José Orabuena

José Orabuena ; Born Hans Sochaczewer (born August 10, 1892 in Berlin , † February 16, 1978 in Ascona , Switzerland ), was a German-Jewish writer. His main works include novels about the life of Jews in Poland and Germany.

Life

childhood

Hans Sochaczewer came from an assimilated and emancipated Jewish merchant family. His parents Max Sochaczewer (1858–1929) and Magarethe Baschwitz (1870–1943) avoided contact with Jews and therefore did not raise their children according to the Jewish faith . The family did not go to the synagogue , nor did they obey Jewish dietary laws . The private school Orabuena attended did not have any religious education for Jewish children, so his parents decided to let him take Christian religious education. From his memoirs, however, one can see that he had little to gain from Christian religious instruction. It was the same with the Jewish religious instruction given by a rabbi , which he received after he was nine years old and which only filled him with horror. So it was impossible for Orabuena to develop an understanding of the Jewish religion. Some of the German families of Jewish origin preferred assimilation, i.e. complete dissolution into the German population, in order to avoid hostility and restrictions by non-Jews that would have resulted from demarcation. The price paid by the Orabuenas family and other Jewish families for emancipation was a religious uprooting that plunged many Jews into a profound identity crisis.

Orabuena was burdened not only by the lack of religious affiliation, but also by the overly strict upbringing by her father, who as a merchant expected very high performance from his children and was always dissatisfied with the school performance of his children. Orabuena was a good student at the beginning of his school career and began to be interested in literature and to write at a very early age. For science, however, he had little understanding.

When he got into a bitter argument with his father about his career aspiration to become a writer and threatened suicide, his parents and doctors sent him to a sanatorium and later to a madhouse . This step put a lasting strain on the relationship with his parents, and Orabuena broke away from his family.

Outbreak of the First World War and Orabuena's stay in Vilnius

In the First World War Orabuena fought for Germany the German-French border and was eventually to the eastern front was added. There he did not stay in the arms service for long, but was sent to Vilnius / Wilna as a press representative after a long hospital stay , where he first met Eastern Jews .

Although Vilnius was initially “strange and a new world” to him and, as Orabuena reports, the city was dirty and its houses and streets were in a very poor condition, he was all the more interested in the residents and “what it was that one apparently takes more seriously than order and cleanliness ”. Due to the language barriers (Orabuena spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew ) he hardly got any closer to the people in Vilnius. In addition, he was not religious at the time, which made him suspect in many eyes of the deeply religious Vilnius Jews, who viewed everything in the mirror of divine providence. Orabuena, on the other hand, did not find the everyday life of Vilnius Jews to be monotonous. Despite their wretched situation (most of them were poor), they had a keen sense of family, community and religion.

The time after the World War and Orabuena's departure for Copenhagen

On returning to Germany, Orabuena felt the mood change in the German population. If before the outbreak of World War I there was still a common enthusiasm for war among non-Jews and Jews, this mood turned into an anti-Semitic one . In 1922 he made his debut with the story Die Grenz , in which he - strongly expressionist - processed his traumatic madhouse experiences. During this time his short marriage (1923–1925) with the pianist Marie (Miriam) Zweig , a cousin of Arnold Zweig , falls . In his novel Sonntag und Montag from 1927, the most successful bookseller of his books, he first described the fate of Eastern Jewish workers in Berlin. The book was based on the maxims of the New Objectivity and described the Moloch Berlin in an almost documentary way , not least the poverty and hopelessness of the Berlin population. His publications were well received in literary circles. Stefan Zweig invited him to Salzburg, where he met Joseph Roth ; he was also in contact with Erich Maria Remarque .

For a time he also took on publishing activities. But Orabuena moved to Copenhagen as early as 1928 - not only because he admired Danish poets such as Jens Peter Jacobsen , but because the hostile mood in Germany was becoming increasingly noticeable. Orabuena lived in Copenhagen for twelve years under changing circumstances. He found it difficult to support himself and his mother, who had moved to Denmark after 1933. The two were supported by Orabuena's younger brothers Ernst, who gained a foothold in the United States. He experienced the takeover of power by the National Socialists from Porto Ronco in Switzerland , where he sought relaxation at the invitation of Remarque. After the end of the Weimar Republic , he was only able to publish one essay in a German newspaper in Germany, a work entitled Nachlass am DESK in the Vossische Zeitung .

Exile situation in Denmark

Shortly after May 10, 1933, Orabuena learned that his works had also been burned . The exile situation in Denmark turned out to be extremely difficult as Orabuena's writing activity was stopped and he could no longer publish in Germany. In addition, Orabuena wrote texts that were rather uninteresting for foreign readers.

Since Orabuena eluded daily political issues, political texts were out of the question for him. He contributed two stories for the magazine Die Sammlung , edited by Klaus Mann . However, at times it was difficult for him to find a subject to write about, so that he lived in isolation and loneliness for a long time. During this time he began to research his ancestors, to deal with the Jewish doctrine of the faith and to understand the stages of Jewish historical development. He came across a family named Orabuena, from which many doctors emerged and who had to leave their country as a result of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 . He admired this family, adopted the name Orabuena and from then on considered himself a descendant of this Sephardic family.

At the same time he found access to religion and his consciousness changed. The East European Jews offered Orabuena the possibility of the position of the assimilated "air people" ( Theodor Lessing to solve) without roots and discover a new form of religiosity that filled him. So his two-year stay in Vilnius became a key experience post festum , which Orabuena now fixed in literary terms. In 1935 he began working on his novel about the eastern Jewish town of Vilnius. In it he describes the encounter between East and West Jews shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. As a kind of alter ego , he lets a man named David Orabuena travel to Vilnius. Despite communication difficulties and different views of the two Jewish schools , a harmonious coexistence emerges from which both groups benefit. Orabuena worked with discipline for three years on the completion of the novel, which took place in Copenhagen in 1938. Although many publishers praised him for his work, no one was initially ready to publish his book.

At about the same time, at the latest since 1934, he began to reject the texts he wrote in the twenties and early thirties under his former name Hans Sochaczewer, because he could no longer identify with his earlier texts. He saw it only as "mere reading for entertainment, because its content was tied to an earth that did not seem to have been created by God, but by a liberal and benevolent, yet unsuspecting person." Orabuena reformulated his poetic mission so that now faith and poetry formed a causal relationship. For him, poetry, “true poetry”, only emerged in “connection with the unearthly.” In this regard, Orabuena leaned on the Jewish understanding, according to which a change of name always means a change of consciousness or personality.

In 1959 his main work was Gross ist Deine Treue. Roman of the Jewish Vilna first published. It received positive reviews, including in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung .

England and Switzerland

He had already moved to England in 1940 , where his sister had lived for a long time. In 1948 he acquired British citizenship while in exile in Manchester , and his name change, which he had already completed in the 1930s, became official there. Shortly afterwards he moved to Switzerland, where he lived until his death. In 1952 he was baptized in Einsiedeln Monastery and officially converted to Catholicism .

Some of the texts written in the early 1960s play mainly in a Spanish-Italian, Catholic milieu, such as Rauch and Flamme (1960) and Auch Gram enchanted (1962). These books testify to a new, now completely irony - and exaggeration - free art theory orientation as well as a deep religiosity of the poet. In a very unique way, both Jewish roots and Christian beliefs are exposed.

In the context of his autobiography Im Tale Josaphat , published in 1964 , Orabuena sought to illustrate the genesis and accompanying circumstances of his identification. The two posthumous older works, the collection of legends Das Urlicht (1971) and the novel Tragische Furcht (1980) are subordinate to the poet fan: “How I learned to die” .

Works (selection)

• Hans Sochaczewer - The Border (Konstanz, Wöhrle , 1922)
• Hans Sochaczewer - Henri Rousseau (novella) (Potsdam, Kiepenheuer, 1927)
• Hans Sochaczewer - Sunday and Monday , Potsdam 1927.
• Hans Sochaczewer - The Lovers (novel) (Berlin, Zsolnay, 1928)
• Hans Sochaczewer - People after the War (novel) (Berlin, Zsolnay, 1929)
• Hans Sochaczewer - Die Untat (novel) (Berlin, Kiepenheuer, 1931)

• José Orabuena - Childhood in Cordoba. The life story of the doctor David Orabuena (Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer, 1951)
• José Orabuena - Happiness and Mystery (Life Story of Pater Marcellus) (Zurich / Paderborn, Schöningh, 1957)
• José Orabuena - Great is your loyalty. Novel of the Jewish Wilna , Zurich / Paderborn, Schöningh, 1959.
• José Orabuena - Smoke or Flame (Zurich / Paderborn, Schöningh, 1960)
• José Orabuena - Grief also enchants (Zurich / Paderborn, Schöningh, 1962)
• José Orabuena - On the story of my Vilnius novel “Great is your Treue” , Zurich, Thomas, 1963.
• José Orabuena - In the valley of Josaphat. My life story , Zurich / Paderborn 1964.
• José Orabuena - The primal light. The stories of the wise Elias , Schöningh, Paderborn 1971, ISBN 3-506-96189-6 , new edition: Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1979, ISBN 3-451-18474-5 .
• José Orabuena - Tragic Fear (Novel) (Freiburg, Herder, 1980), ISBN 3-451-19139-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 10.
2. ↑ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 10 f.
3. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 17.
4. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 17.
5. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 86.
6. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 85.
7. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 87.
8. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 89.
9. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 87.
10. ↑ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 96.
11. ↑ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 94 ff.
12. ^ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 7.
13. ↑ Orabuena, Im Tale Josaphat, p. 167.
14. ↑ Heinecke, Ostjudentum, p. 102.
15. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 28, 1959.
16. ↑ Orabuena, Im Tale Josaphat, p. 288.
17. ↑ Orabuena, Im Tale Josaphat, p. 285.

literature

• Andreas Heinecke: Eastern Jewry in the work of José Orabuena . Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1990, ISBN 3-631-42759-X ( European university publications . Series 1: German Language and Literature , Volume 1182), (Dissertation University of Frankfurt am Main 1989, 274 pages, 21 cm).
• Walter Nigg : The helping poet José Orabuena . in: Walter Nigg: Heilige und Dichter , Walter, Olten 1982, pp. 203-226, ISBN 3-530-61212-X .
• Thomas F. Schneider: Exile as a biographical and aesthetic break in continuity. From Hans Sochaczewer to José Orabuena . In: Helga Schreckenberger (Ed.): Aesthetics of Exile . Rodopi, Amsterdam et al. 2003, ISBN 90-420-0965-9 , pp. 173-185 ( Amsterdam contributions to recent German studies , volume 54).
• Orabuena, José. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 17: Meid – Phil. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-22697-7 , pp. 394-403.
• Joseph Rieger: José Orabuena: Who you are and know me - and other stories . Aschendorff-Verlag, Münster, 2019, ISBN 978-3-402-12078-1

Web links

• Literature by and about José Orabuena in the catalog of the German National Library