Jonas Kreppel

Jonas Kreppel (born December 25, 1874 in Drohobycz , Galicia , † July 21, 1940 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was an Austro-Jewish writer and publicist whose works were published in German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish.

Life

origin

Jonas Kreppel came from a family of merchants who originally lived in southern Germany and the Silesian region (Kreppeling, Kreppelhof ). Some family members emigrated to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century , others, like Jonas Kreppel, became victims of the Shoah , and some survived in Israel.

Professional background

Jonas Kreppel grew up with six other siblings in Drohobycz multilingual (German, Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew). After training as a book printer, he became editor of the German-language "Drohobyczer Zeitung", which was printed in Hebrew letters. He wrote for other magazines such as "Zijon" (literary, Hebrew), "Jüdische Volksstimme" and "Jerusalem" (Cracow, German-speaking), "Jerushalajim" (Cracow, Hebrew). In Lemberg , Jonas Kreppel edited the Hebrew daily newspaper “Ha Yom” (“The Day”) from 1904 and the Yiddish daily newspaper “Der Tog” in Krakow from 1909 . As the author of Yiddish detective novels, he published the series "Max Spitzkopf - the Viennese Sherlock Holmes" from 1908, which was distributed throughout Galicia.

Kreppels political friend and supporter was the Drohobycz Reichsrat member Nathan Löwenstein von Opoka , who was close to the "Poland Club". In 1914 Jonas Kreppel was appointed to the press secretariat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, and in 1915 he became its press officer. In 1924 he switched to the state press service of the Austrian Federal Chancellery, where, as a non-academic and self-taught, he embarked on an astonishing career in higher civil service (Ministerial Secretary, Government Councilor).

From 1914 on, Jonas Kreppel worked - in addition to his duties as a civil servant - as a political publicist. From 1915 to 1920 he published his own weekly paper, the Jüdische Korrespondenz . She was close to the Agudath Israel . In addition, Jonas Kreppel published books and brochures (see list of literature) in which he, as an Austrian patriot loyal to the emperor , pleaded for a victory peace between the (from his point of view more Jew-friendly) Central Powers against (from his point of view anti-Jewish) Russia . After the collapse of the k. and k. Monarchy , Jonas Kreppel directed his gaze to the republican "German Austria" and defended its independence against all attempts at annexation to the German Empire, especially after 1933.

In the 1920s, Jonas Kreppel mainly published Eastern Jewish stories and legends in Yiddish and German. His main work is the statistical handbook Jews and Judaism of Today from 1925.

persecution

As early as 1935, Jonas Kreppel warned in his anti-Hitler pamphlet 1935 (see bibliography) that the Western powers would give in to the foreign policy demands of Nazi Germany and thus of an impending great war. This font was put on the “list of harmful and undesirable literature” by the National Socialists .

Jonas Kreppel himself was arrested immediately after the " Anschluss of Austria " in May 1938 and first transferred to the Dachau concentration camp (July 1938) and then to Buchenwald (September 1938), where he died of exhaustion after two years of forced labor (" extermination through labor "). His ashes were buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery / Israelite Department.

At the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, he is commemorated as a victim of the Shoah in the “Hall of Names”.

meaning

Through his political publications, Jonas Kreppel stands for the compatibility of Jewish faith and Austrian citizenship. As a strictly Orthodox Jew, he expressed certain reservations about political-secular Zionism. He campaigned for the colonization of Palestine by “faithful” Jews as well as for remaining in the “ diaspora ”, which was linked to the demand for equal coexistence between Jews and non-Jews in their respective home countries. Mainly through his encyclopedic research, e.g. He achieved literary historical importance through his work on the Jewish Lexicon , international Judaica and his collections and editions of Eastern Jewish legends in German and Yiddish.

Works (selection)

• Austria-Hungary after the peace treaty. <A fantasy?>. Publishing house "Der Tag". Vienna 1915.
• The world war and the Jewish question. Publishing house "Der Tag". Krakow 1915. ( digitized version )
• The end of the Dardanelles adventure and Romania. A German assessment of the situation. Publishing house "Der Tag". Vienna 1916.
• In the fourth year of the war. Publishing house "Der Tag". Vienna 1917.
• The struggle for and against peace. Notes, manifestos ... etc. on the peace question since the peace offers of the Central Powers. With an introduction and comments by J. Kreppel. Publishing house "Der Tag". Vienna 1917.
• Peace in the East: notes, manifestos, messages, speeches, declarations, negotiation protocols and peace treaties with Ukraine, Russia and Romania. With an introduction and comments by J. Kreppel. Publishing house "Der Tag". Vienna 1918.
• Brother un shṿesṭer , 1924 ( digitized version )
• Jews and Judaism Today. A manual. Amalthea Verlag Zurich-Vienna-Leipzig 1925. ( digitized version )
• Eastern Jewish legends. Publishing house "Das Buch". Vienna 1926.
• How the Jew laughs. Anthology of Jewish jokes, satires, anecdotes, humoresques, aphorisms. A contribution to the psychology of the Jewish joke and to Jewish folklore. Publishing house "Das Buch". Vienna 1933.
• 1935 [nineteen thirty-five] - the fateful year of Europe. Germany and Austria in the focus of world politics . Publishing house "Das Buch". Vienna 1935.

literature

• Klaus Hödl: As a beggar in Leopoldstadt: Galician Jews on their way to Vienna. Böhlaus Zeitgeschichtliche Bibliothek, Volume 27. Vienna-Cologne-Weimar 1994 (2nd edition).
• Hans Otto Horch and others (eds.): Conditio Judaica. Part 3: Judaism, anti-Semitism and German-language literature from the First World War to 1933/1938. Tubingen 1993.
• Jewish Lexicon . Volumes I to IV / 2. Berlin 1927 ff.
• Klaus Kreppel : The Austrian-Jewish writer Jonas Kreppel (1874–1940). In memory of the 70th anniversary of his death on July 21, 1940 in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Lecture on July 17th, 2010 at Annapunkt in Augsburg on the occasion of the international "Kreppeltreffen" 2010.pdf
• Klaus Kreppel: The Austrian-Jewish Publisher Jonas Kreppel (1874-1940). In memory of the 70th anniversary of his death in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp A lecture at the occasion of the international "Kreppeltreffen" in Augsburg / Germany on July 21st 2010, PDF
• Klaus Kreppel : Jonas Kreppel - faithful and patriotic. Biographical sketch of an Austrian-Jewish writer . With the participation of Evelyn Adunka and Thomas Soxberger , Mandelbaum-Verlag, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85476-814-2 (with a detailed bibliography, pp. 278–290).
  • Monika Halbinger: Book review Jonas Kreppel - faithful and patriotic. In: haGalil, June 11, 2018.
• Marcus G. Patka: Ways of Laughter. Jewish wit and humor from Vienna. Encyclopedia of Viennese Knowledge. Volume XIII. Vienna 2010.
• Jacob Toury : The Jewish Press in the Austrian Empire. A contribution to the problem of acculturation 1802–1918. Writings of the Leo Baeck Institute. Vol. 41. Tübingen 1983.

Web links

Wikisource: Jonas Kreppel  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See keyword “Kreppel” Unit Id # 80486. Beth Hatefutsoth. The Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. Tel Aviv. "Distinguished bearers of the Jewish family name Kreppel include the Galician-born Austrian politician, Hebrew, German and Yiddish printer, author, editor and publisher Jonas Kreppel (1874–1940)."
2. ^ Max Spitzkopf, the Viennese Sherlock Holmes | Yiddish Book Center. Accessed May 31, 2019 . 
3. ↑ Strzelecka:  Lion's Arch by Opoka Nathan. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 5, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1972, p. 292.
4. ↑ cf. Google Books
5. ^ "List of harmful and undesirable literature." As of December 31, 1938. Leipzig, 1938, page 77.
6. ↑ http://totenbuch.buchenwald.de/names/details/page/122/letter/k/person/3315/ref/names
7. ↑ http://friedhof.ikg-wien.at/search.asp?lang=de
8. ^ Entry in the Central Database of the Names of Holocaust Victims at the Yad Vashem Memorial
9. ^ Directory of the staff at the Jewish Lexicon , University Library of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main , accessed on August 22, 2013.
10. ↑ The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, for example, has Jonas Kreppel's story Bruder un Schvester under Reg. 12349 put online: www.yiddishbookcenter.org.