Hermann Kükelhaus

Hermann Kükelhaus (born August 4, 1920 in Essen , † January 30, 1944 in Berlin ) was a German soldier and poet . He became known through his letters and poems published by his brother Hugo .

Life

Growing up in Essen and, after his father's death in 1931, on a small farm in the East Prussian Bischofsburg , the mentally precocious boy came to the Napola Internat Stuhm. In 1938 he described the totalitarian rule as "cosmic carcinoma" with his report on the Abitur with the title The Rulers and the Masses. This caused a commotion: the report was broken off, he himself was arrested, interrogated and finally sentenced to one year of detention underground in a mine; he did not get the school leaving certificate.

He was then trained as a soldier and sent to Russia as an infantryman; as one of five of his company he survived the campaign on Moscow with a bone bullet and frostbite. In the summer of 1942, as a non-commissioned officer, he was ambushed with his advance command.

In autumn he was shot in the forehead and he was brought back to Berlin. Doctors friends made sure that he did not have to go back to the front, but that he could stay in Berlin in outpatient treatment. There he wanted to witness the attacks from the street in order to help with the extinguishing operations after the all-clear. During one such mission, he fell from a burning roof on January 30, 1944 in Uhlandstrasse.

Quote

From a letter to Brother Hugo dated February 10, 1942:

A few days ago the second of my good friends fell. A young painter, a man after my heart. Only nine of our company are now alive. It will go on like this. We are not being replaced.

The gate is there

shrouded in death -

in a gray world

a fool the hero.

Take it and listen

and be forgotten

and don't cry

but laugh at me

so pale

so the same

and die in peace ...

Book editions

His brother Hugo, who was 20 years his senior, had his first collection of his poems published in 1942 as a private print by Stichnote in Potsdam. A second, "official" selection came out in 1947 by the same publisher. It was intended as a forerunner for an edition of a work planned by Peter Suhrkamp in his own publishing house, but which - Suhrkamp died in 1959 - did not (or no longer) materialize. In 1964 the volume … a fool, the hero was published by Diogenes Verlag (around 160 pages), which was reprinted there in 1985, this time as a paperback. Today his work is accessible through the edition of Urachhaus Verlag (around 250 pages).

• Poems , cue note, Potsdam 1947
• ... a fool, the hero. Letters and poems . Ed. V. Elizabeth Gilbert (with an afterword). Introduction by Hugo Kükelhaus, Diogenes, Zurich 1964
• ... a fool the hero. Letters and Poems 1939–1943 . Ed. V. Ingrid Grebe, Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 978-3-8251-7208-4

literature

• Kraft, Werner: Young poet , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 26, 1959
• Nordmeyer, Barbara: Conscious of Time. Biographical sketches , Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1966, pp. 141–153

swell

1. ↑ Zurich 1964, p. 30

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Kükelhaus in the catalog of the German National Library