Julie Schrader

Julie "Julchen" Schrader (born December 9, 1881 in Hanover ; † November 17, 1939 in Oelerse , now part of the municipality of Edemissen in Lower Saxony ) was a German writer who wrote mainly poetry until the late 1970s . Since then, her authorship has been disproved in most of the work in literary studies .

Julie Schrader

Life

Julie Schrader's tombstone

Julchen was born Anna Wilhelmine Julie Schrader in Hanover in 1881 and worked as a maid, reader and housekeeper for a living. On December 26, 1922, she married Hermann Niewerth and died in 1939 in Oelerse near Lehrte ("suicide by drowning").

But this leaves the area of ​​verifiable facts. Because all further information about Schrader's life and work comes from her great-nephew Berndt W. Wessling , who was the editor of her works until his death . According to the literary critic Werner Fuld , his claims about Julchen have "meanwhile been refuted or relegated to the realm of fable." This applies in particular to the numerous sexual adventures described in Schrader's works. According to scientific knowledge, her affair with the composer Leo Fall also never took place.

To the work

You holy spirit, you were my fall!

Oh, Leo, come back!

And get the kid out of the stable

So that it may make me happy!

With this poem Julie Schrader is said to have come to terms with the end of her affair with Leo Fall in 1907. Not least because of such humorous ambiguities and ambiguities, Julchen was discovered and successfully marketed in the late 1960s, the age of " sexual liberation ". Back then, the involuntarily comical poems by the “Silesian swan” Friederike Kempner were very popular and appreciated. Based on her, Julie Schrader was given the nickname “Welfischer Schwan”.

According to her editor, Julchen wrote around 2000 poems, which have been published regularly from 1968 onwards in ever new arrangements. There were also diaries, “Hanoverian dramas” as well as recipes, stories and letters. The re-releases ended abruptly in 1989.

criticism

As early as 1971, the parodist Robert Neumann had questioned the authenticity of the works based on linguistic peculiarities and ruled out the creation of the texts for the claimed point in time. This suspicion was confirmed in 1976 by investigations in which Schrader's life was checked for “ Kindler's literary dictionary ”. Result: "All of Wessling's sources for alleged contemporary publications by Julie Schrader turned out to be fictitious and thus confirmed the doubts about her existence as an author". "The swan is a duck" was the headline of the "Stern" on June 10, 1976. The son has also been believed to be the author behind the texts of Wessling's mother Anni Julie. The journalist Gabriele Stadler dismantled the myth of "Julie Schrader" most in detail in a radio series on Hessischer Rundfunk in 1988/1989 . At the same time, it provided the impetus for a new reception of the work.

Wessling always denied having invented Schrader's work freely, but admitted that he had become an “arranger, polisher, picker” with Julchen. “Why not: I saw the whole Julchen thing more as a columnist enterprise from the start. With my artist biographies, I had to proceed differently: scientifically, thoroughly researching, as precisely as possible. At Julchen ...? ”But it was precisely the reference to his biographical works that led to Wessling's undoing when falsified passages were discovered in several of these books.

In years of disputes, Wessling took legal action against his critics with threats from lawyers, injunctions and legal proceedings, but was unable to convince the professional world. Over the years, he eventually lost all sense of proportion in defending his point of view.

Of course, Julie Schrader really wrote - much like any simpler person of her age. In the first book editions, eight poems by Julchen were reproduced in facsimile , later Wessling presented other poems and a few letters from Julchen in the original. However, these works turned out to be writing to one's own husband, copies of foreign poems and occasional prose, the quality of which corresponds to what is rhymed in many families for anniversaries. In these originals you won't find a bit of frivolity and no prominent correspondent.

In summary, one can subscribe to the “ Brockhaus Enzyklopädie ” (1981), according to whose judgment the bulk of Julchen's works can be attributed to the editor BW Wessling.

Reassessment

Even with the knowledge of their true origin, many of the “Schrader” poems can still be read with pleasure today. And there are still public readings of her poems or performances of her pieces - albeit not as much as in past decades. So interest seems to have decreased, but not broken.

Gabriele Stadler already referred to the time-relatedness of her poems and did not mean the turn of the century, but the time of the dawn of the late 1960s, whose mood Bernd W. Wessling used and processed in marketing. “The naive are attracting attention again in our time. Painting grandmas and grandpas are in vogue. Poets who hit the emotional nerve with elegiac penetrance get into business, and writers who 'let it flow as it comes from their hearts' are encouraged by all means, "said Wessling in 1971." Writer Julie Schrader " accommodated this time-related tendency to the trivial , counter-modernity and nostalgia - and thus to success.

However, the scientific processing is still at the beginning. The extent to which Schrader's legacy has been preserved about Wessling has not yet been processed, nor has the true genesis of her writings been scientifically traced and the new reception of the work, suggested by Stadler, appropriate to its real time of origin.

Sources

During his lifetime, Wessling kept almost all of Julie Schrader's handwritten originals under lock and key. According to Werner Fuld, at the end of the 1970s he donated 20 handwritten occasional poems to Julie Schrader as a donation to the Hamburg State Library. According to Wessling, the further Julchen estate was deposited with a lawyer and was later to be bequeathed to a Lower Saxony museum with a blocking period of 20 to 30 years. Shortly before his death, Wessling gave his literary estate to the Hamburg State Archives, where it can be viewed by the public.

plant

Julie Schrader's works have been published in bound form or as paperbacks by various publishers and in countless editions. Here is a list of the book publications. The year refers to the time of the first publication:

• Do you want to kiss me quietly? Poems, Part 1 (1968)
• Left along paradise. Poems, Part 2 (1969)
• I am your dandelion - From the day and night books of a Wilhelmine Fraulein (1971)
• When I Love I See Stars (1971)
• Dandelion's Moritaten (1973)
• Julie Schrader, e.g. Currently in poste restante. The correspondences of the dandelion . Piper, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-492-02049-6 .
  • as dtv paperback, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-423-01167-X .
• The Eroticon of the Guelph Swan (1974)
• Genoveva & Der Cassernower. Two really great Hanoverian dramas (1975)
• Above the stars, the palm trees blow. The big album of the Welfish Swan (1977)
• I feel like a Christmas tree. Poems and Treats by Julie Schrader (1978)
• Julie Schrader's Collected Delicacies (1980)
• Julie Schrader's Cookery and Gourmet Book - 200 Practical Recipes (1981)
• Love's rose finger bores. Prose, poems and letters from the 'Welfischen Schwan' (1982)
• Bethlehem and Goose Breast. Collected Advent and Christmas Lust (1985)
• With one foot on Goethe's grave. (All the poems of the 'Welfischen Schwan', 1) (1987)
• Love came to me tonight. (All poems of the 'Welfischen Schwan', 2) (1987)
• The senator's wife. Comedy (1988)
• Let Cupid shoot when he wants. Poemes, letters and pieces of the Wefischen Schwan (1989)

literature

• Karl Corino : Wagner and no end. In: nmz (Neue Musikzeitung) 47 (3) 1998, p. 11
• Werner Fuld: Julie Schrader. In: Ders .: The Lexicon of Forgeries. Eichborn, Frankfurt / M. 1999, pp. 234–237 ( ISBN 3821814446 )
• Gabriele Stadler: Julchen Schrader, the Guelph swan who was a duck. In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged. Fraud in politics, literature, science and music. Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1992, pp. 330-341
• Anni Julie Wessling: My aunt, your aunt. Memories of the Welfish Swan Julie Schrader. 1985
• Berndt W. Wessling: Grotesque ejections ?. In: nmz 47 (6), 1998, p. 11

Web links

• Literature by and about Julie Schrader in the catalog of the German National Library
• Julie Schrader, meeting at hamburgtheater.de
• Sternentaler, a frivolous poem

Remarks

1. ↑ Stadler, p. 337.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Fuld, p. 235.
3. ↑ Stadler, p. 334
4. ↑ Wessling, cit. in Stadler, p. 333
5. ↑ More detailed in the article by Berndt W. Wessling
6. ↑ For example, he attacks the HR literary editor Corino : "The man is sick, haunted by a perverted Sado-Masochism" and a "vain, know-it-all and lying informer of Freissler's doggedness" (Wessling 1998, p. 11)
7. ↑ cit. in Stadler, p. 333
8. ↑ so Wessling, quoted. in Stadler, p. 335
9. ↑ Interesting addition for the State Archives (press release of the City of Hamburg from October 20, 1999)