Alexander Lernet-Holenia

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Alexander Marie Norbert Lernet-Holenia , pseudonym Clemens Neydisser , (born October 21, 1897 in Vienna ; † July 3, 1976 there ) was an Austrian writer .

Life

Lernets mother, widowed Sidonie Baroness Boyneburgk-Stettfeld , b. Holenia, was married to the liner lieutenant Alexander Lernet in his second marriage. The marriage, which had been concluded shortly before Alexander was born, was divorced soon after the birth, which led to the rumor that a Habsburg archduke was the father of the child. This unclear fatherhood preoccupied the later writer until the end of his life. After various positions ( Vienna , Klagenfurt , St. Wolfgang ), he passed his school-leaving examination in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in July 1915 and began studying law at the University of Vienna in the same year , but registered as a war volunteer in September of the same year . He spent the years 1916 to 1918 as a soldier in the First World War and wrote poetry in the process. He sent one of them, the Ascension of Enoch , to Rainer Maria Rilke in 1917 , who later did a lot for the young Lernet-Holenia.

In 1920 he was adopted by his mother's wealthy family, who lived in Carinthia , and since then has had the double name Lernet-Holenia. In 1921, calling himself a “freelance writer”, he published his first volume of poetry in the Viennese Literary Institute (Wila): Pastorale . 1923 converted Lernet- Holenia - originally Protestant denomination - the Roman Catholic Church . In 1925 he published his first drama, Demetrius , followed a year later by the comedies Ollapotrida and Austrian Comedy, for which he received the renowned Kleist Prize in 1926 . In 1927 the Goethe Prize of the city of Bremen followed . In 1928 he wrote the piece Opportunity Makes Love (or Quiproquo ) together with Stefan Zweig under the pseudonym Clemens Neydisser . In the 1930s, he published numerous works in various genres, plays, stories and novels, three of which were filmed: The Adventures of a Young Gentleman in Poland (1931), I Was Jack Mortimer (1935) and The Standard (1934). At this time Lernet-Holenia was on friendly terms with, among others, Carl Zuckmayer and Ödön von Horváth , whose best man he was in 1933. When books were burned in 1933 , his works were also burned. In 1936 the novella Der Baron Bagge appeared , which was considered by many contemporaries (including Hilde Spiel ) to be his most mature work.

When he returned from a trip to America in 1939, he was drafted into military service and the Second World War broke out a little later . Two days after the attack on Poland began , he was wounded and transferred to Berlin , where he was appointed chief dramaturge at the Heeresfilmstelle . During the war, he had a relationship with the publishing partner Maria Charlotte Sweceny for a few years , who found its way into his novel Mars im Widder as Cuba Pistohlkors and to which he dedicated his favorite work, the collection of poems The Trophae . In Kitzbühel he met Eva Vollbach, who was to become his wife, from Berlin. Lernet-Holenia provided the idea for the Zarah Leander film Die Große Liebe , the production of which began in 1941 and which became the most commercially successful film of the Nazi era.

Memorial plaque on his last place of residence in the Vienna Hofburg

In 1941 his most famous work, the novel The Blue Hour , which describes the attack on Poland, was published in The Lady magazine. The book edition, titled Mars im Widder , was banned by the Nazi censors even before it was extradited, as this work made it clear that the German attack on Poland had not been preceded by any provocations from the Polish side, as the Nazi propaganda claimed . 15,000 copies were deposited in a warehouse in Leipzig that was destroyed in air raids in 1943/44. He spent the period up to 1944 in Berlin, where he was in contact with Gottfried Benn and Alfred Kubin . His novel Both Sicily was written in Berlin .

After the war he married Eva Vollbach and moved with her to St. Wolfgang, where the couple lived until 1951 and then moved to Vienna.

Until his death he remained literarily productive and received numerous honors, but also showed himself to be a conflict-prone personality. In 1969 Lernet-Holenia became president of the Austrian PEN Club , but he resigned from his position in protest against the award of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature to Heinrich Böll . In 1976 he died of lung cancer at Cumberlandstrasse 53 in Vienna and was buried in an honorary grave in the Hietzinger Friedhof (group 30, number 23).

reception

Grave of Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Lernet-Holenia was heavily controversial during his lifetime, not least because of his penchant for polemical criticism of the times. Nevertheless, his works were widely read, not least because of their elegant style and the Austro-Hungarian nostalgia that they often contain.

More recently, the motifs and the fantastic elements of his works have come into the focus of literary studies. The following assessment is exemplary of recent reception history:

"It would not be a mistake to regard Lernet-Holenia [...] as the most important Austrian narrator of the fantastic, alongside Perutz , whose last novel he edited"

Stefan Zweig described Lernet-Holenia in a letter to the composer Richard Strauss as

“… A mysterious person as a poet, big in his poems and some of his dramatic scenes, then again incredibly casual when he writes comedies or shallow novels with his left hand and for money-making, which then have no depth at all, but still have grace . Working with you, I thought, could stimulate him to the highest productivity, because when the fiery awakens in him, he is, in my opinion, greater than all the others. "

Awards

Works (selection)

  • Pastoral. 1921 (poetry)
  • Kanzonnair. 1923 (poetry)
  • Ollapotrida . 1926 (play)
  • Scene as an introduction to a funeral for Rainer Maria Rilke. 1927 (play)
  • Opportunity makes love. (also: Quiproquo ), together with Stefan Zweig, 1928 (play)
  • The adventures of a young gentleman in Poland. 1931 (novel)
  • Ljuba's sable. 1932 (novel; new edition 1954 under the title Die Frau im Zobel )
  • Jo and the gentleman on horseback. 1933 (novel)
  • I was Jack Mortimer . 1933 (novel)
  • The standard. 1934 (novel)
  • The Baron Bagge . 1936 (novella)
  • The resurrection of the Maltravers. 1936 (novel)
  • The man in the hat. 1937 (novel)
  • Radiation Home. 1938 (story)
  • A dream in red. 1939 (novel)
  • Mars in Aries. 1941 (novel)
  • Both Sicilies. 1942 (novel)
  • Germania. 1946 (poetry)
  • The twentieth of July. 1947 (story)
  • The Count of Saint Germain. 1948 (novel)
  • The Count Luna. 1955 (novel)
  • The exchanged letters. 1958 (novel)
  • Prinz Eugen. 1960 (biography)
  • The queen's collar. 1962 (non-fiction book about the collar affair )
  • The white lady. 1965 (novel)
  • The pretenders to the throne. 1965 (play)
  • Pilate. A complex. 1967 (novel)
  • The witches. 1969 (novel)
  • The incantation. (under the pseudonym: GT Dampierre), 1974 (novel)

Filmography

script
Literary template

literature

  • Hélène Barrière, Thomas Eicher, Manfred Müller (eds.): Personal bibliography Alexander Lernet-Holenia . Athena, Oberhausen 2001, ISBN 3-932740-88-2 .
  • Hélène Barrière, Thomas Eicher, Manfred Müller (eds.): Guilt complexes. The work of Alexander Lernet-Holenia in a post-war context . Athena, Oberhausen 2004, ISBN 3-89896-192-3 (collection of articles).
  • Eva-Suzanne Bayer-Klötzer:  Lernet-Holenia, Alexander. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , pp. 315-317 ( digitized version ).
  • Christopher Dietz: Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Maria Charlotte Sweceny . Letters 1938–1945 . Böhlau, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-205-78887-4 .
  • Robert Dassanowsky : Phantom Empires: The Novels of Alexander Lernet-Holenia and the Question of Postimperial Austrian Identity . Ariadne Press, Riverside, California 1996, ISBN 1-57241-030-2 .
  • Thomas Eicher, Bettina Gruber (Ed.): Alexander Lernet-Holenia. Poetry on the Boulevard . Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1999, ISBN 3-412-15998-0 (collection of articles).
  • Thomas Hübel, Manfred Müller, Gerald Sommer (eds.): Alexander Lernet-Holenia. Resignation and rebellion. Contributions to the Vienna symposium on the poet's 100th birthday . Ariadne Press, Riverside, California 2005, ISBN 1-57241-143-0 (collection of articles).
  • Franziska Mayer: Wish fulfillment. Narrative strategies in the prose work Alexander Lernet-Holenias . Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2005, ISBN 3-412-16004-0 .
  • Peter Pott: Alexander Lernet-Holenia. Figure, dramatic work and stage history . Braumüller, Vienna et al. 1972.
  • Marina Rauchbacher: Paths of Narration. Subject and world in texts by Leo Perutz and Alexander Lernet-Holenia . Praesens, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7069-0359-8 .
  • Roman Rocek : The nine lives of Alexander Lernet-Holenia. A biography . Böhlau, Vienna et al. 1997, ISBN 3-205-98713-6 .
  • Volker Weidermann : The book of burned books . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 2008, ISBN 978-3-462-03962-7 . (For Lernet-Holenia, pp. 71–73)
  • Carl Zuckmayer , Alexander Lernet-Holenia: Correspondence . Edited, introduced and commented on by Gunther Nickel . In: Zuckmayer yearbook. Volume 8, 2006, pp. 9-185.

Web links

Commons : Alexander Lernet-Holenia  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rein A. Zondergeld, Holger E. Wiedenstried: Lexicon of fantastic literature . Weibrecht Verlag, Stuttgart et al. 1998, ISBN 3-522-72175-6 , p. 216.
  2. ↑ Roman Rocek: The nine lives of Alexander Lernet-Holenia. A biography . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 1997, ISBN 3-205-98713-6 , p. 184.
  3. ↑ Alexander-Lernet-Holenia-Park in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
  4. ^ List of harmful and undesirable literature , as of December 31, 1938, p. 84. Leipzig, 1938.
    Berlin.de - List of the literature banned by the National Socialists
personal data
SURNAME Lernet-Holenia, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lernet-Holenia, Alexander Marie Norbert (full name); Neydisser, Clemens (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 3rd July 1976
Place of death Vienna