Kurt hero

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Kurt Held (actually Kurt Kläber ; born November 4, 1897 in Jena ; † December 9, 1959 in Sorengo , Switzerland ) was a German-Swiss writer who emigrated to Switzerland in 1933. His best-known work is the youth book Die Rote Zora und seine Gang .

Life

Kurt Held's father was a foreman by trade. He himself did an apprenticeship as a locksmith at Zeiss , first turned to the Wandervogel movement as a young man , took part in the First World War and after the war became a member of the Spartakusbund and the KPD . In 1924 he married the writer and storyteller Lisa Tetzner . With her he moved to different places in Germany. He worked as a miner in the Ruhr area, as an author, editor and editor for various magazines and publishers. As a member of the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers , he was co-editor of the KPD-related literary and political magazine Die Linkskurve . Kläber also published his own poems and novels. In Bochum he was head of the workers' college .

On the night of the Reichstag fire , Kläber was arrested as a prominent communist on February 28, 1933, but was soon released with the help of his wife. After his release, the couple secretly fled Germany with the help of a relative from an industrial family, first to Czechoslovakia and Paris, and later to Carona in Ticino , Switzerland. Kläber was only allowed to stay there on condition that nothing was published. The couple lived on the income from their small farms and the income that Lisa Tetzner had from a teaching position in Basel. Because of Stalinism , Kläber broke with the KPD in 1938. Due to the harsh conditions of exile , health problems and the loss of his long-standing ideological basis, he got into a psychological crisis. To keep himself busy, he helped his wife, who continued to write children's books, with her work.

He soon began to enjoy this activity and wrote several books, of which in particular The Red Zora and Her Gang was a great success. Since Kläber was banned from writing in Germany, he published the book in Switzerland under the pseudonym Kurt Held. As a result of their literary successes, Tetzner and Kläber achieved modest prosperity, received Swiss citizenship in 1948 and continued to live in Switzerland. After a long illness, Held died in Sorengo Hospital.

Others

His estate is located in the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World in Dortmund .

Artistic creation

Kläber's first poems are considered expressionist and pacifist . Later his writing activity was shaped entirely by his communist attitude and can be described as workers' literature. The books for young people created in exile under the name of Kurt Held are characterized by a socially critical attitude, the effort to live together in solidarity and by thematizing the fate of social outsiders in a language appropriate for young people.

Honors

In 1967 the primary school at Görlitzer Str. 51 in Berlin-Kreuzberg was named after Kurt Held. This school closed in 2005.

Works - in extracts

  • New seeds. Poems . Publishing house of the Jenaer Volksbuchhandlung, Jena 1919.
  • Revolutionaries: Tales from the struggles of the proletariat 1918–1925 . Illustrations by Maria Braun, Roter Türmer Verlag, Leipzig 1925.
  • Barricades on the Ruhr. Stories from the struggles of the Ruhr proletariat. Verlag der Jugendinternationale, Berlin-Schöneberg 1925; New edition Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt 1973 ( nemesis.marxists.org excerpt).
  • Outrage! Up! Poems, sketches, travelogues . Publishing house Der Syndikalist, Berlin 1925.
  • Passengers of the III. Class. Novel . Internationaler Arbeiter Verlag, Berlin, 1927 ( nemesis.marxists.org excerpt).
  • The dead from Pabjanice. Narratives . Cover by I. Leistikow, Publishing Cooperative of Foreign Workers in the USSR, Moscow 1936.
  • The black brothers . Together with Lisa Tetzner in 2 volumes, Verlag Sauerländer, Aarau 1940/41.
  • The red Zora and her gang . A story from Dalmatia for the youth. Sauerländer Verlag, Aarau 1941.
  • Faido's drummer. 2 volumes, Verlag Sauerländer, Aarau 1947 and 1949.
  • Matthias and his friends. Text drawings by Heinrich Strub, Verlag Sauerländer, Aarau 1950.
  • Everything for twenty cents. Text drawings by Felix Hoffmann, Verlag Sauerländer, Aarau 1951.
  • Spook in Neuhausen: narrative. Illustrations by Max Schwimmer, Weiss Verlag, Berlin 1951.
  • Giuseppe and Maria. 4 volumes, Sauerländer Verlag, Aarau 1955.
    • 1. The trip to Naples.
    • 2. About smugglers, customs officers and soldiers.
    • 3. The children's town.
    • 4. The process.
      • Abridged version by Hansjörg Schmitthenner in one volume: Sauerländer Aarau, at the same time with the Frankfurt Book Guild in 1967.
  • My brother Georg. Illustrations by Kurt Wendlandt , your reading book; H. 125, Rufer-Verlag (part of Bertelsmann since 1938), Gütersloh 1955.

literature

Exhibitions

  • From our life to freedom. Lisa Tetzner and Kurt Kläber. Life and work. Curated by Wiltrud Apfeld and Cristina Rita Parau. Cultural area the flora of the city of Gelsenkirchen. September 18 to October 30, 2011. Traveling exhibition

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Drews (Ed.): Verboten und burned , Kindler, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-463-00860-2 , p. 143
  2. Michael Scammell: Koestler . Random House Publishing Group, 2009, ISBN 978-1-58836-901-7 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  3. Kathrin Chod: Kurt Held Elementary School . In: Hans-Jürgen Mende , Kurt Wernicke (Hrsg.): Berliner Bezirkslexikon, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg . Luisenstadt educational association . tape 1 : A to O . Haude and Spener / Edition Luisenstadt, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89542-122-7 ( luise-berlin.de - as of October 7, 2009).
  4. ^ The emptied classroom In: Der Tagesspiegel. July 22, 2005.