Louis Fürnberg

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Louis Fürnberg, 1949

Louis Fürnberg (born May 24, 1909 in Iglau , Moravia , Austria-Hungary , † June 23, 1957 in Weimar ) was a Czechoslovakian - German writer , poet and journalist , composer and diplomat . From 1932 he wrote under the pseudonym  Nuncius or  Nuncius . He wrote the text and melody of the party's song , which for years served as the official anthem of the SED .

Life

Fürnberg was born as the son of a German-speaking, Jewish family of textile manufacturers in the Moravian Jihlava. His mother, Berta Fürnberg, died shortly after his birth. Due to his second marriage, he moved to Karlsbad with his father, Jakob Fürnberg, and spent his childhood and youth there. His half-brother Walter Fürnberg was born in 1913.

From 1919 on, Fürnberg attended high school in Karlsbad. At the request of his father , he had to break off the apprenticeship as an art ceramist in "Knolls Porzellanfabrik" in Fischern in 1926 because of tuberculosis . At the age of seventeen he joined the Socialist Youth. In 1927 he went to Prague and attended the German Commercial Academy. He began to publish his first poems in the local German-speaking bourgeois press.

In 1928 he became a member of the German section of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia . In May 1932 he founded the agitprop group Echo von links , for which he mainly worked as a copywriter between 1932 and 1936. As part of one of the group's programs, he met Lotte Wertheimer in 1936, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish entrepreneur who was also a communist and whom he married in 1937. Until 1939 he worked for the communist press in Prague. B. since 1934 as editor of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) , which had emigrated from Berlin to Prague. He also worked on the counterattack under Bruno Frei . After contracting pulmonary tuberculosis again in 1936, he stayed in Lugano for a cure. The echo from the left has been discontinued.

After the Germans invaded Prague in March 1939, the Fürnberg couple tried to flee to Poland , but were betrayed and imprisoned. While Fürnberg's wife was released after two months and was able to flee to London , he went through several prisons and was tortured. Only later did his wife's family manage to buy him free by bribing the Gestapo and to have him deported to Italy , where he met his wife again at the turn of the year 1939/40. They continued to flee via Yugoslavia , where their son Miša was born in Belgrade in 1940, until they finally reached Palestine in 1941 . His family, which remained under German control, was murdered in the Holocaust .

After the end of the war, Fürnberg returned to Prague from Jerusalem in 1946. In the following two years he worked as a journalist and correspondent for several newspapers in Prague. In 1947 his daughter Alena was born. This was followed by an activity in the Ministry of Information, from 1949 to 1952 he was first counselor ( cultural attaché ) of the Czechoslovak embassy in East Berlin and then returned to Czechoslovakia. The political climate of the late Stalinist Soviet Union, which was clearly marked by anti-Semitic tendencies, had also - and particularly strongly - spread to Czechoslovakia under Klement Gottwald . Fürnberg was forced to change his name to Lubomír Fyrnberg. The death sentences imposed during this time on parts of the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the Slansky trial , which also affected some of Louis Fürnberg's friends and acquaintances, affected his health.

Louis Fürnberg's funeral, 1957
tomb
Fürnberg Monument in Weimar

In 1954 Fürnberg moved to Weimar with his wife and their two children . Here he was deputy head of the National Research and Memorial Centers for Classical German Literature and was co-editor of the Weimar articles . In 1955 he became a member of the German Academy of the Arts . In the same year, however, he suffered a heart attack from which he did not recover. He died at the age of 48 on the night of June 23rd to 24th, 1957 and was buried on June 27th in the honorary grave field of the historical cemetery in Weimar . After his death, his widow Lotte Fürnberg, who worked for many years as a radio editor, ran the Louis Fürnberg archive in Weimar. She died in Weimar in January 2004 at the age of 92.

In 1961 Martin Reiner and Franz Dospiel created the Louis-Fürnberg monument in the park on the Ilm .

On his 100th birthday, the Weimar Classic Foundation honored the poet with a memorial event in the city palace, at which Fürnberg's daughter Alena read from his poems and the writer Wulf Kirsten gave a laudatory speech. In the administration building of the concentration camp memorial Buchenwald his study was faithfully reconstructed; it has been accessible since June 2017 after registration (via www.buchenwald.de).

Artistic creation

Fürnberg saw himself as a political poet. He once assured his comrades lyrically: What I sing, I sing to comrades. Your dreams run through my song.

Fürnberg wrote mainly poems , stories and novels . His novella The Encounter in Weimar dealt with a meeting between Adam Mickiewicz and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . Fürnberg's dramas, festivals and cantatas bear witness to his communist sentiments, to which he remained true to the end of his life.

The text of the success hits of the Puhdys Old like a tree refers to the poem Old I'd be of Fürnberg, they sing here "Old like a tree, I would like to be, as the poet describes it ...".

The name Louis Fürnberg still arouses very strong associations with the song The Party , as a tribute to the IX. Party congress of the KPČ in May 1949, to which he was not invited, much to his mortification. This has pushed his other works into the background. After the XX. At the CPSU party congress in 1956, the song was ideologically cleansed. The original refrain So grows from the Leninian spirit, welded by Stalin, the party, the party, the party, was sung according to the new party line. So from the Leninian spirit grows welded together, the party, the party, the party . The poems The Birth of Stalin, The Young Stalin, The Greatest Student were to be deleted from the edition of the work. And the song of Stalin is now A Song of Man . I dedicate this song to Stalin and now it was called This song I dedicate to the Soviets . Elsewhere, instead of Lenin and Stalin, the names of Marx and Engels were honored .

Awards

Louis Fürnberg was honored with the National Prize of the GDR in 1956 .

Works

  • Songs Songs Moritats - A selection. Basel 1937.
  • Hell, hate and love. 1943 (poems).
  • The brother nameless. A life in verse. Mundus-Verlag , Basel 1947.
  • The meeting in Weimar. Novella. Aufbau-Taschenbuchverlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-7466-1067-2 (reprint of the Berlin 1952 edition).
  • You have a goal in mind. (The reading worker; 4). Central Library of German Classics, Weimar 1959.
  • Home that I always meant. Bohemia and Germany in poems from the estate. Aufbau-Verlag , Berlin 1964.
  • Songs, songs, and payments. A selection. German Academy of Arts, Berlin 1959.
  • Mozart novella. Manesse, Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-7175-8184-8 (first edition 1947).
  • The Spanish wedding. 2nd edition, Berlin 1986 (illustrations by André Masson ) (first edition 1948).
  • And stars wander as I go. Poems, songs, songs. 2 ed. Henschel, Berlin 1981.
  • Hikers in the morning. A circle of poems. Dietz Verlag , Berlin 1961.
  • Herbert Meinke (Ed.): Was a winter day ... poems. Dahlemer Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-928832-07-7 .
  • Late summer evening. 1951 (poem)
  • The vacation . Structure, Berlin 1964. From the estate. Edited by Lotte Fürnberg and Gerhard Wolf
  • Collected works in six volumes . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1964/65.
  • The great friendship. ( Friedrich Engels at the death of Karl Marx ). Fragment from the estate. First Junge Kunst 4, 1959; again in: “But the world is changed.” Almanach 1959. Ed. PEN-Zentrum Ost und West , Verlag der Nation , Berlin 1959, pp. 56–76.
  • Song of life. Selected poems. (Selection by Gerhard Wolf and Alena Fürnberg ). Faber & Faber, Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-86730-098-8 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Louis Fürnberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Joachim Kahl : An ideology-critical analysis of Louis Fürnberg's "Song of the Party" . (PDF) In: Enlightenment and Criticism , special issue 10/2005.
  2. ↑ Jörg Bernhard Bilke: He knew how to sing many a song about the party. And not just praiseworthy ones: Louis Fürnberg from Moravia. In: Kulturpolitische Korrespondenz , edition 1390.
  3. ↑ Home for Fürnberg's books. In: Neues Deutschland from 24./25. June 2017, p. 15 (dpa report).
  4. ↑ Christian Eger: Lenin, Goethe and peppermints. In: Frankfurter Rundschau from 5./6. August 2017, p. 37.
  5. ↑ Angela Mehner: Poet and Communist - 50th anniversary of the death of the poet Louis Fürnberg ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . German Broadcasting Archive (= "Document of the Month June 2007"). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dra.de
  6. ↑ Peter Dittmar: The party, the party is always right . In: Die Welt , January 7, 1997.
  7. ↑ See the letter that Lotte Fürnberg (widow of L. Fürnberg) sent to the publisher on September 24, 1960. Quoted in Peter Dittmar: The party, the party, is always right . In: Die Welt , January 7, 1997.
personal data
SURNAME Fürnberg, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nuncio (pseudonym); Nuncius (pseudonym); Fyrnberg, Lubomír
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, poet and musician of Jewish descent
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Iglau , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH June 23, 1957
Place of death Weimar