Louise Hartung

Louise Hartung (born January 6, 1905 in Münster , † February 24, 1965 in Berlin ) was a German singer and teacher. After the Second World War, she played a leading role in Berlin's main youth welfare office and played a key role in building democratic youth work . She initiated numerous progressive initiatives of the office, including the “Monday reading groups”. Hartung became known to the general public in 2016 through the publication of her long-term correspondence with her friend Astrid Lindgren .

Youth, education and career as a singer

Louise Hartung was the youngest of eight siblings. Her mother died giving birth. Three of her brothers died in World War I. Her musical talent was shown early on. After finishing school, she first trained as a singer for classical Italian opera , followed by musical cabaret and songs from German romanticism . After studying in Paris , Milan and Berlin, including as a student of the famous opera singer Sara Cahier , she finally moved to Berlin in 1925/26.

In Berlin, Hartung met a number of leading intellectuals and artists, she became part of the bohemians in the golden twenties . She was friends with the Swedish painter and art collector Nell Walden , who had published the artist magazine “ Der Sturm ” together with her then husband Herwarth Walden for many years , as well as with the actress and singer Lotte Lenya . In 1928 she took part in the world premiere of the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill . Hartung gave concerts and recorded several gramophone records.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Hartung supported Kurt Weill in his emigration. Together with Selma Stern-Täubler , she represented him and Lenya in the settlement of their divorce in the same year, as the couple were abroad. Lenya gave Hartung a role in London in 1933 at the Savoy Theater .

After her return to Germany, she was expelled from the Reichstheaterkammer and was banned from performing for several years. She stayed in Berlin and kept her head above water with freelance work as a photographer on the fringes of the art scene. For some time she was able to work as an assistant director and photographer with Lucie Höflich , director of the drama school of the German Theater in Berlin . When she was allowed to perform again, she gave recitals with the pianist Hertha Klust . Hartung and the soprano Maria Schreker , with whom Hartung lived, were forced to take part in Wehrmacht concerts at the front in the Soviet Union and in France in order not to lose their permission to perform again.

Together with Schreker, Hartung hid Jewish friends in their common house in Potsdam and protected a married couple from deportation in their weekend house in Caputh . Like many other women in Berlin at the end of the war, she suffered sexual violence from members of the Red Army .

post war period

After the war, Hartung was initially unemployed. In 1947 she was employed by the Berlin magistrate in the main art office. She had already joined the SPD in 1926 ; now she got involved in local politics. From 1946 to 1950 she was a state party congress delegate, from 1946 to 1950 and from 1953 to 1954 a member of the district assembly . In 1949/50 she was district councilor for youth in Wilmersdorf and in 1950 she ran for the city parliament.

With her professional work, she made a significant contribution to the rebuilding of the art scene in Berlin. At first she specialized in the field of classical music. As a clerk, expert reviewer and speaker, she helped found a new chamber orchestra, a new choir and a music prize. She organized music festivals and concert series to promote young musical talent. In 1949 she took over the management of the Office for Music in Berlin.

When the Berlin local government was restructured in 1951, all employees had to reapply for their jobs. At times, Hartung was traded as the future Senator for Popular Education, but was ultimately not given this leadership position. Instead, she got a job in the main youth welfare office, where she was subordinate to the SPD politician Ella Kay . With this change, Hartung found her calling. The main youth welfare office implemented a number of progressive initiatives in which Hartung played a key role. She built up the care for the war orphans and established professional care for traumatized and criminal children. She built up the promotion of reading and put the overcoming of National Socialism and racial discrimination in the foreground of her educational work. In 1953 Hartung established the “Monday Reading Groups”, in which adults read from children's books to children in selected youth centers and libraries. What was read was discussed, the comments were written down and then evaluated in the youth welfare office. Although Hartung was a valued employee and the deputy of Ella Kay, working with her manager was not easy. According to Hartung, many of the creative ideas of the Berlin youth welfare office, which were adopted by other youth welfare offices across Germany, came from her; Kay had been praised for this.

As a youth welfare officer, she represented the authorities in the FSK ( Voluntary Self-Control of the Film Industry ) and was a member of the Federal Ministry's award committee for the children's and youth film award. Since Hartung's health was compromised, she turned down several job offers from abroad, including from the UN , which had offered her to lead a larger children and youth project.

Louise Hartung died of cancer in 1965 at the age of sixty.

Friendship with Astrid Lindgren

To promote reading, Hartung regularly invited writers and organized readings. She was friends with several authors. A special relationship developed with Astrid Lindgren, who was her favorite children's author. Hartung invited Astrid Lindgren to a reading for the Hauptjugendamt Berlin in autumn 1953. During her stay, Lindgren lived in Hartung's apartment. On the last day, Hartung showed Lindgren during a car trip the bombed-out part of East Berlin, where she used to live, which touched Lindgren deeply. This stay marked the beginning of a close, intellectually stimulating and loving friendship. By the time Hartung died, the two women met several times and wrote more than 600 letters to each other, the longest letters being from Hartung. She set the tone of the correspondence. Lindgren's biographer Jens Andersen attested Hartung for Lindgren the function of an "intellectually challenging window into a different and larger world than the one in which Astrid moved in Stockholm every day." Lindgren was fascinated by Hartung's changeful life story.

Hartung's letters were emotional and romantic; she had fallen in love with Lindgren. She kept sending parcels with bouquets and bulbs, books, gloves, fruit or even a plane ticket for a trip to Berlin. She wooed Lindgren, although she already had a friend in Berlin, the doctor and psychotherapist Gertraud Lemke. Lindgren wasn't ready to enter into the kind of physical relationship Hartung wished for.

A total of 620 letters of correspondence (364 from Hartung, 256 from Lindgren) have been received. In 2016 Jens Andersen and Jette Glargaard published a selection of the letters. In 2017 the correspondence was published as an audio book, read by Eva Mattes and Oda Thormeyer . The chosen title “ I also lived! ”Is a quote from one of Lindgren's letters from 1964. The editors describe the correspondence as a“ fascinating, multi-layered double portrait of two busy, committed, intellectual modern women ”. Hartung in particular was celebrated as a discovery in the German-language feature pages , in which the publication met with a great response. She is the "less famous, but more interesting part" of the correspondence. Meike Feßmann wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Hartung's statements about friendship and about the "importance of wishes that one should not give up, even if one knows that they cannot be fulfilled", even as philosophical weight. According to Die Presse, the correspondence of the two women is a contemporary document about the intellectual life of the German 1950s and 1960s and the effects of the German economic miracle as well as a piece of contemporary Berlin history before and around the construction of the Wall . Cornelia Geisser described it in the Berliner Zeitung as a “lesson in heart formation”. In Sweden, on the other hand, it was asked occasionally whether such intimate letters should be published. Jens Andersen told Swedish television that passages in which Hartung was "completely beside himself" and desperate because Lindgren did not want a love affair had been deleted. However, the selection criteria are not set out in the publication itself.

literature

• Astrid Lindgren, Louise Hartung: I also lived! Letters of friendship . Ed .: Jens Andersen, Jette Glargaard. Ullstein, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-550-08176-7 .
• Bettina Michalski: Louise Schroeder's sisters. Berlin social democrats of the post-war period . Dietz, Bonn 1996, ISBN 3-8012-0240-2 , pp. 117 .

Web links

• Luise F. Pusch : Louise Hartung - biography on fembio.org, 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Astrid Lindgren, Louise Hartung: I lived too! Letters of friendship . Ed .: Jens Andersen, Jette Glargaard. Ullstein, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-550-08176-7 , pp. 8–17, (Unless otherwise stated, the biography is based on the information in the foreword. Many details from Hartung's life given there, especially up to the end of the war, come from her letters.).
2. ↑ ^{a b} Anne Burgmer: Infinite longing . In: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung . January 12, 2017, p. 22 .
3. ^ Luise Pusch: Louise Hartung. In: fembio. 2017, accessed August 7, 2018 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Meike Feßmann: It can't be that nobody loves the little ones . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 30, 2017, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed July 22, 2018]).
5. ↑ ^{a b} Bettina Michalski: Louise Schroeder's sisters. Berlin social democrats of the post-war period . Dietz, Bonn 1996, ISBN 3-8012-0240-2 , pp. 117 .
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Cornelia Geissler: Two ways to be free. Adults only: Astrid Lindgren's correspondence with the German Louise Hartung . In: Berliner Zeitung . January 17, 2017, p. 20 .
7. ^ Antje Rávic Strubel: Afterword . In: Jens Andersen, Jette Glargaard (Ed.): I also lived! Letters of friendship . Ullstein, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-550-08176-7 , pp. 507-515, here 508 .
8. ↑ Jens Andersen: Astrid Lingren. Your life . DVA, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-421-04703-8 , pp. 263-270, citation pp. 267-268 .
9. ↑ Andersen 2015, pp. 271–278.
10. ↑ Astrid Lindgren, Louise Hartung: I lived too! Letters of friendship . Ed .: Jens Andersen, Jette Glargaard. Ullstein, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-550-08176-7 (The editors show the number of letters received and the locations of their safekeeping on p. 23).
11. ↑ Andersen, Glargaard (Ed.) 2016, p. 24.
12. ↑ Andersen, Glargaard (Ed.) 2016, p. 20.
13. ↑ "Dear, sweet, beloved ASTRID" . In: The world . November 19, 2016, p. 8 (It is a full-page article with excerpts from the correspondence.).
14. ↑ Julia Wäschenbach: Letters of a Friendship. Astrid Lindgren's and Louise Hartung's correspondence is full of love and everyday worries . In: Thuringian General . December 24, 2016.
15. ↑ Johanna Popp: "I love you inexpressibly". The letters between Astrid Lindgren and the German Louise Hartung not only tell a personal story . In: Münchner Merkur . February 6, 2017, p. 18 .
16. ↑ ^{a b} Sometimes I'm really sad that so many people… In: Die Presse . February 11, 2017.
17. ↑ ^{a b} Aldo Keel: Oh, that was a god potion. Astrid Lindgren received love letters and bottles of wine from Louise Hartung for years - but she rejected all advances . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . February 15, 2017, p. 39 .