Herbert von Hoerner

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Herbert von Hoerner (* July 9th / May 21st,  1884 greg. In Ihlen ( Latvian Īle ) in the parish of Groß-Autz ( Latvian Lielauce ) in Kurland ; † according to a more recent announcement on September 26th, 1946 in Bautzen ) was a Baltic German writer and painter .

life and work

Herbert Otto Christian Carl von Hoerner was born on May 9th (according to other sources on May 8th) 1884 at Gut Ihlen in Kurland. He was the youngest of the five children of Rudolph von Hoerner (1848-1919) and Baroness Magdalene von Lieven (* 1853). The paternal family originally came from the Egerland in Bohemia and was raised to the Polish nobility in 1568 and entered into the Courland knighthood in 1620 . Herbert's father had been the majority owner of von Ihlen from 1880 , resident district marshal from 1879 to 1905, director of the Courland Provincial Museum from 1892, president of the Courland Society for Literature and Art from 1893 and assessor of the Kurland Evangelical Lutheran Consistory from 1894 to 1905 .

Herbert von Hoerner received private lessons and attended the Russian high school in Mitau . During this time the lifelong friendship began with his classmate Johannes von Guenther , who was two years his junior and who later became a writer and translator . After graduating from school, Hoerner did his military service with the 42nd Mitauschen Dragoon Regiment of the Russian Army , which he left as an ensign . He then began in 1905 to study painting, art history and architecture at the art academy in Munich . In 1906 he switched to the State Art School in Breslau ; there was one Hans Poelzig his teachers. In 1908 he passed a drawing teacher exam in Breslau. Then Hoerner worked as a drawing teacher in Mitau and lived for a time as a freelance artist in Riga . He also went on study trips that took him back to Munich and Italy, among other places.

The outbreak of the First World War surprised him in Germany, where he worked as a portrait painter in Freiburg im Breisgau . As a Russian reserve officer, he was interned in Küstrin and Celle (according to other sources in Zell am See ) and only released in 1916 on the advice of his father. Poems and smaller prose texts by Hoerners were already represented in anthologies at this time.

In 1917 Herbert von Hoerner lived in the Künstlerhaus Dresden-Loschwitz , where on December 15, 1917 he married the writer Susanne Heintze (1890–1978), who came from a family of artisans in Breslau . Two sons emerged from this marriage, including the astrophysicist Sebastian von Hoerner .

Since the Baltic States had meanwhile been occupied by German troops and belonged to the area of ​​the Commander-in-Chief in the East , Hoerner was able to return to Gut Ihlen with his wife in 1918. In the civil war between 1919 and 1920 he took the an officer in the 3rd Company Baltic Landeswehr the Latvian War of Independence in part. From November 1919 to April 1920 he published nine issues of the company magazine Die Leuchtpistole . He contributed colored drawings and extensive analyzes of the military and political situation in the Baltic States. He presented his war experiences in his first individual publication Villa Gudrun in 1922 .

Like many other Baltic Germans, Hoerner had to leave Latvia after the dissolution of the Baltic State Armed Forces and his family lost their traditional property. As a translator, portrait painter, poet and writer, he spent seven years traveling in Germany. Stays in Berlin , Chemnitz (1921), in an artists' colony in Überlingen on Lake Constance (1922–1925) and on estates in Pomerania are documented . In Überlingen he edited and translated for the publishing house of Oskar Wöhrle . In 1928 Hoerner finally settled in Görlitz , where he was employed as a drawing teacher at the Augustum grammar school and at times also taught mathematics and German.

In addition to the teaching profession, he was increasingly active as a writer. In the 1930s, in addition to reports from the war, a number of novellas and short stories were published by him. Hoerner was a teller of anecdotes with profound humor, often with melancholy touches. He chose mostly local, traditional subjects, used simple but symbolic motifs and tried to create an atmospheric drawing of landscapes and people. This type of homeland-related poetry could easily be brought into line with blood-and-soil notions and was valued by National Socialism , even if it did not contain a clearly political message. For his farmer's novel Der graue Reiter (1940), which has been translated into numerous languages ​​and adapted motifs from Theodor Storm's novella Der Schimmelreiter , Hoerner awarded the Berlin Literature Prize for 1940.

During the Second World War he volunteered for service in the Wehrmacht and was used as an interpreter (" Sonderführer ") at Stalingrad and in the Ukraine . After a serious illness, he became a language teacher for an interpreting company in Wroclaw . Shortly before the end of the war, according to all previous accounts based on memories of his son, who died in 2003, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets while fleeing from Breslau to Görlitz and was imprisoned in Bautzen remand prison in 1946, while his wife was arrested in Görlitz. According to a research published in 2011, which is based on newly opened East German and Russian archive material, he stayed in Görlitz during the last months of the war and was available to the Görlitz fortress commander Colonel Neise as an interpreter.

According to previous accounts, Hoerner was taken to an internment camp in Torgau as a prisoner and is said to have died there in May 1950. Deviating from this, the investigation from 2011 found that Herbert von Hoerner was, according to the files, arrested on June 18, 1946 together with his wife by the Soviet secret service MGB in Görlitz and on August 30, 1946 by a Soviet military tribunal of the 11th Transcarpathian Mountains -Berliner Guard Panzer Division was sentenced to death by shooting for “counterrevolutionary crimes” under Article 58/2 (armed insurrection, invasion of the USSR) of the RSFSR Criminal Code . The judgment was carried out on September 26, 1946 in Bautzen. Accordingly, von Hoerner was never interned in Torgau. In October 2002 Herbert von Hoerner was rehabilitated by the Russian military chief prosecutor.

Herbert von Hoerner's literary works were reprinted several times up until the 1960s, but are largely forgotten today. Only his poem Erntekranz is still printed in school books.

Awards

Works (selection

  • Villa Gudrun (pieces from a collection). On the Bolshevik Front in Latgale in August 1920 (Hartenstein im Erzgebirge 1922); War memories with poems
  • Theseus (1923); Drama, performed in Meiningen
  • The Frog's Resurrection: An Animal and Dance Fable (1927);
  • The Magic Circle: a dance game with accompanying verses (1928);
  • Six poems (1935); Poetry
  • Brother in the field (1936); narrative
  • The Tsar's Coachwoman (1936); narrative
  • The Last Bullet (1937); narrative
  • The Green Lemonade (1938); narrative
  • The Big Tree (1938); narrative
  • The Gray Rider (1940); Roman, translations into French, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish and Latvian
  • The Wave (1942); Lyric poems
  • Landscapes (1942); Sketches

Settings:

  • Anning's song, little song, summer night, the wave . Four songs for medium voice, violin, cello and piano (approx. 1949); Composer: Hilda Kocher-Klein
  • Rural ways. Four songs for medium voice and piano. Folk tune (Rilke). Round song (Johannes von Guenther). Lament (Johannes von Guenther). Annings Lied (Herbert von Hoerner) (1960); Composer: Gerhart von Westerman
  • Wave of Life (1979); A choral work for festive occasions based on a text by Herbert von Hoerner for male choir and piano or organ or orchestra; Composer: Hermannjosef Rübben.
  • Harvest Wreath (1999); Composer: Wilhelm Koch

Translations:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the previous biographical accounts, Herbert von Hoerner's death date is May 8 or 9, 1950 and Torgau is the place of death . According to a paper published in 2011 ( Ronny Kabus : "... I cry for my father every day." In the power of Stalin and the SED. Norderstedt 2011 ( BoD ), ISBN 978-3842331020 , pp. 67-71), the Newly accessed East German and Russian archive material supports, Hoerner was never interned in Torgau and, according to MGB files, was shot on September 26, 1946 in special camp No. 4 Bautzen . Source: Information from W. Oleschinski from DIZ Torgau , quoted in Kabus, p. 71.
  2. ↑ Johannes von Guenther: A life in the east wind . Biederstein Verlag, Munich 1969, p. 357.
  3. ^ A b Ernst-Edmund Keil (ed.): East German reading book: German poetry of the middle of the century from the Baltic States to the Banat. , Cultural Foundation of German Expellees , 1984, ISBN 978-3885570301 , p. 18.
  4. ↑ Bruno Goetz (ed.): The Baltic Provinces. Volume 4: The Young Balts. Poems. Felix Lehmann Publishing House, Berlin 1916.
  5. ↑ Details on Susanne von Hoerner-Heintze in Gudrun Wedel: Autobiographies of women: A lexicon. Böhlau Verlag Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20585-0 , p. 351.
  6. ↑ Die Leuchtpistole , magazine of the 3rd Company of the Baltic State Army (DSHI 120 BR / BLW 270). Completely available in the collection of the Herder Institute in Marburg .
  7. ^ A b Manfred Bosch: Bohème am Bodensee: literary life on the lake from 1900 to 1950 . Verlag Die Libelle, Lengwil 1997, ISBN 3909081754 , p. 113.
  8. ↑ a b Hoerner received the Berlin Literature Prize for 1940 together with Kurt Kluge and Friedrich Griese . Since the award was not presented until the following year, the year 1941 is often mentioned. See also: Helga Strallhofer-Mitterbauer: Nazi literary prizes for Austrian authors: a documentation. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3205982045 , p. 88 in the Google book search.
  9. ↑ Ronny Kabus: "... I cry for my father every day." In the hands of Stalin and the SED. 2. edit again u. extended Edition Norderstedt 2016, p. 38.
  10. ↑ Ronny Kabus: "... I cry for my father every day." In the hands of Stalin and the SED. 2. edit again u. extended Norderstedt edition 2016, pp. 73–80.
  11. ↑ Hörner poem harvest wreath is for. B. printed in O. Watzke u. a .: Poems in pictures of the hours. Lesson proposals with templates for 4th grade. Auer-Verlag, Donauwörth 2000, ISBN 3-403-02017-7 .
  12. ^ Franz Lennartz : The poets of our time: 275 individual representations of the German poetry of the present. Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1941, p. 182
  13. ^ The printing of The Magic Circle was donated for the March Festival 1928 of the Society of Book Friends in Chemnitz by Friedrich Emil Krauss-Schwarzenberg and Friedrich Wagner-Poltrock in Chemnitz
  14. ↑ Claudia Friedel: Women composing in the Third Reich: An attempt to reconstruct the reality of life and the dominant image of women . LIT Verlag Münster, 1995. ISBN 3825823768 , p. 41, Ref. 92
  15. ↑ Gerhart von Westerman : Rural wise men. 4 songs. op. 22, Verlag Bote & Bock Berlin, Wiesbaden, 1960
  16. ↑ score. Hermannjosef Rübben: Wave of Life (PDF; 2.0 MB) Verlag Peter J. Tonger, 1979
  17. ↑ Score: Erntekranz. T: H. von Hoerner. M: Wilhelm H. Koch. Music and product range publisher Waltraud Krause. no year
personal data
SURNAME Hoerner, Herbert von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Ihlen , Courland , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1946
Place of death Bautzen