Kurt Kluge

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Friedrich Otto Kurt Kluge (born April 29, 1886 in Lindenau near Leipzig ; † July 26, 1940 in Fort Eben-Emael near Liège ) was a German sculptor and ore caster who appeared at the age of 48 as a humorous writer and in the last Years of his life during the time of National Socialism published several well-received and in some cases award-winning novels and short stories, which were still received after 1945. His most successful novel Der Herr Kortüm (1938) occupies a certain exceptional position in the German-language literature of the 20th century, insofar as it focuses on a "lively, outlandish eccentric figure" (Fricke / Klotz) and thus conceptually more towards older authors like Jean Paul , Charles Dickens and Wilhelm Raabe are linked to contemporary trends. Kluge died of heart failure in 1940 while visiting the front.

Life

Origin and career

The monument to the Emperor Alexander Guard Grenadier Regiment No. 1 created by Kluge in 1927 ; It shows Eberhard Freiherr vd Recke vd Horst, who died on September 8, 1914 in the Battle of the Marne and who was friends with Kluge
Berlin memorial plaque on house Krottnaurerstr 64, in Berlin-Nikolassee

Kluge was the son of the miller and grain trader Friedrich Kluge from Zappendorf near Eisleben and the daughter of a master blacksmith Amanda Koch from Nietleben near Halle. His father was an organist and teacher and Kurt showed a versatile musical talent at an early age. After graduating from high school in 1904, he attended the teachers' college in Oschatz and in 1908 became an assistant teacher at the elementary school in Großzschocher . In addition to his teaching profession, he became a painting and drawing student at the Leipzig Academy and continued his studies at the Academy in Dresden in 1910 . With watercolors , woodcuts , lithographs , etchings and hand drawings, the student Max Klinger first received recognition when he was called up for military service in the First World War in 1914. At the beginning of November 1914 he was so badly wounded in the Battle of the Ypres near Becelaere in Belgium that he finally returned from the war.

Metallurgists and sculptors

Back in Leipzig in 1916, Kluge founded an ore foundry . In 1919 he joined the Leipzig Freemason Lodge Minerva to the three palms . In 1921 he accepted Arthur Kampf's call to the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin , where he was appointed full professor in a newly established chair for ore sculpture. As a result, Kluge built a workshop for the academy in his field, restored damaged art monuments on behalf of the state, created his own sculptural works and was active in research. He went on study trips to Iceland , Italy , Greece and Turkey , contributed significant metallurgical and art-historical findings to the understanding of metal casting and discovered an ancient Greek workshop in Olympia . He presented his research results in scientific publications such as The Design of Ore and its Technical Foundations (1928) or the three-volume work on The Ancient Large Bronzes (1927) , which was developed together with the archaeologist Karl Lehmann-Hartleben .

Writing development

At the end of the 1920s, Kluge made the decision to devote more time to writing. First he published his peace poetry , which had already been written during the First World War. In the year of the National Socialist “seizure of power” in 1933, his play Ewiges Volk was created , which, in contrast to his other works, has a clear ideological proximity to National Socialism . It was not until 1934, at the age of 48, that Kluge published his first narrative text; In the few years up to his untimely death, an extensive literary production followed.

death

Kluge suffered a heart attack near Liège in late July 1940 while visiting the battlefields of the Western campaign with a group of German writers and poets . His body was transferred to Berlin-Zehlendorf and buried on Kirchweg in Nikolassee .

Literary work

Kurt Kluge's literary work can be assigned to bourgeois realism and is in the tradition of Jean Paul and Wilhelm Raabe. It appears detached from all literary trends of its time. The visual arts are a big topic of the author and his occupation with it has autobiographical traits. At the same time the author tries to give his works a mark of wise humor. The entire narrative is characterized by a broad epic layout and carefully drawn characters. In his bloody portrayal of the German petty bourgeoisie , Kluge also shows critical and even satirical echoes.

Clever narrative work, like parts of his dramatic and lyrical work, is determined by a semi-serious and cheerful disposition and fine to bizarre humor. In addition, his great admiration for art and music and his enthusiasm for down-to-earth handicrafts are evident. Clever preferences and topics can also be seen as a concession to the time of National Socialism , as he created an out-of-the-way idyll in his writings that played over and obscured the dark reality. In this perspective, Kluge is also cited as a negative example of so-called inner emigration . The Germanist Rainer Drewes dealt in 1991 with the example of Kluge's work with the ambivalence of non-fascist literature in the Third Reich .

An eight-volume edition of works by the author, who has also been translated into various other languages, was brought onto the market around 1950 by Engelhorn Verlag in Stuttgart , where the first edition of Kluge's most successful book Der Herr Kortüm was published in 1938 .

Novels

Debut (1934)

Kluge's first published novel Der Glockengießer by Christoph Mahr (1934) dealt with the extinction of a historical craft occupation. The eponymous hero, a passionate bell founder, gets into a serious crisis when "his art" is suddenly no longer in demand. Ultimately, however, he found his way back to the real meaning of the trade in his new job as a brick maker.

Poet of "Kortüm" (1938)

In the same year the novels The Silver Wind Flag and The Wing House followed , two shorter works that Kluge rewrote and supplemented in 1938 and merged into his main work Der Herr Kortüm . With the newly added parts ( The Guests , The Echostube and The Wide Paths ), a humorous novel of epic proportions was created, which in the first edition comprised nearly seven hundred and fifty pages.

In it, Kluge describes in episodes the story of a Hamburg captain and original who opens an unconventional gastronomic establishment in the Thuringian Forest . The individual construction phases of the inn stand for the different phases of life of the well-traveled title figure. The tragicomic Kortüm, for which "life itself becomes art" (Paul Fechter), says goodbye at the end of the book from its sphere of activity in order to orbit as a planetoid in space.

Gero von Wilpert declared the work to be the epitome of German humor in 1969: “While the more recent trends (...) hardly show any humor, in the present, alongside Thomas Mann , Emil Strauss and Ernst Penzoldt, Kurt Kluge's“ Der Herr Kortüm ”stands out as a truly German masterpiece Humors. ”Karl August Kutzbach, the author of Kluge's entry in the New German Biography , also called Kortüm in 1979“ a major work of our humorous literature ”.

With the figure of the foolish do-gooder, who is infectious everywhere, but at the same time is able to inspire people of all stripes for crazy projects, the results of which he is not really interested in, Kluge creates, according to a National Socialist interpreter, "a prototype of the German People “( Franz Lennartz ). According to a newer blurb, the Kortüm embodies the "image of the quirky German par excellence". Gerhard Fricke's history of German literature sees the reason for the success of the much-read novel in "a masterfully portrayed idiosyncratic small-town atmosphere full of eccentricities and loners in which the microcosm of everyday events and the macrocosm of universal thoughts, memories and fantasies intersect."

Due to the great fame and popularity of the work, Kluge was sometimes only called "the poet of Kortüm " or even equated with his figure in the specialist literature (for example, in the title of an overall selection from his works published in 1956: Wisdom of Kortüm ). The real model for the figure of Mr. Kortüm was a Thuringian innkeeper, the owner of the Schöffenhaus at the time , who was known as the original and had protested against the appearance of The Silver Wind Flag and The Wing House because he felt that he was badly drawn in them. However, Paul Fechter considered the realistic elements of the novel in his Small Dictionary for Literary Conversations (1950) to be negligible: "With Kluges Kortüm, nobody thinks of the archetype anymore, the effect of the work has nevertheless increased from year to year."

The effect of the Kortüm also resulted in artistic adaptations by third parties; thus composed z. B. Julius Weismann wrote an overture entitled The silver wind vane .

Award-winning novel "Magic Violin" (1940)

With the cheerful novel Die Zaubergeige , published shortly before Kluge's death, which tells the story of a misunderstood violin virtuoso who, with the help of a stolen Stradivarius , attained the highest level of fame over numerous complications and obstacles and conquered the woman of his life, Kluge succeeded in creating a second work that he did similar to how Der Herr Kortüm received the greatest attention from both critics and readers. With a circulation of over 400,000 copies, the novel was a bestseller in its day. In 1940 Kluge was awarded the City of Berlin Literature Prize for his magic violin . In 1942 he was posthumously awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Prize for the magic violin . In 1944 the book was made into a film.

Early work published posthumously

Kluge's first novel, which he had begun in 1929 and completed in the early 1930s, but for which no publisher could be found at the time, was only published after his death with the title Grevasalvas (1942). This "story of an inflamed person" has autobiographical traits: It shows a Thuringian sculptor who turns his back on the Berlin art business in order to become aware of his poetic destiny in the rural solitude of the Engadine and in Delphi .

Novellas

Even more than his novels, the cheerful, contemplative stories and novellas by Kurt Kluge are materially related to his artistic profession: The fake goddess (1935) is about B. from the archaeological hunt for antique sculptures, The Gobelin (1936) plays in the painter's milieu, The Nonnenstein (1936) depicts a fateful event in the life of a porcelain manufacturer family .

Dramas

In addition to the debut Ewiges Volk (1933), with which Kluge recommended himself as a National Socialist writer by dramatically elevating the Carinthian fight against the Serbs and Slovenes in 1918/19 to a mythical battle of fate, the author created several other, more entertaining stage works such as Die Excavation of Venus (1934, an archaeological comedy) or The Gold of Orlas (1936). Overall, Kluge's dramatic work was far less important than its narrative.

Listening sequences

In the field of radio drama, Kluge wrote various audio sequences, such as B. about Johann Sebastian Bach (1935). The musically interested author emphasizes his special bond with “German music”, which he also expresses in his last novel Die Zaubergeige and in the story Nocturno (1939) about the Dark Countess von Hildburghausen .

Scripts

Kluge also worked on the screenplay of the film The Higher Command (1935), an espionage drama set during the Napoleonic Wars .

Poetry

In addition to his early war poems , which were compiled in the largely neglected volume Pacem (1916), a volume of poems appeared in 1941 , the selection and compilation of which was made by the author himself.

Essays, letters, radio and film reports

Kluge's letters to contemporaries were also published posthumously ( Lebendiger Brunnen , 1952). In 1956, an anthology of works, letters and conversations by Kurt Kluge was published under the title Weisheit des Kortüm . In Die Sanduhr (1966), the author's family published previously unpublished stories, radio and film texts, essays and notes.

reception

Kurt Kluge's grave in Zehlendorf

After 1945, a number of literary scholars tried to track down Kluge's “worldview and humorous attitude to life”, with Mr. Kortüm being the focus of interest almost exclusively . Reinterpretations of the Kortüm or his author as a resistant figure who wanted to assert itself as a “wise gate” “under the conditions of fascist tyranny” are to be found as well as emphatic appraisals of the figure as a paragon of “German humor” and critical considerations that the work assign to Nazi literature.

Kluges Stück Ewiges Volk (Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1933) was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the German Democratic Republic . Already in the Soviet occupation zone the Kluge souvenir was thanks to Kurt Kluge: Leaves for the memory of the poet; Dedicated to friends and admirers (Engelhornverlag, Stuttgart 1940) put on the list to be eliminated.

This text also contains the obituary of the National Socialist writer Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer ( Death gave a deadline ). Kolbenheyer, who published with the same publisher as Kluge, stylized Kluge's unexpected cardiac death in Flanders during a battlefield inspection the day after the visit to the place where he had been seriously wounded 25 years earlier, as a recuperated soldier's death, which Kluge had apparently granted a fateful delay to enable him to do his literary work. In his obituary, Kolbenheyer describes Kortüm as a “earthbound, bright dream figure” who resembles its creator, who twice - when he was wounded in 1914, which could easily have ended, and when he actually died 25 years later - in the soil of the battlefield was sunk. Kolbenheyer himself had been unsuitable for the front in World War I and had managed an Austrian prisoner of war camp near Linz until the end of the war . Kolbenheyer's obituary was republished in the civil weekly newspaper Die Zeit on July 27, 1950, to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of Kluge's death .

Kluge's novels Der Herr Kortüm and Die Zaubergeige were repeatedly reissued in the 1950s and 1960s; the Kortüm was published by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in a shortened version until the 1980s (most recently in 1986); the unabridged version was last in the program at Ullstein-Verlag in 1981 .

Film adaptations

With a star cast with Will Quadflieg and Gisela Uhlen in the leading roles, Kurt Kluge's last novel was made into a film after his death. The film Die Zaubergeige (1944), made in the middle of the war, is now classified by film critics as an “unrealistic artist novel”. Kluge's novella The Fake Goddess was staged in 1971 for television by Helmut Käutner .

Awards

swell

Web links

Commons : Kurt Kluge  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Kurt Kluge  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Fricke , Volker Klotz : History of German poetry. Matthiesen Verlag, Tübingen 1949.
    For Fricke and his collaborators see: Wilfried Barner: Pioneers, schools, pluralism: studies on the history and theory of literary studies. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1997, p. 232 f.
  2. ^ The information on Karl August Kutzbach's wounding (NDB) coincides with the records in the German list of losses except for the exact date (issue 213 of November 21, 1914, page 2810). Kluge was a non-commissioned officer in the 8th company of the Royal Saxon Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 243.
  3. ^ Paul Fechter: History of German Literature. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1952.
  4. ↑ Gero von Wilpert : Specialized Dictionary of Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 231). 5th, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1969, DNB 458658170 .
  5. ^ Franz Lennartz: poets and writers of our time. Individual presentations on beautiful literature in German. 6th edition, Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1954.
  6. ^ Gerhard Fricke, Mathias Schreiber : History of German literature. 17th edition, Schoeningh Verlag, Paderborn 1974.
  7. ^ Paul Fechter: Small dictionary for literary conversations. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1950. On Paul Fechter see Wilfried Barner: Pioneers, Schools, Pluralism: Studies on the History and Theory of Literary Studies. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1997, p. 225.
  8. ↑ a b Kluge received the Berlin Literature Prize for 1940 together with Herbert von Hoerner and Friedrich Griese . The award ceremony did not take place until 1941, in the case of Kluge it was posthumous, so that in literature 1941 is often mentioned as the year of the award. See also: Helga Strallhofer-Mitterbauer: Nazi literary prizes for Austrian authors: a documentation. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-205-98204-5 , p. 88 in the Google book search.
  9. ^ A b Schmidt, Wieland: Kurt Kluge (Raabe Prize Winner - Postum 1942) , Yearbook of the Raabe Society, Volume 23, Pages 171-192, 2010. ISSN  1865-8857
  10. ↑ a b For the classification of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize and its award winners in the National Socialist cultural policy cf. Horst Denkler : The Wilhelm Raabe Prize - A German Story. Radio essay. In: Hubert Winkels (Ed.): Rainald Goetz meets Wilhelm Raabe: the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, its history and topicality. Wallstein Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-89244-489-7 , pp. 20–46 (the “humorous narrator Kurt Kluge” is mentioned on p. 34 in the Google book search).
  11. ↑ polunbi.de
  12. ↑ polunbi.de
  13. ↑ Christian Jäger: Minoritarian literature. The concept of small literature using the example of Prague and Sudeten German works. Wiesbaden 2005, p. 163, note 136.
  14. ↑ Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer : Death gave a deadline. In memory of Kurt Kluge († July 26, 1940). In: The time . No. 30 of July 27, 1950, zeit.de accessed on October 13, 2016.
  15. ↑ Klaus Brühne (Ed.): Lexicon of International Films. Volume 9. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1990, p. 4396.
personal data
SURNAME Kluge, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 29, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1940
Place of death Fort Eben-Emael near Liège