Leo Lania

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Leo Lania , actually Lazar Herman (born August 1 . Jul / 13 August  1896 greg. In Kharkov , Russian Empire , died 9. November 1961 in Munich ) was a German-Russian-American journalist and writer .

Life

The Hitler-Ludendorff Trial (1925)

Lazar Herman was a son of the doctor and university professor Friedrich Salomon Hermann and the Myra Mintz. After his father's death in 1906, his mother returned to Vienna with her two sons . After attending the Vienna Commercial Academy , Lania started working for the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung from 1915 . In the First World War he volunteered and was used as an artillery officer on the Eastern Front and on the Isonzo . After the war, Lania joined the Communist Party of Austria and worked as an editor for Die Rote Fahne . From September 1921 he lived in Berlin.

With the help of a forged letter of recommendation from Benito Mussolini's brother Arnaldo , he managed, disguised as an Italian fascist, to gain access to Adolf Hitler and the Volkischer Beobachter in Munich in 1923 . Lania published one of the first internationally acclaimed interviews with Hitler. He documented his experiences as an early investigative journalist with the emerging Nazi movement in the books Die Gravegräber Deutschlands (1924) and The Hitler-Ludendorff Trial (1925). In his book Gewehre auf Reisen (1924), he warned of the dangers of secret rearmament in Germany. He was then charged with treason. Following this process, the Reichstag passed a “Lex Lania” to protect journalistic professional secrets. Lania was a local editor at the Berliner Börsen-Courier and until 1926 wrote a total of 24 articles for the Weltbühne .

From the mid-twenties, Lania turned increasingly to theater and film. He was a member of the dramaturgical collective of the stage operated by Erwin Piscator in 1927 in the Berlin theater on Nollendorfplatz . Lanias business comedy about the oil industry economy , whose stage music of Kurt Weill was born, was at the April 1928 Piscator stage premiere. Lania also wrote the script for the film adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera , with whom he had already worked on the Piscator stage.

Because of the impending takeover of power by the National Socialists, Lania emigrated to Austria via Prague in 1932 and to France in 1933. After the outbreak of war , Lania registered for military service in 1939, but was imprisoned for several months in an internment camp in Audierne . In 1940 he managed to escape to the south of France. In the same year he emigrated to the United States via Spain and Portugal with his wife and son. He processed his experiences on the run in the volume The Darkest Hour (1941). In the United States he worked for the Office of War Information .

In the mid-1950s, Lania moved permanently to Munich. He wrote a biography on Ernest Hemingway . In 1959 he wrote an autobiography as a ghostwriter for Willy Brandt , then Governing Mayor of Berlin .

In 1961 Leo Lania died of a heart attack in Munich. Willy Brandt made sure that he received an urn grave of honor at the Waldfriedhof Berlin-Zehlendorf .

Leo Lania's estate is maintained by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives .

Works (selection)

Today we are brothers (1942)
  • Guns on the move. Pictures from the German present , (1924)
  • The Hitler-Ludendorff Trial , 1925 (report)
  • The Peace Conference , 1926 (drama)
  • The dance in the dark. Anita Berber . A biographical novel , 1929
  • God the King and the Fatherland , 1930 (drama)
  • The Promised Land , 1934 (novel)
  • Wanderer into Nowhere , 1935 (novel)
  • The Hero , 1936 (drama)
  • The Darkest Hour , 1941 (report, translated into two languages)
  • Today we are brothers: the biography of a generation . Translation Ralph Marlowe. Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1942
  • Land im Zwielicht , 1950 (novel, translated into five languages. Published 2017 by Mandelbaum-Verlag and with an afterword by Michael Schwaiger).
  • World in Transition , 1953 (autobiography, translated into three languages)
  • The Foreign Minister , 1960 (novel)
  • Hemingway. A pictorial biography , 1960

Filmography (selection)

literature

  • Hanno Hardt:  Lania, Leo. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 615 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 419
  • Lania, Leo. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 15: Kura – Lewa. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-22695-3 , pp. 159-167.
  • Primus-Heinz Kucher: Theodor Kramer and Leo Lania. A letter encounter in March 1933, in: Zwischenwelt. Literature, resistance, exile . Journal of the Theodor Kramer Society , 3–4, 2013, ISSN  1606-4321 p. 7f
  • Michael Schwaiger: Leo Lania. Writing against oblivion. A biography of the journalist and publicist Leo Lania (1896–1961) . Vienna: Association for the History of the Workers' Movement 2015 (Documentation 1–4 / 2015)
  • Michael Schwaiger: Behind the facade of reality. Life and work of Leo Lania . Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-385476-545-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Schwaiger: "Behind the facade of reality". Life and work of Leo Lania. Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017, p. 19.
  2. ↑ Michael Schwaiger: "Behind the facade of reality". Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017, pp. 29–33.
  3. ↑ Michael Schwaiger: "Behind the facade of reality". Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017, p. 52.
  4. ^ Paul Ostwald: Reporter Leo Lania is rediscovered: The Wallraff of the 20s . In: The daily newspaper: taz . July 24, 2018, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed July 25, 2018]).
  5. ^ A b Stefana Sabin : Tanz ins Dunkel - as a pacifist and publicist, Leo Lania was a clairvoyant critic of the Nazis from an early age . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 25, 2018.
  6. ↑ This piece and its staging are the subject of the study: Tatjana Röber, “The new methods of viewing”. Subjectivity and perception concepts in cultural theory and factual theater of the 20s . St. Ingbert: Röhrig 2001.
  7. ^ Publisher's note on Michael Schwaiger: “Behind the facade of reality” , accessed on November 21, 2017.
  8. ↑ On March 3, Lania gave a lecture to 500 listeners in Vienna about the transfer of power in Berlin, the article describes the response
personal data
SURNAME Lania, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Herman, Lazar (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Kharkov
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1961
Place of death Munich