Lisa Matthias

Lisa Matthias sitting on her car, June 1932

Lisa Matthias (* 22. December 1894 in Berlin , † 2. November 1982 in Angelholm , Sweden ) was a German journalist and publisher . As the lover of the writer Kurt Tucholsky , she served him as a model for the literary figure of "Lottchen" and, in certain traits, as a model for the figure of Lydia in Gripsholm Castle .

Life

Tucholsky and Lisa Matthias in Läggesta, Sweden, 1929

As Lisa Matthias explains in her autobiography Ich war Tucholskys Lottchen , she was born in 1894 as the daughter of a “then already wealthy Berlin merchant”. At the age of 19 she married a German born in Moscow , with whom she went to Russia in 1914 . In mid-1915 the couple returned to Berlin, where a son and daughter were born. Matthias' husband died of the Spanish flu in early 1920 . She came into contact with literary circles in Berlin in the 1920s through her marriage to the sociologist , writer and translator Leo Matthias , who also wrote regularly for the political weekly Die Weltbühne . On January 25, 1927, she met Kurt Tucholsky, then editor of the Weltbühne, at an artists' ball to which Rudolf Schlichter and Bertolt Brecht , among others , had invited. Your autobiography therefore begins with the words:

I was as intimate friends with Kurt Tucholsky from January 27, 1927 to autumn 1931 as a woman can be with a man. I was - according to his own words - mother, cradle, comrade to him.
Much of his best work was created during these years. His anthologies, the "summer story" of Gripsholm Castle , which is dedicated to me. On the first front page it says: “For IA 47407” - that was my license number.

Tucholsky biographer Gerhard Zwerenz commented on these lines and on all of the memories :

A little less penetrance, a little more restraint - what does more mean here - a little restraint at all, and Lisa Matthias would be better off. (...)
This is the rare case that an autobiography is necessary because it provides information that cannot be found anywhere else. At the same time, however, they are hidden under such a thicket of contortions that a hypercritical mind is required to see them.

Matthias shows little reluctance, for example, to portray himself as an enlightened, progressive and emancipated woman who already owned her own car at the end of the 1920s and purposefully planned her professional career. With the latter, she undoubtedly benefited from her liaison with Tucholsky. In June 1927 her first text appeared on the Weltbühne ("Uses Din formats"), and after Tucholsky's first "Lottchen" monologue was published in September 1928, "the doors of the Ullstein Blätter opened for me more easily than before" as she wrote.

Since Tucholsky was traveling almost constantly between 1927 and 1933, the couple only saw each other for a short time in different places in Germany, Switzerland and France . In April 1929 they both traveled to Sweden together , where they rented a house near Gripsholm Castle . From this summer stay, the well-known "summer story" Gripsholm Castle emerged in the fall of 1930 . The ominous dedication for the license plate "IA 47 407" was her suggestion, writes Matthias (p. 249):

If my full name appeared in the dedication, our relationship - this now half stunted relationship - would become apparent to the world. I wasn't interested in it. So as not to offend Tucholsky directly, I suggested that he mention my license number.

The "half stunted" relationship between Matthias and Tucholsky was finally to break in 1931. As an important reason Matthias gave an obscure episode, according to which Tucholsky wanted to marry the daughter of the famous film actor Emil Jannings (camouflaged as "Orje Pachulke" in Matthias' book) in exchange for a high monthly " apanage " . Such plans have not yet been substantiated by any Tucholsky biographer.

After the takeover of the Nazis Matthias saw as a Jew , former world stage forced -Mitarbeiterin and former lover Tucholsky to leave Germany as soon as possible. In April 1933 she emigrated to Sweden.

There she built up the Bibliophile Publishing House in the following years, which specialized in the translation of French and German classics. The publishing house had particular success with the translation of Georg Büchner's drama Woyzeck . With her autobiography, which appeared in Hamburg in 1962, Matthias drew the wrath of the German feature pages. The former Weltbühne employee and then editor of the Berliner Tagesspiegel , Walther Karsch , was outraged that Tucholsky was portrayed in "less than underpants". It was also complained that Matthias had given completely wrong and unqualified judgments about her former lover. Among other things, she claimed that Tucholsky never suffered from the political situation in Germany and that he always answered his letters "impersonally, without obligation, cheerfully".

Lisa Matthias died in 1982 in Ängelholm, Sweden, leaving behind her daughter from her first marriage. Her son was killed in a traffic accident in 1938.

Works, translations, editions

• I was Tucholsky's little lot. Text and pictures from the cinema of my life , by Schröder, Hamburg 1962
• Mario Prassinos , Drommar; en antologi. För bokens typografi svarar Lisa Matthias . Stockholm, Tryckt för Bibliofila klubben av Skånska centraltryckeriet, 1950
• Heinrich von Kleist , Om marionetteatern och två andra essayer , ( About the Marionette Theater ). Translation into Swedish with Egon Jonsson. Stockholm: Bibliofila klubben, 1949
• Achim von Arnim , Majoratsherrarna (The Majoratsherren). Translation into Swedish with Egon Jonsson. Stockholm: Bibliofila klubben, 1948.
• Gérard de Nerval , Aurelia (Aurélia, ou le Rêve et la Vie). Translation into Swedish. Stockholm: Bibliofila klubben, 1947.
• with Per Anders Fogelström , 13 ödesdigra år: klipp ur svenska och utländska tidningar Malmö: Beyrond, 1946.

literature

• Gerhard Zwerenz: Kurt Tucholsky. Biography of a good German. Munich 1979, pp. 263-272
• Lottchen revealed . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1962, pp. 83 ( Online - May 9, 1962 ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Lisa Matthias in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Berliner Morgenpost about Tucholsky's Lottchen

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lisa Matthias: I was Tucholskys Lottchen , Hamburg 1962, p. 15
2. ^ Gerhard Zwerenz: Kurt Tucholsky. Biography of a good German. Munich 1979, p. 266