Julius Hay

From left to right: Julius Hay , Bertolt Brecht , Ernst Legal , Alexander Abusch (1948)

Julius Hay (actually Gyula Háy ; born May 5, 1900 in Abony , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary ; † May 7, 1975 in Ascona , Switzerland ) was a Hungarian-Austrian communist playwright.

Life

In addition to dramas, he also wrote radio plays. He also worked as a translator of plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Nestroy and Arthur Schnitzler, among others into Hungarian. While Lion Feuchtwanger was very committed to the young playwright, Bertolt Brecht criticized Hays' play "haben", which later became world-famous.

In 1919 he joined the Hungarian council movement and worked as a propagandist in the People's Commissariat for Education. In 1920 he began to study stage architecture in Dresden . Since 1929 he lived in Berlin. He was involved in the communist movement in Germany in the 1920s, which he mentally supported. After the performance of his play "Gott, Kaiser, Bauer" in Berlin in 1932, the National Socialists demanded that he be expelled from Germany. After they came to power, he had to leave the country and came to Moscow via Vienna (1933) and Zurich (1934) in 1935. During the Stalinist purges he did not take part in denouncing other writers who had emigrated from Germany; in his memoirs, published in 1971, he later reported on the repression of the Stalin era. Hay took a more critical stance towards Stalin's dictatorship . After the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, he began to look after Hungarian prisoners of war. From 1944 on he was editor of a propaganda station for Hungary alongside Imre Nagy and Mátyás Rákosi . After the war in 1945 he returned to Hungary, where he worked as a professor at the theater and film school. With his pamphlet “Why do I not like Comrade Kucsera”, Hay became one of the spokesmen and spiritual pioneers of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He was arrested, was in prison until 1960 and then went into exile. After his deportation he was elected President of the Exil-PEN Club.

The premiere of “haben” in August 1945 at the Vienna Volkstheater led to the first theater scandal after the war and even to a battle in the stalls when, during a scene by the village midwife Képés, played by Dorothea Neff , poison was hidden under a statue of the Madonna and Pupils of the Catholic Piarist high school and members of the former Hitler Youth rioting broke off the fence. Members of the theater and City Councilor for Culture Viktor Matejka managed to calm the situation down.

Hay spent the last years of his life in Ticino , Switzerland .

Works (selection)

• God, emperor, peasant. Play. First performance 1932, Breslau
• To have. Play. Written in 1938, world premiere in 1945, Budapest (TV adaptation in 1964 by Rolf Hädrich; with Therese Giehse , Ingmar Zeisberg and others)
• Judgment day. Tragedy. First performance 1945, Berlin
• Energy. Play in three acts. Henschelverlag, Berlin 1952
• The turkey man. Tragicomedy. First performance 1954, Berlin
• The horse. Comedy. First performance 1964, Salzburg
• Gáspár Varrós right. Play. First performance 1965, Wuppertal
• The Grand Inquisitor. First performance 1969, Vienna
• Mohács. Tragedy. First performance 1970, Lucerne
• Julius Hay born in 1900, Revolutionary Notes. 1971 (autobiography)

literature

• János Szabó: The "perfect doer" Julius Hay. A playwright under the spell of contemporary history . Iudicium-Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-89129-092-6 .
• Éva Háy: On both sides of the barricades . Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 1994.
• (henschel SCHAUSPIEL): Julius Hay, Stations of an eventful life, “Der Eilbote” No. 1, 1997/98
• Hay, Julius. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 10: Güde – Hein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-22690-X , pp. 278-286.

Web links

• Literature by and about Julius Hay in the catalog of the German National Library