Leo Katz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leo Katz (born January 22, 1892 in Sereth in Bukovina , Austria-Hungary ; died August 9, 1954 in Vienna ) was an Austrian writer in German and Yiddish .

Life

Leo Katz came from a Hasidic Jewish family and grew up in the Bukovinian city of Sereth, which at that time was right on the Austrian border with the Kingdom of Romania and had a large Jewish population. In 1907, the then 15-year-old experienced the events of the peasant uprising in Romania , which he later processed in literary terms in the novel Burning Villages . After elementary school, he could not do any further education, but had to work in his father's wood business. However, he tried to further educate himself privately and was able to take his Matura as an external student in Vienna in 1914 . Shortly afterwards the First World War broke out. Katz was classified as unfit for military service and was able to stay in Vienna and began studying history and philosophy there. In the war years he made his way through tutoring and began to get involved in politics. Since the Austrian Social Democrats had supported the war, he joined the opposition group of the Free Association of Socialist Students . During this time he also met his future wife Bronia Rein, who had fled with her family from the Galician Kolomea to Vienna after a pogrom and was a supporter of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair .

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and under the influence of the Russian October Revolution , he and his group joined the newly founded KPDÖ . In 1920 he was able to complete his studies, but had few career prospects in the rest of Austria, which was depressed by the war . He wrote briefly for the communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne , which, however, could not pay its employees. That is why he soon accepted an invitation from his sister Fanny, who had emigrated to the United States . From 1920 to 1922 he lived in New York, first as a balloon seller in Coney Island , later with the newly founded left-wing Yiddish magazine Morning Freiheit . Soon afterwards she appointed him their European correspondent and so he returned to Europe in 1926, first to Paris and in 1927 back to Vienna. There he wrote again for the KPÖ organ Die Rote Fahne . At that time, however, the communists in Austria were a small group because, unlike in Germany, the left wing of the socialists remained with the social democrats. This was especially true for Red Vienna with its social reform efforts. In 1930 he went to Berlin at the invitation of the KPD and now wrote satirical texts for the German Rote Fahne , his wife was able to work there for the Soviet trade agency. Before the National Socialists came to power in Berlin, he fled to Paris in 1933 and brought his family to join him a short time later. In Paris he wrote for the Yiddish newspaper Naie Presse, and in February 1934 he witnessed the fascists' attempted coup, which was prevented by the Popular Front . When civil war broke out in Spain , he was on behalf of the Comintern between 1936 and 1938, disguised as a businessman, and illegally bought weapons for the Spanish Republic . He was instrumental in the creation of a secret deal in which the Turkish Minister of the Army ordered 50 aircraft from Canada, which, however, reached Republican Spain via France - an affair that resulted in the resignation of the Turkish Minister.

In 1938 he was expelled from France and, still an Austrian citizen, fled to New York . However, since the family only had a tourist visa for the USA and Katz feared that his work as a former arms smuggler could bring him to prison there, he sought asylum in another country. During his time in New York he was friends with Ernst Bloch and it was there that he wrote the novel Brennende Dörfer , which, however, was not published in an English translation until 1947 ( Seedtime ). In 1940 the left-wing Mexican government under Lázaro Cárdenas issued him a visa and the family moved to Mexico City . At the time, the place was a gathering point for European refugees as well as American leftists. In addition to the former Minister for Ammunition Procurement of the Spanish Republic, Alejandro Otero, Katz also met German and Austrian emigrants such as Egon Erwin Kisch , André Simone , Ludwig Renn and Bodo Uhse . He was politically as well as literary in Mexico and was involved in the founding of the journal Free Germany ( Alemania Libre ), which was published there, in which Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht also contributed from the USA . With the local leader of the "Free Germany" movement of the same name , Paul Merker , who also lived in exile in Mexico , Katz was increasingly falling apart, as he accused him of clinging to German national views despite the increasingly bad news from Europe . He then founded an Austrian KP group in Mexico with Bruno Frei , which joined the Acción Republicana Austriaca en México , and they published their own magazine for it under the title Austria Libre . He also wrote for the newspaper Frai Welt, which is published in Yiddish .

In 1944 his second novel Totenjäger was published in Mexico by the emigrant publisher El libro libre , which is set again in his hometown Sereth. This novel describes the situation of this city in fascist Romania with great detailed knowledge and under the steadily growing influence of the German National Socialists. However, it is not a historical-scientific novel, as Katz was completely cut off from information from his hometown in exile and idealized the role of the Soviet Union from a distance. This also meant that later, when information leaked again, he was deeply disappointed in the Soviet Union and the Moscow-loyal communists. Unlike many other emigrants, he therefore did not go to the GDR after the end of the war, and he also declined invitations from the KPÖ to return to Austria. He stayed in Mexico and revised his first novel Brennende Dörfer , which was published under the English title Seedtime in 1947 in New York by Alfred A. Knopf Verlag and was a surprising success.

In 1949 he finally tried to settle in Israel , where he met two of his sisters who had survived the Holocaust in Romania, and learned there that his sister Fanny from Chicago, who had also emigrated there, a few days before his arrival died in Tel Aviv . But since he got heart problems in the hot, humid climate there - he had had a heart attack as early as 1946 - and he was considered a disliked communist in the Zionist state, he accepted the offer a few weeks later and returned to Vienna in early 1950. There he wrote as a freelancer for the Austrian People's Voice , but did not allow himself to be included in the party apparatus by the KPÖ in order to be able to continue writing. He wrote seven other novels during this time. Of these, the two children's books Tamar and Die Grenzbuben were published in the GDR , as well as the two historical novels Die Welt des Columbus and Der Schmied von Galiläa . Two other works, in which he dealt with the historical relationship between Jews and Christians ( Christianity becomes the state religion ) and with the history of the Jews in Spain ( church, mosque and synagogue ), were rejected, with the indication that the content was with does not agree with the interpretations of Soviet historians. A third manuscript, which was to become a book about Thomas Münzer for young people , was also rejected. Conversely, every author who published in the GDR was avoided by publishers in the FRG and also in Austria, which means that these three works remained unpublished.

On August 9, 1954, Leo Katz suffered another heart attack and died in Vienna.

His son Friedrich Katz , born in Vienna in 1927, was a university professor and at times dean of the humanities faculty at the University of Vienna and was considered an expert on Mexican history and politics.

Works

  • Burning villages. Novel. German First edition: Ed. Association for the promotion and research of anti-fascist literature. Afterword Konstantin Kaiser. Series: Anti-Fascist Literature and Exile Literature, Studies & Texts 7. Social Criticism, Vienna 1993 ISBN 3851151666 ; 2. edit Edition Rimbaud Verlag Aachen & Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft , Vienna 2006 ISBN 3-89086-668-9 ISBN 3901602275
    • Review: Klaus Werner: (untitled) In Zs. Germanistik. International organ of presentations with bibliographical references, Tübingen, No. 2, 1995, p. 618
  • Death Hunter , novel, editorial "El Libro libre", Mexico 1944, ISBN 3-89086-672-7 (also translated into Spanish and Yiddish)
  • The border boys . Youth novel. Illustrations by Axl Leskoschek . East Berlin: Children's book publisher, 1951
  • Tamar . Youth novel. Illustrations Ernst Jazdzewski . East Berlin: Children's book publisher, 1952
  • The world of Columbus , historical novel, Berlin 1953
  • The blacksmith of Galilee , historical novel, Berlin 1955

literature

  • Ursula Seeber (Hrsg.): Small allies: expelled Austrian children's and youth literature . Vienna: Picus, 1998 ISBN 3-85452-276-2 , p. 133
  • 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. 352
  • Constantine Kaiser: Katz, Leo. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 269f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leo Katz: Death Hunter ; Rimbaud Verlag, 2005, ed. Konstantin Kaiser, biographical data according to the afterword of the son Friedrich Katz, ISBN 3-901602-22-4
  2. ↑ Gerald Howson: Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War , St. Martin's Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0312241773
  3. ↑ with b / w portrait photo of LK around 1920 and a family photo with Mrs. Bronia Katz and son Friedrich around 1950. For the first time in 1947 New York in English translation ( Seedtime )
  4. ↑ only with portrait photo from 1920
personal data
SURNAME Katz, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer in German and Yiddish language
DATE OF BIRTH January 22, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Sereth , Bucovina
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1954
Place of death Vienna