Hermann Krieger

Hermann Krieger (born May 31, 1866 as Hermann Krüger in Bielefeld , † February 7, 1943 in Malente ) was a German writer .

Life

Hermann Krieger in Malente in 1937

Hermann Krieger was born into a family of factory workers as Hermann Krüger in Bielefeld and grew up in poor conditions. After an apprenticeship as a locksmith, he left home early. For a short time he was a seaman and drove from Amsterdam to North America. He came to Hamburg around 1885 and got by with odd jobs. From 1894 he lived in Berlin-Friedenau and adopted the stage name Hermann Krieger. There he tried his hand at first as a painter, but soon began his first literary work. In Friedenau he made the acquaintance of Peter Hille and Otto Julius Bierbaum . In 1897 he returned to Hamburg, where he married Christine Paape, daughter of a Hamburg wagoner , in 1906 . He was on friendly terms with Carl Albert Lange , Alexander Zinn , and Michael Georg Conrad . All his life, Krieger suffered from severe pain caused by gout and rheumatism, which is why he stayed several times for several months of treatment at the Edmundsthal-Siemerswalde sanatorium in Geesthacht . In 1932 Hermann Krieger moved to Malente , where he died in 1943.

Literary work

Hermann Krieger's literature was influenced, among other things, by the encounter with Peter Hille and by the works of Henry David Thoreau . A reference to nature can be found in almost all of his writings. The bitter poverty in which he spent almost his entire life shaped his literary work. He increasingly combined a religion-like belief in salvation with a nature-related existence.

After Krieger returned to Hamburg from Berlin in 1897, he initially published his first small works in the Neue Hamburger Zeitung . The work Moderne Eginharde from his time in Berlin was already available, a critical pamphlet against the monarchy and the church. In Berlin he was also in contact with members of the Friedrichshagener poet circle . Experiences from these encounters flowed into the satirical verse epic Willy Meier . Around 1900 he wrote the drama Die Wette and the comedy Die Gründer , the latter premiered in Hamburg in October 1911. Supporters in those years were Otto Ernst , Carl Müller-Rastatt , Alexander Zinn and Michael Georg Conrad. He gained greater fame with his first novel, the Hahnekamp family and their friend Schnurrig , the story of a family that leases an allotment garden not far from the Hamburg Alstertal .

Cover illustration The Autopest of 1926.

His experience as a beekeeper and his deep interest in the life of bees led to his natural philosophical work Imma - A bee fair from beekeeping country , as well as appear as protagonists in his novels the Hahnekamp family and their friend Schnurrig and in Die Höllenmühle Beekeepers. Many of his feature sections deal with flora and fauna, but especially the bird world and the north German hedgerow landscape are the subject of these texts.

For the commercial classes , the association newspaper of the Association for Tort Commis of 1858 (Commercial Club in Hamburg), he wrote a versatile self-taught some were economic and colonial botanical essays.

In the emergency turn , Krieger developed the historical-morphological worldview of an eternal alternation between the rise and fall of high cultures. Accordingly, cultures inevitably have to get into crises in order to grow up - the so-called emergency turnaround. In addition to neo-Germanic features, the work also has clear anti-Semitic features.

In the novel Die Höllenmühle ( Die Höllenmühle) , published in 1929, the northern German landscape is combined with Nordic mythology to create a work of natural mystery. The role model for one of the protagonists in the Höllenmühle is Detlev von Liliencron , who is admired by Krieger . At about the same time, the civilization and urbanity critical publication Die Autopest was created.

Many of Hermann Krieger's works remained unpublished and are considered lost.

Awards

The Hamburg group around Hans Leip , Hans Much and Fritz Höger awarded Krieger a support payment of 1,000 marks in 1927 in the aftermath of the artist festival Die Silbergrüne Junke.

Krieger received several scholarships from the Art Care Commission of the City of Hamburg between 1925 and 1930.

In 1930 he received a lifelong honorary pension from the city of Hamburg. During the festivities in the music hall on the occasion of Constitution Day 1930, the award was announced by Mayor Rudolf Roß .

Works

• Modern Eginharde. Berlin 1895.
• Willy Meier - A time mirror. Verlag Gottfried Veith, Hamburg 1899.
• The Hahnekamp family and their friend Schnurrig - the happy story of a liberation. Alfred Janssen publishing house, Hamburg and Berlin 1912.
• Imma - A bee fair from beekeeping country. Ernst Schwabe publishing house, Hamburg 1922.
• Not-Wende - On the rise of the Germanic Occident. Publishing house Georg Westermann, Braunschweig and Hamburg 1923.
• The robbery of the China tree - adventurous trips to the tropics by a German naturalist. Publishing house Georg Westermann, Braunschweig and Hamburg 1924.
• The autopest. Theodor Weicher publishing house, Leipzig 1926.
• The hell mill. A landscape novel of people and animals. German Book Community, Berlin 1929.

expenditure

• The Hahnekamp family - a happy story. German Book Association, Berlin no year [1929]; (strongly changed new edition).

literature

• Torben Dannhauer: "The nights are celebrations out here!" - Life and work of Hermann Kriegers . In: Edition Literatur im Strom. 1st edition. Volume 1. Zeitkartell publishing house, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-9819059-0-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Torben, Dannhauer: "Out here the nights are celebrations!" - Life and work of Hermann Kriegers. In: Edition Literatur im Strom. 1st edition. Volume 1. Zeitkartell publishing house, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-9819059-0-8 .
2. ↑ Hermann Krieger: To err is human - humoresque. In: Neue Hamburger Zeitung, No. 27 of January 17, 1897.
3. ↑ For example: Hermann Krieger. Rubber, gutta-percha and balata. In: Der Handelsstand - bi-monthly publication for German merchants at home and abroad. Newspaper of the Association for Action Commis from 1858. No. 12 (3rd year) from June 15, 1902; derslb. The oil palm. In: ibid., No. 20 (4th year) of October 15, 1903; derslb. Samoa - Colonial Economic Sketch. In: ibid., No. 15 (4th year) from August 1, 1903.
4. ↑ Torben, Dannhauer: "Out here the nights are celebrations!" - Life and work of Hermann Kriegers. In: Edition Literatur im Strom. 1st edition. Volume 1. Zeitkartell publishing house, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-9819059-0-8 .
5. ^ The Constitution Day in Greater Hamburg. In: Hamburger Anzeiger, No. 185 of August 11, 1930.