads, 1, in "VHS sheets for science and art, publication organ of the Swiss Adult Education Centers", vol. 1, volume 2. Verlag Dr. H. Girsberger & Cie, Zurich 1927, pp. 68-72

Web links

Wikiquote: Henry Louis Mencken  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Encyclopedia Britannica
  2. ↑ Review of the Teachout biography. In: SZ , No. 74/2003, p. 16
  3. ↑ Theo Stemmler: The critic tsar as a racist . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1990, pp. 228 ( online - via the major American critic Henry Louis Mencken).
  4. ^ Writer Returns Mencken Award. In: The Washington Post . December 29, 1989. Retrieved August 15, 2019 .
  5. ^ Marion Elizabeth Rodgers: Mencken: The American Iconoclast refers in the preface to prattlibrary.org as a source; s. also family tree wiki
  6. ↑ Diary entry April 1, 1945
  7. ^ Author Henry Louis Mencken. In: perlentaucher.de . Retrieved August 13, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Donald Trump and the Triumph of Malice , Die Welt, February 21, 2016
  9. ↑ Bayard vs. Lionheart in The Evening Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), 1920-07-26
  10. ↑ 1900 - 1982
personal data
SURNAME Mencken, Henry L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mencken, Henry Louis (full name); Mencken, HL
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American publicist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore , Maryland, USA
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 1956
Place of death Baltimore , Maryland, USA