Jakob Littner

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Jakob Jenö Littner (born April 17, 1883 in Budapest ; † May 6, 1950 in New York ) was a Jewish stamp dealer and Holocaust survivor, whose autobiographical report Mein Weg durch die Nacht was used by the writer Wolfgang Koeppen as a template for his novel Jakob Littner's Notes from a hole in the ground (1948, republished 1992).

Life

Jakob Littner, owner of a stamp wholesaler in Munich since 1911, was arrested in 1938 on the basis of an ordinance issued by the Nazis regarding the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany. He was to be deported to Poland. Here, however, entry was refused so that he could return to Munich.

During the November pogroms his business was destroyed on 9 November 1938th From then on, Littner lived in hiding before he left Munich for Prague on March 1, 1939 . The further escape from the German troops finally led him to Zbaraz , a small Galician town in the Tarnopol district near the Romanian border. After the invasion of the Wehrmacht and the SS in July 1941, Littner, his partner Janina Korngold and their son Richard were brought together with about 5000 other Jews in a ghetto, from which they escaped in June 1943, immediately before its liquidation. For a fee, they found accommodation with a Polish landed gentry and lived in hiding in the cellar until the Red Army conquered the area in March 1944.

In August 1945 Littner returned to Munich with Janina, whom he had married two months earlier in Krakow. They lived there with Christine Hintermeier, the co-owner of the stamp shop that Littner had provided with food and money while he was on the run and was still in the ghetto. Between August and November 1945 he wrote his experiences under the title Mein Weg durch die Nacht. A document of racial hatred .

He gave his manuscript to the Kurt-Desch-Verlag in Munich. However, based on an expert opinion by the writer Rudolf Schneider-Schelde , who later became the program director of Bayerischer Rundfunk , the decision was made that the work had to be fundamentally revised before it could be published, as it was “literarily without the slightest value”. However, the writer Karl Lerbs , who was scheduled for revision, died in the meantime.

In April 1947 Schneider-Schelde reached an agreement with the new publisher Herbert Kluger from Munich to first subject the book to an editorial revision and then to publish it. At Kluger’s request, the still largely unknown Wolfgang Koeppen took over the revision, so that the heavily modified work could appear in 1948 under the title Recordings from a Hole in the Ground , partly financed by Littner. However, it turned out to be unsaleable.

Jakob Littner emigrated to the USA with his wife in June 1947, where he reopened a stamp shop in Manhattan. He died there on May 6, 1950.

On the history of publication and reception

In 1985 a reprint of the records was published by the Berliner Kupfergraben-Verlag , the distribution of which was, however , prohibited a little later by the Suhrkamp Verlag , whose in-house author Koeppen had been since the 1950s. In 1992 the book was finally republished by Suhrkamp Verlag with Koeppen as the author under the slightly different title Jakob Littner's Notes from a Hole in the Ground.

In his foreword to this, Koeppen claimed that his novel was based solely on the publisher's notes; there was no written submission by Littner:

“The Jew told the new publisher that his god had held his hand over him. The publisher listened, he made notes of places and dates. The escaped man was looking for a writer. The publisher reported the unbelievable to me. I had a dream. The publisher asked me: “Do you want to write it?”
The abused person wanted to leave, he emigrated to America. He promised me a fee, two care packages every month.
I ate American canned food and wrote the story of the suffering of a German Jew. Then it became my story. "

In 1999 the literary scholar Reinhard Zachau published in the magazine Colloquia Germanica for the first time excerpts from Jakob Littner's manuscript Mein Weg durch die Nacht , the existence of which had been unknown until then, at best only vaguely suspected. Zachau and above all Jörg Döring, the author of a Koeppen biography for the years 1933 to 1948, demonstrated on the basis of extensive comparisons that Koeppen adhered closely to Littner's text in his editing of the material, but nevertheless made some significant changes (especially simplifications and dramatizations). According to Koeppen, he also used the template to write his own (personal) story .

expenditure

  • Kurt Nathan Grübler (Ed.): Journey Through the Night. Jakob Littner's Holocaust Memoir . With a foreword by Reinhard Zachau. New York, London 2000.
  • Koeppen, Wolfgang: Jakob Littner's notes from a hole in the ground . Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1994.
  • Koeppen, Wolfgang: Jakob Littner's notes from a hole in the ground . Novel. With an afterword by Alfred Estermann. Frankfurt a. M .: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002.
  • Littner, Jakob: Notes from a hole in the ground . Munich: Kluger, 1948. (Reprint: Berlin: Kupfergraben Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985).
  • Littner, Jakob: My way through the night . With comments on Wolfgang Koeppen's text adaptation. Edited by Roland Ulrich and Reinhard Zachau. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002.

swell

  • Jörg Döring : "... I put myself under, I made myself small ...". Wolfgang Koeppen 1933-1948 . Frankfurt a. M., Basel 2001.
  • Alfred Estermann: A kind of blank check for free literary exploitation . In: Wolfgang Koeppen: Jakob Littner's notes from a hole in the ground . Frankfurt a. M. 2002, pp. 139-191.
  • Reinhard K. Zachau: The original manuscript for Wolfgang Koeppen's "Jakob Littner's notes from a hole in the ground" . Colloquia Germanica 2/99.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephan Braese: German Post-War Literature and the Holocaust . Campus Verlag, 1998, ISBN 978-3-593-36092-8 , pp. 175 ( google.com [accessed February 27, 2016]).
personal data
SURNAME Littner, Jakob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Littner, Jakob Jenö (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 1950
Place of death New York City