Hermann vinegar
Hermann Essig (born August 28, 1878 in Truchtelfingen , † June 21, 1918 in Berlin ) was a German playwright , storyteller and poet .
Life
Hermann Essig was the son of the Truchtelfingen pastor and the two years older brother of the painter Gustav Essig . He spent his school days in Weinsberg and Heilbronn , where he graduated from high school at the Karlsgymnasium . He studied at the Technical University in Stuttgart. In 1902 he had to go to Switzerland for a cure because of a lung disease and began to write there. From 1904 he lived in Berlin, first as a technical draftsman for an engineer friend, then as a freelance writer. In 1905 he married the widow of Emil Rosenow , a social democratic member of the Reichstag and a writer. His comedy Kater Lampe was played very successfully and secured the existence of the rather unsuccessful vinegar for a long time. In the following years he tried to gain a foothold in Berlin's literary life. In 1905 he finished the drama of Napoleon's Rise . In the years 1906/1907 the tragedy Ueberteufel and the drama Your silent happiness followed -! , 1908 the story The Weather Frog and the Tragedy of the Visitation of Mary .
Up to this point there was neither a performance nor a publisher that would have accepted vinegar. The Swabian finally came to Paul Cassirer through the editor of the S. Fischer Verlag Moritz Heimann . The Swabian comedies Die Weiber von Weinsberg and Die Glückskuh appeared here . Only now did the criticism slowly take notice of Essig, who kept on writing. In 1910 he finished the play Der Held vom Wald , in 1910/1911 the comedy Der Frauenmut .
In 1911 the Liebhaberbühne Pan performed one of his plays for the first time, Die Glückskuh . The poet Jakob van Hoddis writes about it:
“Hermann Essig pleases me most by inverting a familiar psychological perspective. He portrays women as the more spiritual, as the more conscious animals, whose decisions grow in greater brightness, and also of unconscious dullness; but he also sees them as the more wicked, harder, and more mendacious. One would call Hermann Essig a cruel psychologist if one did not feel that he loves women far too much to idealize them; he can still enjoy smiling where a Strindberg rages and accuses. "
In 1911 and 1912, the famous critic Alfred Kerr published Essigs' tales in his and Paul Cassirer's magazine Pan , edited by Cassirer. In 1912, Essig completed the one-act comedy Ein Taubenschlag .
In 1912 there was a break with Cassirer because he did not feel that he was being given sufficient support. Essig self-published many of the as yet unpublished dramas, including the new play The Emperor's Soldiers and the comedy The Pig Priest .
In 1913, Jakob Schaffner's awarding of the Kleist Prize to him and Oskar Loerke by Jakob Schaffner (for the hero of the forest ) meant a great financial and idealistic success. This year I also had my first contact with Herwarth Walden , the head of the art institution Der Sturm . Walden takes Essig's dramas into his publishing house, but cannot get any performances for the author. In 1913 Essig finished the comedy Pharaoh's Dream .
In 1914 Essig was drafted into military service and sent to Graudenz (West Prussia) to train pioneers. Second award of the Kleist Prize to him (for The Emperor's Soldiers ) by Arthur Eloesser ; the price is shared again, this time between him and Fritz von Unruh . First performances in Berlin and Düsseldorf bring him into conflict with the censors. She will take action against him again and again in the years to come, mainly because of sexually offensive and mocking bodies.
In 1915/1916 he finished Emil Rosenow's play Die Hope des Vaganten .
In 1917/1918 Essig was released from military service for one year because of neurasthenia. Because he rejects modernity and feels only taken advantage of by the storm , he writes the key comedy Kätzi and the key novel Der Taifun ; both appear posthumously.
In April 1918, Essig was called up for military service again. The tragedy Mira, the Silver Bride remains unfinished. On June 21, Essig dies of pneumonia in Berlin-Lichterfelde.
In total, he wrote sixteen dramas that merged naturalistic , expressionistic and classical elements. They are characterized by realism and have stylistic and content references to Gerhart Hauptmann , Hermann Sudermann and Frank Wedekind . Topics are a social criticism directed against the bourgeoisie, the isolation of the individual and the absurdity of human existence. The often drastic representation and thematization of sexuality as well as strong satirical elements often called the censor on the scene.
Essig's greatest success was his key novel Der Taifun ( Kurt Wolff , 1919), in which he made fun of the art-crazy Berlin audience and the modern tendencies of the Sturm circle. The author Kasimir Edschmid wrote about the typhoon :
“Essig is undoubtedly not linguistically or formally creative in the grand and ultimate sense and yet has written a book that has never been available in terms of compactness, originality and abundance of what has been seen. ('Taifun', by Kurt Wolff, Munich). Nevertheless, in the end it would be unthinkable without Sternheim and Heinrich Mann. The novel satirizes the 'Sturm' circle with a boldness of form that is hardly known in Germany. Mann's scourging novels are (with the exception of the unfortunately bad ending 'Professor Unrat') not stylized into the poetic, not into the eternal, but only into the temporal glossiness. They remain politics. From then on, vinegar builds up, because in the end the 'Sturm' circle is sausage for him, and it by no means sensationalizes him too much that even invisible images are ultimately sold as the last level of abstraction, ie empty frames. Instead, he twitches after the human misery behind it, after the twistedness of the soul, after the most impossible expressions of the twisted, baroque in existence. And he accomplishes the fusion of the most obnoxious, terrible and daring things with unusual concentration. Undoubtedly one of the best satirical novels of our time and, as a result, seriously misunderstood because of its boldly outdated content. "
Critics such as Alfred Kerr or Franz Blei valued vinegar, but complained about the technical blunders and dramatic weaknesses.
Vinegar was buried in the park cemetery in Lichterfelde-West in Berlin. His grave was abandoned after World War II.
reception
During the Weimar Republic , Dramas Essigs were played mainly in Berlin, among others by directors such as Jürgen Fehling and Leopold Jessner . In 1933 he was put on one of the book-burning blacklists , and when the Sturm's rooms were searched , his works were also confiscated and stamped in. The president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer Hanns Johst , however, affirmed in a letter to the widow that vinegar as a whole is not forbidden, he even appreciates its work. There were no more performances until 1975.
In the early 1970s, Helene Weigel made the head of the authors ' publishing house , Karlheinz Braun, aware of the pieces of vinegar. As a result, there was a small renaissance of the playwright. His comedies The Lucky Cow , The Pig Priest , The Wives of Weinsberg and Der Frauenmut were performed from 1978 in Stuttgart, Basel, Esslingen, Pforzheim, Freiburg and Nuremberg. The Munich Volkstheater Ruth Drexels played a Bavarian version of the lucky cow with great success in 1988/89. It was also recorded for television.
The writer Martin Walser , whose daughter Franziska Walser in the first performance of Glückskuh played the Rebekkle said:
“I would really like to read more pieces because this rhythm of speech has bewitched me, I am constantly tempted to say such vinegar sentences, I have trouble defending myself. It is clear that vinegar can no longer disappear ... "
literature
Primary literature
- Hermann Essig: The typhoon . Ed. And with an afterword by Rolf-Bernhard Essig. Weidle-Verlag, 1997
Secondary literature
- Ralph Müller-Saalfeld: Essig, Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 659 ( digitized version ).
- Helmut Sembdner (Ed.): The Kleist Prize 1912–1932. A documentation . Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1968. pp. 52-58 u.ö.
- Georg Brühl: Herwarth Walden and "The Storm" . DuMont, Cologne 1983, ISBN 3-7701-1523-6 . Pp. 103, 107, 217, 247, 293, 300, 324, 350f.
- Volker Pirsich: The storm. A monograph . Verlag Traugott Bautz, Herzberg 1985, ISBN 3-88309-020-4
- Rolf-Bernhard Essig : Hermann Essig 1878–1918. From folk play to city novel - a Swabian writer in Expressionism Berlin. Exhibition of the Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage June 26, 1993 - August 7, 1993. Reichert, Wiesbaden 1993, ISBN 3-88226-582-5 ( Exhibition catalogs / State Library of Prussian Cultural Heritage . NF 5)
- Donatella Germanese: Pan (1910-1915). Writer in the context of a magazine . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1755-2 ( Epistemata. Series Literary Studies . 305). Pp. 80-85 et al.
- Barbara Besslich: L'Empereur between Expressionism and Exile. Napoleon dramas by Hermann Essig, Fritz von Unruh, Walter Hasenclever and Georg Kaiser . In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society 47 (2002), pp. 250–278.
Web links
- Works by Hermann Essig at Zeno.org .
- Works by Hermann Essig in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Literature by and about Hermann Essig in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Vinegar, Hermann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German playwright, storyteller and poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 28, 1878 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Truchtelfingen |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 21, 1918 |
| Place of death | Berlin |