Josef Wolfgang Loewe

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Josef Wolfgang Steinbeißer (born May 25, 1894 in Aufhausen , Upper Palatinate , † September 16, 1980 in Regensburg ) was a German master locksmith, actor and playwright. Posterity will remember him mainly because of his social drama teacher Elly . It describes the well-known case of the Regensburg teacher Elly Maldaque towards the end of the Weimar Republic , which was also worked on by Ödön von Horváth and Walter Mehring .

Life

Before the war

Josef Wolfgang Steinbeißer was born on May 25, 1894 in the small town of Aufhausen in the Upper Palatinate. He first completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith. In 1912 he went to nearby Regensburg as an assistant. During the First World War , Loewe was stationed on the Russian front. He survived the war physically unscathed, but his experiences made him a staunch pacifist . First poems were written. In 1917 he married Theresia List from Regensburg. In 1919 he passed the master's examination to become a locksmith.

Loewe began early on as an actor on amateur stages. Finally, he took professional acting lessons from senior director Arthur Wedlich and received his first engagement at the Regensburg City Theater in 1920 . His acting activities took him to Ulm , Berlin and finally to Vienna . On the side, Loewe wrote plays. He completed his first stage work Between Two Powers , an argument about idealism and materialism, in 1922.

But the theater work could not support the steadily growing family in the long run and so Loewe returned to his learned profession in 1924, but without giving up writing. In the next few years the dramas emerged: Eros , one of the great army , Herrmann and Dorothea as well as teacher Elly and Demetrius .

Demetrius

Demetrius , performed in 1934 and based on the story of the alleged Tsar's son Dimitiri I , which had already been taken up by Schiller , Hebbel and others , was his greatest success. The performance was, however, largely operated by the then NS mayor of Regensburg, Otto Schottenheim . Obviously the regime wanted to install a labor poet and cheered Steinbeisser's work on the event even before the first performance. Numerous Nazi figures as well as the Thurn and Taxis princely couple attended the premiere and donated a standing ovation. There were 31 curtains. Enthusiastic reviews appeared throughout Germany in the press, which has meanwhile been synchronized.

One critic noted what the National Socialists were interested in in the play: “Loewe’s Demetrius is carried by the realization that the hero rightly won the throne of Russia . “One saw in Steinbeisser's work a justification for Hitler's seizure of power .

Josef Wolfgang Steinbeißer received the Johannes Fastenrath Foundation Prize of the City of Cologne for Demetrius . The then unemployed father of four children was generally predicted to have a steep career. But it soon became quiet again because he refused to write Nazi propaganda pieces. He later commented on the Regensburg Week : "I didn't take part in the Nazis and so of course I was quickly through again."

After the war

After the end of the war, Steinbeißer joined the Regensburg writers' group Der Grüne Kranz , which published the anthologies Die Vierzehn and Im Banne einer alten Stadt in 1950 and 1951 . Steinbeißer published excerpts from his more recent dramatic works Judas and Roritzer , the cathedral builder . In 1951, on the occasion of the first Nordgau day after the war, Loeweisser's unemployment drama One from the Great Army was premiered in the Regensburg City Theater.

Loewe wrote numerous short stories, poems and essays as a result. His later works include the dramatic poetry Eros and Sins of the Fathers and the religious-philosophical treatise So spoke God in man to man for man .

Steinbeißer was a member of the Regensburg Writers' Group International (RSGI) since 1920, and in 1960 he was made an honorary member. Josef Wolfgang Steinbeißer died on September 16, 1980 at the age of 86 in Regensburg.

"Teacher Elly"

The Elly Maldaque case

Main article: Elly Maldaque

Born in Erlangen in 1893 , Elly Maldaque was an elementary school teacher in Regensburg during the Weimar Republic. After breaking away from her fanatically religious father, she became increasingly interested in the social and political currents of her time. In 1929 the political police became aware of them and had them watched by "swastika operatives". After a house search, during which parts of her diary were secretly copied and sentences from it were put together in a way that distorted the meaning, the Bavarian Minister of Education, Dr. Franz Goldenberger (BVP) resigned without notice on June 28, 1930. She suffered a nervous breakdown and, by order of the Regensburg city council, was admitted to the local psychiatric ward because of "publicly dangerous mental illness", where she died only a few days later.

The case caused a stir across the country. Over 90 newspaper articles appeared, reported on the renowned world stage . In the Bavarian state parliament , the processes of her termination and death were the subject of heated debates several times. But because of the political balance of power, all attempts to rehabilitate Elly Maldaque were unsuccessful.

Deviations

Loewe, who, according to information from the family circle, knew Elly Maldaque very well, took up the essential building blocks of the original story for his play, Teacher Elly . But he used the material very freely and changed some historical framework conditions for dramaturgical reasons.

For example, Elly Maldaque has moved back to her parents' house in Loewe’s drama due to constant spying. This increases the intensity of the conflict between father and daughter. Elly's biological mother is also still alive, who next to Elly stands for a modern and fairer world. The biggest deviation, however, is Elly Maldaque's suicide by jumping out of the window of the district president. This deprives your opponents of the opportunity to label them as insane through a briefing and thus discredit their ideas and conceptions. A late triumph that Loewe treats his protagonist.

Despite these changes, teacher Elly can with some justification be called an early documentary piece. Similar to Hochhuth's The Deputy , a real occurrence is narrated in a condensed manner in order to make the historically important points all the more clear.

interpretation

Steinbeisser's piece is a picture of society at the end of the Weimar Republic.

The central figure Elly Maldaque is swarmed by representatives of all political currents, from left and right, from conservatives, national and religious forces. However, she resists all attempts at seduction and stormy declarations of love, since she does not see her ideals realized in any social group, and undeterred goes her own way, the way of human rights and human love . Elly Maldaque thus remains the only representative of a real democracy in the midst of increasingly extremist forces .

In this role, she radically questions the existing state. A state only has a right to exist if it is just and social. Accusations that it undermines the state and promotes revolutionary ideas, she replies: "An unjust state should go under!" "You get rid of these blatant contradictions, these class differences, and you get rid of the turmoil and the revolution!"

In doing so she also contradicts the concept of the God-given order, which demands blind obedience and unconditional willingness to make sacrifices and is exemplarily represented by Elly's father: “What does 'freedom' mean! The best freedom is to obey! ”“ The spirit of an official is his prescription, and it is his intellect to carry it out! ”

With clear analogies to the Christian myth, loach Elly paints Maldaque as a secular savior. Logically, with her death, the hope for a better, more humane world also dies. In the very literal sense, the figure Elly Maldaque stands for love: “You killed love!” Exclaims the Nazi informer Frank after Elly Maldaque's death before he goes mad.

Love is dead and its persecutors go mad. In view of the development of National Socialism , Steinbeißer's piece, which was created around 1930, is characterized by astonishing foresight.

Reception history

On 6 May 1970, the newly formed Drama Studio of RSGI Steinbeißers teacher Elly in scenic reading presented. Excerpts from this work were published in the book Horváths Lehrerin von Regensburg , published in 1982 by Professor Jürgen Schröder from Tübingen . In 1994, Steinbeisser's teacher Elly was to be staged in the Regensburg City Theater for the author's 100th birthday. But despite the support of the then cultural advisor Dr. Greipl could not realize the project.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Regensburger Echo, March 16, 1934
  2. ^ Regensburger Echo, April 19, 1934
  3. ^ Welt am Sonntag, April 22, 1934
  4. ^ Regensburg Week, July 21, 1967
  5. Jürgen Schröder: Horváth's teacher from Regensburg , Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 218