Ludwig Bemelmans

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Ludwig Bemelmans (born April 30, 1898 in Meran , † October 1, 1962 in New York City ) was an American writer and illustrator of European origin.

Life

Emslander-Haus on Arnulfsplatz, Regensburg, where Bemelmans lived as a child
Sign on the Bemelmans house on Arnulfsplatz, Regensburg

Ludwig Bemelmans was the son of the Belgian painter Lambert Bemelmans and the brewer's daughter Franziska Fischer. He grew up in what was then Austria-Hungary and in the German Empire , but is said to have spoken French as his first language because of his French nanny . In 1904 the father left the family. The mother moved with Ludwig and his brother to their hometown Regensburg , where their father owned the brewery restaurant "Emslander". Bemelmans was an undisciplined and rebellious student. His mother therefore sent him to his uncle, who owned several hotels in Tyrol , without leaving school .

After Ludwig shot a hotel employee in a dispute - according to another reading he was just throwing a plate at him - the sixteen-year-old was sent to his father, who was then living in the United States , in 1914 . He spent the next few years working in hotels and restaurants. In 1917 he joined the United States Army and was promoted to corporal, but due to his family ties to Germany, he was not employed in Europe, but in a military hospital. In 1918 he received American citizenship.

During the twenties, Bemelmans continued to work in the restaurant and hotel industry, for example as a waiter in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and tried, initially without much success, as an artist and painter. In 1925 he designed the “Hapsburg House” restaurant, which he became co-owner. In the early 1930s he met an influential supporter in the Viking Press children's book editor , May Massee. After his first book Hansi (1934), which describes the adventures of two Austrian children and their dog, he published a number of other children's books, which, however, achieved only moderate success. In 1935 Bemelman married Madeleine Freund, with whom he had a daughter Barbara. In 1939 he achieved his breakthrough with Madeline . The verse story illustrated by Bemelmans himself about a self-confident little Parisian girl was initially rejected by several publishers on the grounds that the book was too demanding. Eventually it was published by Simon and Schuster and became a success. By 1961 there were a total of seven books about Madeline's adventures, with which Bemelmans was able to acquire a permanent reputation as a children's book author in the Anglo-Saxon world. Five of them were published in book form during the author's lifetime, one (“Madeline's Christmas”) in McCall's in 1956 and as a book in 1985, the last in 1999 posthumously from the estate (“Madeline in America and Other Holiday Tales”). The first film adaptation of the books was the Oscar-nominated short film Madeline in 1952 .

Bemelsmanns also wrote and drew for well-known American newspapers and magazines such as Vogue , Town and Country , The New Yorker , Fortune , Harper's Bazaar , McCall’s , Holiday and Stage . He has also published several adult books, including Hotel Splendide and The Donkey Inside. With the novel The Blue Danube , published in 1945 by Viking Press , which depicts everyday and provincial life in Germany under National Socialism in bizarre and critical scenes , he set Regensburg as his mother's hometown a literary monument. The book was published in 2007 by Suhrkamp / Insel under the title “On the beautiful blue Danube” in German translation. It is based not least on the experiences of a trip to Germany in 1935, during which Bemelmans was arrested on short notice after publicly imitating Hitler.

Bemelmans traveled extensively across the USA and Europe . In the 1940s he turned to the theater and film industry, wrote several scripts and realized a few smaller projects in Hollywood . Bemelmans wrote the script for Yolanda and the Thief (1945), a Hollywood musical with surrealist features, which despite the participation of stars like Fred Astaire became a mega-flop, but is now valued as an avant-garde experiment.

Bemelmans was a successful author and illustrator in the circles of American and international celebrities in his later years. So he was commissioned to paint the children's room of the yacht Christina of the shipowner Aristoteles Onassis . Bemelmans' travel books from the 1950s were also aimed at a tourist clientele with a taste for luxury. Bemelmans died of pancreatic cancer and is buried in Arlington , Virginia Military Cemetery. His paintings now fetch prices of up to several hundred thousand dollars.

Multiple mentions of Ludwig Bemelmans and the "Madeline" series in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel "The Marriage Plot" (2011, German "Die Liebeshandlung") in the chapter "And Sometimes They Were Very Sad" (German "And sometimes they were very sad "), in the German-language edition also in the author's" thanks "at the end of the book and in the list of sources.

Works

Autobiographical
  • My War with the United States , 1937
  • Life Class 1938
  • Small Beer , 1939
  • Hotel Splendide , New York (Viking Press) 1941 (his time as a waiter)
  • I Love You, I Love You, I Love You , 1942
  • Bemelmans Hotel , New York (Viking Press) 1946
  • My Life in Art , New York (Harper and Brothers) 1958
Travel reports
  • The Donkey Inside , New York (Viking Press) 1941
  • The Best of Times: An Account of Europe Revisited , 1948 (his visit to Dachau concentration camp)
  • How to Travel Incognito , 1952
  • Italian Holiday , 1961
  • On Board Noah's Ark , 1962
Novels
  • Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep , 1943
  • The Blue Danube , New York (Viking Press) 1945; German: On the beautiful blue Danube , (island) 2007. An abridged German radio play version was published in 2005 under the title Die Blaue Donau by LOhrBär-Verlag in Regensburg; Stage version by Eva Demski The Blue Danube , premiered on April 11, 2008 in Regensburg
  • Dirty Eddie , 1947 (Experiences in Hollywood)
  • The Eye of God , 1949
  • The Woman of My Life , 1957
  • Are You Hungry, Are You Cold , 1960
  • The Street Where the Heart Lies , 1963
Biographies
  • To the One I Love the Best , 1955
Children's books
  • Hansi , New York (Viking Press) 1934
  • The Golden Basket , 1936
  • The Castle Number Nine , 1937
  • Quito Express , 1938
  • Madeline , New York (Simon and Schuster) 1939
  • Fifi , 1940
  • Rosebud , 1942
  • Sunshine: A Story about the City of New York , 1950
  • The Happy Place , 1952
  • Madeline's Rescue , New York (Viking Press) 1953
  • The High World , 1954;
  • Parsley , 1955
  • Madeline and the Bad Hat , New York (Viking Press) 1956
  • Madeline and the Gypsies , New York (Viking Press) 1959
  • Madeline in London , New York (Viking Press) 1961
Scripts

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bemelmans, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Meran
DATE OF DEATH October 1, 1962
Place of death New York City