Hilde Marx

Hilde Marx (born November 1, 1911 in Bayreuth ; died October 4, 1986 in New York ) was a German-American poet , writer and journalist .

Life

Youth and Studies

Hilde Marx was born as the daughter of Adolf Marx from Bamberg who, together with his wife, owned the Schriefer textile department store at Richard-Wagner-Strasse  4 in Bayreuth. There she attended the grass school and in 1925/1926 switched to the humanistic high school in Friedrichstrasse . There she already experienced anti-Jewish tendencies at this time.

In spite of everything, in 1929 she received the Jean Paul Prize of the City of Bayreuth, an award given to schoolchildren for special achievements in German language and literature. After graduating from high school in 1931, Hilde Marx went to Berlin to study newspaper studies , theater history and art history for the winter semester of 1931/1932 . After she was forced to de-register in 1933/1934, she worked as a freelancer for a Jewish newspaper. In 1934, Hilde Marx published a collection of poems in the verse under a pseudonym . Her first volume of poetry under her own name Dreiklang. Words Before God, Of Love, Of The Day appeared in 1935 and made them known to the Jewish literary public. The volume, which also dealt with problems of the Jewish population, was later banned.

Written by Hilde Marx texts for a Jewish cabaret had the Gestapo to be submitted, their events and readings were from the secret police monitored (Gestapo). At that time she did not want to leave Germany.

emigration

When Hilde Marx refused to have any credit transferred to Germany in Pilsen , the Gestapo threatened her with imprisonment in a concentration camp . She then left for Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1937/38 , stayed there for a few months in Prague and moved to New York in November 1938 .

There she earned her living through jobs, including working as a nanny, carer for the elderly and saleswoman. In her free time, she trained as a qualified masseuse. During this time, her first poems in America appeared in the German-Jewish magazine Aufbau . She received US citizenship in 1943 and married her childhood friend, the general practitioner Erwin Feigenheimer . There are three daughters from this marriage.

In 1951, Hilde Marx's third and last volume of poetry, Report, was published, with works from 1938 to 1951. Cabaret also persisted, and so Hilde Marx was best known in the United States for her One Woman Show , performances with serious and cheerful elements. They also included dramatized topics on the Jewish and Christian tradition, recitations by classical German authors, as well as their own works.

After 1960 she was appointed to the editorial team of the Aufbau , where she wrote theater and film reviews and short biographies of Jewish emigrants.

Visit to Germany

In 1967, 30 years after emigrating, she visited relatives in Germany. This visit - which only became known in 1982 - prompted Josef Gothart to invite the chairman of the Jewish Community and other people and institutions, including the Bayreuth city administration, to give a lecture to the students at their former grammar school, today's Christian-Ernestinum grammar school . She gave the lecture on June 16, 1986 and two days later also a reading of her own and other works. The low presence of the Bayreuth population and especially their own generation struck her as unpleasant.

In a letter of thanks to the mayor of Bayreuth, she described the visit to her hometown as "the hardest job I have ever done".

Hilde Marx died in New York at the age of 74. Her extensive estate is in the State University of New York in Albany .

literature

• Marx, Hilde: Dreiklang: Words before God, of love, of the day . Philo Publishing House. Berlin, 1935
• Albrecht Bald: Hilde Marx (1911–1986) - a German-Jewish poet and journalist between Bayreuth, Berlin, Prague and New York . Attempt of a biographical-literary sketch. In: Archive for the history of Upper Franconia 79 (1999), pp. 417-441.
• Hilke Meierjohann: Hilde Marx, journalist and poet

Web links

• Literature by and about Hilde Marx in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hilde Marx in the Bavarian literature portal (project of the Bavarian State Library )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heaviness and soap bubbles in: Nordbayerischer Kurier of August 21, 2018, p. 10.