Karl Otten

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Karl Otten (born July 29, 1889 in Oberkrüchten , † March 20, 1963 in Muralto on Lake Maggiore ) was a German writer .

Life

Karl Otten was the son of a customs officer . From 1890 to 1905 he grew up in Cologne , then Dortmund, Bochum and Aachen (from 1907), where he was a student at the Kaiser Wilhelm High School , where he belonged to a group of peers who were enthusiastic about literature; further members were Walter Hasenclever and Ludwig Strauss as well as Philipp Keller and Julius Talbot Keller, with Hasenclever and J. Talbot Keller he published the "Aachen Almanach" in 1910. In Aachen, he made the acquaintance of the social reformist ideas of the Catholic priest Carl Sonnenschein , the founder and director of the “People's Association for Catholic Germany”, which had a strong influence on him.

Franz Seraph Henseler : Book cover 1913

In 1910 Otten began - on the recommendation of Carl Sternheim, who was on a cure in Aachen-Burtscheid and put him in touch with Franz Blei - to study in Munich, first studying economics at the University of Munich ; later he switched to art history . During his studies he made trips to France , Italy , Albania and Greece . In Munich he joined the anarchist group Tat around Erich Mühsam and had contact with authors such as Frank Wedekind , Heinrich Mann and Franz Blei. In 1913 Otten continued his studies at the University of Bonn . After he had been expelled there for a smuggling offense , he changed his place of study again in 1914 and went to Strasbourg .

At the beginning of the First World War he was temporarily interned in Tübingen because of his anarchist and pacifist attitudes and then employed as a " working soldier " at a letter censorship station in Trier . In 1918 he was arrested again after the publication of his volume of poetry, The Elevation of the Heart ; only after the beginning of the November Revolution was he released from imprisonment in Koblenz .

Otten moved to Vienna in 1918 with his first wife, the Austrian painter and designer Maria Rosalie Friedmann, called Mitzi, with whom he had been married since 1916 . The couple had a son, Hugo Julian. In Vienna, Otten took part in several magazine projects that propagated the revolutionary upheaval in Germany. He was in contact with Joseph Roth , Alfred Polgar , Robert Musil and Sigmund Freud . After Otten separated from his wife, he went to Berlin in 1922 , where he worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines loyal to the republic. After the National Socialist seizure of power , he emigrated on March 12, 1933, fled via Paris to Barcelona and from there to Cala Ratjada on Mallorca , where he arrived on March 27, 1933. The following two winters, the winter of 1933/34 and 1934/35, he stayed in Paris. From 1935 his permanent residence was the fishing village of Cala Ratjada.

After the beginning of the Spanish Civil War , he managed to escape from the impending Spanish internment ; it finally came to Great Britain via France . In the next few years he worked in London for the BBC as well as for German and English language magazines. After his complete blindness in 1944 he was dependent on the support of his second wife, the translator Ellen Otten (1909-1999), née Kroner, whom he met in 1930 and married in 1939, to continue his journalistic work. From 1947 Otten was a British citizen . In 1958 he moved to Minusio near Locarno in the Swiss canton of Ticino , where he spent the last years of his life.

In addition to his journalistic work , Karl Ottens work includes novels , plays , poems and essays . From 1914 Otten worked for the magazine Die Aktion ; with his volume of short stories, The Jump Out of the Window , he created an important prose work of literary expressionism .

Further narrative works were created in the course of the 1920s, and after his escape from Spain Otten wrote an important novel about the Spanish Civil War with Torquemada's shadow . During his exile in Great Britain he was best known for the English translation of his sociological analysis of National Socialism , which was published in 1942 under the title A combine of aggression (the German original was only published in 1989 as Planned Illusions ).

After the Second World War , Otten worked primarily as an editor of anthologies with texts by Jewish and Expressionist authors who were suppressed in the Third Reich , to which he tirelessly drew attention in lectures and essays.

Karl Otten was a member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt . In 1961 he received the Leo Baeck Prize .

The "Karl Otten Prize for Expressionism and Exile Research" is awarded by the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar.

Works

  • The journey through Albania 1912, Munich 1913
    • New edition as Die Reise durch Albanien und other prose , Zurich 1989
    • New edition published and with an introduction by Elisabeth Pfurtscheller, Eutin 2014, ISBN 978-1-4991-0401-1
  • The jump out of the window , Leipzig 1918
  • Elevation to the throne of the heart , Berlin-Wilmersdorf 1918
  • Lona , Vienna 1920
  • The Strauss case , Berlin 1925
  • Examination for maturity , Leipzig 1928
  • The expedition to San Domingo . Play in eight pictures, Berlin 1931
  • The black Napoleon - Toussaint Louverture and the Negro uprising on San Domingo . Roman, Berlin 1931
  • Paris May 6, 1932 . Play in five acts, Berlin 1932 (together with Stephan Fingal )
  • Torquemada's shadow , Stockholm 1938
    • New edition by Konkret-Literatur Verlag in 1980 in the library of burned books . Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-922144-07-1 .
    • Torquemada's shadow: A Mallorca novel from the Spanish Civil War, edited by Hartmut Siefeldt, Reisebuch Verlag 2014 (e-book and paperback edition)
  • A combine of aggression: masses, elite and dictatorship in Germany . Transl. by Eden Paul & FM Field (from the author's German manuscript [hitherto unpublished]). London: Allen & Unwin 1942. Published in German as:
    • Planned Illusions - An Analysis of Fascism . With an afterward by Lothar Baier, Luchterhand-Literaturverl., Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-630-86706-5
  • The Eternal Donkey , Zurich [u. a.] 1949
  • The embassy , Darmstadt [u. a.] 1957
  • The oil complex , Emsdetten (Westphalia) 1959
  • Herbstgesang , Neuwied a. Rh. 1961
  • Roots - Roman . With a farewell greeting from Kasimir Edschmid. Neuwied a. Rhine 1963
  • The unknown civilian , Stuttgart 1981
  • Autumn 1939 , Marbach am Neckar 1988
  • The daily face of time , Aachen 1989
  • The trip to Germany , Bern [u. a.] 2000
  • Karl Otten reading book . Compiled and provided with an afterword by Enno Stahl . Cologne 2007 (= Nylands small Rhenish library, vol. 1). ISBN 978-3-936235-17-3
  • Stories from Cala Ratjada , edited and z. Partly translated by Hartmut Siefeldt, reisebuch.de 2013

Selected poems

  • Song of the Shepherd (Where is my lamb that I loved)
  • Nut trees (heavy and opaque from cool acidity)
  • Homesickness (homesickness torments me for another world)

Editing

  • Georg Herwegh : What is Germany doing? , Berlin 1924
  • Hunch and departure. Expressionist prose. Edited and introduced by Karl Otten. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1957 ( digitized in the Internet Archive )
  • The Empty House - Prose by Jewish Poets . Stuttgart 1959
  • Cry and confession. Expressionist theater. Edited and introduced by Karl Otten. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1959 ( digitized in the Internet Archive)
  • Albert Ehrenstein : Poems and Prose , Neuwied a. Rh. [U. a.] 1961
  • Georg Kreisler : Two old aunts dance the tango ... and other songs , Zurich 1961
  • Expressionism - grotesk , Zurich 1962
  • Georg Kreisler : The good old Franz and other songs , Zurich 1962
  • Shofar - songs and legends of Jewish poets. , Neuwied a. Rh. 1962
  • Ego and Eros: Master Tales of Expressionism . With a. Afterword by Heinz Schöffler. The bio-bibliographical notes were provided by Ellen Otten, Goverts, Stuttgart 1963

Translations

literature

  • Richard Dove: Journey of No Return. Five German-speaking Literary Exiles in Britain, 1933–1945 . London: Libris 2000.
  • Thomas Diecks:  Otten, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , pp. 652 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Gregor Ackermann: 'The Metamorphoses of the Dolphin'. Novel by Karl Otten. Bibliographic crickets 1 . In: June. Magazine for Culture & Politics , No. 18, Mönchengladbach, 1993, pp. 145–148.
  • Werner Jung: Karl Otten. A portrait . In: June. Magazine for Culture & Politics on the Lower Rhine , No. 4/87. Mönchengladbach: Juni-Verlag, 1987. ISSN  0931-2854 .
  • Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Karl Otten. Work and life. Texts - reports - bibliography . Mainz: Verlag von Hase and Koehler, 1982. ISBN 3-7758-1017-X .
  • Fritz and Sieglinde Mierau (eds.): Almanach for loners . Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2001. ISBN 3-89401-366-4 .
  • Otten, Karl , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 881

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ data: born November 28, 1884 Vienna; died May 5, 1955 New York. Her married name was Friedmann-Otten or Otten-Friedmann; The abbreviated first name is passed down in frequent name variants Mizzi, Mizi and others; see. Source 1 ( Memento of the original from November 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. and Marie Rosalia Friedmann-Otten in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.onb.ac.at
  2. ^ Karl Otten, Torquemadas Schatten , Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-922144-07-1 , p. 271 (afterword by Roland H. Wiegenstein )
  3. ↑ Entry on Otten, Ellen (1909-1999) in Kalliope
  4. ↑ The above three poems are from: Hans Bender (Ed.), Gegenpiel. German poetry since 1945 , Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1962, without ISBN
personal data
SURNAME Otten, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pacifist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberkrüchten
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 1963
Place of death Locarno-Muralto