Jakob van Hoddis

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Jakob van Hoddis (1910)

Jakob van Hoddis (birth name Hans Davidsohn ; born May 16, 1887 in Berlin , † 1942 in Sobibór , Generalgouvernement ) was a German poet of literary expressionism . He is particularly known for the poem End of the World .

Life

Hans Davidsohn was the son of the Jewish medical councilor Hermann Davidsohn and his wife Doris geb. Kempner. His twin brother died in childbirth. He was the oldest son and grew up with his siblings Marie, Anna, Ludwig and Ernst. The poet Friederike Kempner was his great aunt.

From 1893 he attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium (Berlin) , but left the school in 1905 to forestall a relegation . Even as a high school student he wrote his first poems . In 1906 he passed the Abitur as an “external” and matriculated at the Technical University of Charlottenburg for Architecture in the same year . In 1907 he broke off the TH degree and moved to the University of Jena to study classical philology . He later went to the Friedrich Wilhelms University .

In Berlin he became a member of the Free Scientific Association , where he met the law student and later writer Kurt Hiller . In 1908, supported by Hiller, he made his debut with a few poems. Together with Erwin Loewenson (alias Golo Gangi ) they founded the New Club in the Hackesche Höfe in 1909 . Starting in 1910, they organized literary evenings under the name Neopathetisches Cabaret . When his father died in 1909, he took the pseudonym Jakob van Hoddis , van Hoddis being an anagram of his surname Davidsohn.

His poem Weltende became the actual basis of early Expressionism in 1911 and appeared for the first time in the magazine Der Demokratie . Further poetry appeared in the magazine Die Aktion von Franz Pfemfert during this time . His friendship with colleague Georg Heym also dates from this time . His artistic work reveals some of the influence of Stefan George during this period . Van Hoddis was forcibly de-registered from the university at the end of this year "because of carelessness".

In 1912 van Hoddis went to Munich , where he increasingly turned to Catholicism . Here for the first time an incipient psychosis made itself more clearly noticeable. Because of increasing conflicts with his family, he withdrew to the sanatorium in Wolbeck near Munster himself at the beginning of September , which he left in mid-October in order to return to Berlin. Here he became so conspicuous that at the end of October he had to be taken to the “Waldhaus” sanatorium in Nikolassee near Berlin , so that Erwin Loewenson turned to a long-time friend of Kurt Hiller, the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld in Heidelberg, with a request for support . Under the title " Forced into the madhouse" , this forced admission was the cause of media coverage - but at a time when van Hoddis had already "escaped" from the institution. He also studied Greek mythology and its fable structures. However, before the outbreak of his illness in the fall of 1914, he completely stopped using mythological terminology.

After stays in Paris , Munich and Heidelberg , he returned to Berlin completely penniless. In 1914 he gave his last lecture in the New Club . From 1915 van Hoddis was under constant medical treatment and was cared for privately. That year his brother Ludwig died as a soldier in the First World War . In 1918, Franz Pfemfert published the eponymous and fifteen other poems by van Hoddis in his book series Der Rote Hahn under the title End of the World. During this time in Zurich , poems by van Hoddis were recited in the DADA gallery . After the war, van Hoddis' brother Ernst could no longer gain a foothold and emigrated to Palestine .

Memorial plaque on the house at Rosenthaler Str. 40 in Berlin-Mitte

From 1922 van Hoddis was in constant private care in Tübingen . In the meantime his condition had become so serious that in 1926 at the request of his mother Doris Davidsohn, born Kempner, he was incapacitated by the Tübingen District Court and an uncle - Hermann Kempner - took over the guardianship for him. On June 15, 1927, a dispute with his neighbor escalated and he was admitted to the city's university hospital. From there he was transferred to Göppingen on July 4, 1927, to the Christophsbad , a private clinic for the mentally and mentally ill, where he stayed for six years.

In the year of the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” in 1933, van Hoddis' mother emigrated to Palestine with his sisters Marie and Anna. On September 29, 1933 van Hoddis was transferred to the "Israelitische Heil- und Pflegeenstalten" in Bendorf- Sayn near Koblenz . From 1940 onwards, the majority of Jewish psychiatric patients in the German Reich were concentrated in this institution. On April 30, 1942, he was deported from there to the Lublin district to Nazi-occupied Poland and - most likely in the Sobibór extermination camp  - murdered in May or June of the same year at the age of 55.

Work and reception

His poem End of the World was first published on January 11, 1911 in the Berlin magazine Der Demokratie .

70 other poems appeared in the avant-garde magazines Die Aktion and Der Sturm . His lyrical work is mainly characterized by strong ciphers and Dadaist elements. Many of his poems show a bizarre, grotesque content, mixed with naive and black-humorous formulations.

Van Hoddis had great success with many contemporaries, and his poetry was highly valued by literary critics and intellectuals of the time. Weltende opened what is probably the most famous expressionist poetry anthology, Menschheitsdämmerung , published by Kurt Pinthus in 1919 . In later research, however, he took a back seat compared to other representatives of Expressionism such as Georg Heym , Ernst Stadler and Georg Trakl . He based his vocabulary in his poems between 1910 and 1914 very much on that of the early Stephan George. Around 1950 only the poem End of the World and the sixteen poems collection of the same name, which was published in 1918 by Franz Pfemfert , are known to other circles. In 1958 Paul Pörtner published another collection of poems, which, thanks to the estate administrator Erwin Loewenson, contained thirty-five unpublished poems. In studies by Udo Reiter (1970) and Richard Sheppard (1978) one can find further unknown texts by van Hoddis. In 1987 the complete edition of Regina Nörtemann was published, which has compiled two hundred and six poems as well as prose texts, letters and important documents.

The credit for the rediscovery of Hoddis' poetry goes to Paul Pörtner , whose edition, even if incomplete, aroused the interest of many literary scholars: after a few years, essays and two monographs on the life and lyrical work of van Hoddis were published. The common denominator of these contributions, however, is the tendency to attach great importance to mental illness, as a result of which some poems - especially the latest ones - are analyzed from a medical point of view rather than according to aesthetic rules. The only critic who opposes this tendency is Bernd Läufer, the author of a study (1992) on the Variété cycle .

In 2002 Karl Bruckmaier wrote and staged a radio play about the life of van Hoddis for Bayerischer Rundfunk under the title “Then a poet will be lost to him” - speculations about Jakob van Hoddis.

Commemoration

Reminiscent of the poet and his fate Tübingen the Jacob van Hoddis relay near the Psychiatric University Hospital. In Göppingen there is a monument in the garden of the Christophsbad and a dormitory for the reintegration of mentally ill people bears his name. The dormitory belongs to the association “VIADUKT Help for the Mentally Ill e. V. ". In the Rosenthaler Straße 40/41 in Berlin-Mitte , in the passage to the Hackesche Höfe , a memorial plaque has been commemorating van Hoddis since 1994.

expenditure

Prints in lifetime

Work editions

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Jakob van Hoddis  - Sources and full texts

Remarks

  1. ↑ See the materials for the van Hoddis exhibition in the New Synagogue Berlin - Centrum Judaicum , June 10 to August 31, 2001. cjudaicum.de/vanhoddis .
  2. ↑ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon , Walter Jens (Ed.), Munich 1988–1992
  3. ↑ available as a podcast
personal data
SURNAME Hoddis, Jakob van
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Davidsohn, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet of expressionism
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 1942 or June 1942
Place of death Sobibor