Ludwig Franz Meyer

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Ludwig Franz Meyer (born December 9, 1894 in Gnesen , died May 1, 1915 before Sochaczew ) was a German poet.

Life

Ludwig Franz Meyer was the son of a sanitary councilor from Gniezno. As a teenager he was already composing. Meyer studied law in Breslau and Freiburg . He had come to Breslau in 1913 and there had joined the "Association of Jewish Students (VJSt)" founded in 1899 in the BJC and the Jewish hiking association " Blau-Weiß " founded in 1907 .

As a war volunteer he took part in the First World War on the German side and fell as a 20-year-old and member of the Field Artillery Regiment No. 17 "in the fight for the German cause" as a result of a lung perforation by a shrapnel ball before Sochaczew. On his deathbed he was promoted to deputy sergeant . On May 5, 1915, his body was buried in Rybno and then reburied in Gniezno on October 10 of the same year. Shortly afterwards his friend Martin Nothmann wrote: “On October 10th, we transferred the body of Ludwig Franz Meyer to Gnesen. ... His gaze goes to the east, to the fields that have demanded his blood, to the country that disgraces his brothers like no other on earth, on which he wanted to take revenge for Homel, Kishiniev and Bialystok, his gaze goes to the east , also to that country that he searched with his soul throughout his life and should no longer see. "

reception

Meyer's poems appeared in 1915 in Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein 's collection of war poems for field gray and navy blue and in 1916 in the volume of war poems Feldgraue Dichter published by Bogdan Krieger . On behalf of Meyer's mother, the Bonn rabbi Emil Cohn (1881–1948), whose Zionist worldview was controversial in the Berlin community, published an extensive collection of his war poems in the Jewish publishing house in 1916 . Meyer's poems are grouped there under the titles “Jewish songs”, “Mirjam”, “Frau Sehnsucht” and “The songs and the life of a wanderer”. The first poems from Meyer's youth were also recorded there. Rabbi Emil Cohn also published Meyer's first poem in his Jewish children's calendar, founded in 1928, entitled The Jewish Child , which he had written as a teenager. Meyer's poem entitled My mother! appeared in Philipp Witkop's collection of war letters from German students and was translated into Portuguese by Anna Amelia in 1932 in the newspaper Diário de Notícias .

Hans Franck , who previously wrote an article about Reinhard Johannes Sorge in the Frankfurter Zeitung (65), also wrote an obituary for Meyer in issue 70 of the paper, which reads: “Helpless, touching, artless, monotonous, narrating, confessing the hundred pages of poetry from this life. Even where the poet hears dark sounds, the diatonic is in truth unbroken. Only once, only once, has a full sound, suggestive of the future, got lost in the empty sound. At the end of the poem Seeker of God there are these verses: 'My life is nothing but groping and climbing for the castle of light, for God's voices. Towards the goal! I want to pass my life! So I quarrel quietly, calmly and freely! '"

Robert Weltsch noted the following in 1917 in the monthly Der Jude about the volume of poetry edited by Cohn: “[...] This is not a book that wants to be judged from a literary point of view. It is a document spoken of by a whole generation of children who died before they began to live; In these verses of a young person, a poet who has not yet become, eternal youth is the first morning greeting to life, an anticipation of beauty, greatness and love, an awkward stammering of happiness and suffering.But there is still more in it: the first consciousness of a great one , sacred task, the fire of the Tet. This childlike, clean young man was called to become righteous and to participate in the redemption of a people. Now he is dead. And behind him are the great number of those who went down with him, and of whom he was the spokesman. - You, you who have to pay off the great debt together with him, you guarantors, debtors in solidarity, know that a powerful, rich payer ceased to exist before he could still pay. Your guilt has increased considerably. God and the people - who will replace for them what these people would have achieved who died as children before they could fulfill their vow? You who are still alive stand up for these dead! Brethren, let us band together and try to make good at least part of the great damage we can never wholly do! There is no comforter and no consolation for us. But it is a sacred obligation that, in addition to the deeds that are given to us, we still have to do the others which are undone work for that multitude of dead. "

Works

literature

  • Fritz F .: A young Jewish poet. In: Self Defense . 11 (1917), No. 4 (January 26), pp. 2f.
  • Ludwig Franz Meyer. In: Philipp Witkop: War letters from German students. Freiburg 1933, p. 62 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Reichsbundischer Jewish Frontsoldaten specifies May 3rd as the date of death, which could be explained by the fact that he was wounded on May 1st and, as is also mentioned elsewhere, died two days later as a result of the wound.
  2. ^ Felix A. Theilhaber : Jewish Aviators in War. A sheet of memory. Published by Louis Lamm , Berlin 1919.
  3. ↑ a b The Jewish child. ( Free download of the Jewish children's calendar based on the children's calendar 1928/1829 published by Emil Bernhard Cohn as a PDF file , contains the poem by the thirteen-year-old Ludwig Franz Meyer)
  4. ↑ Dead heroes? In: Hedad and Hurray. Jewish youth movements in and about the First World War.
  5. ↑ To the poems in this book. In: Fallen German Jews. Front letters 1914-18. Published by the Reich Association of Jewish Front Soldiers e. V. , Vortrupp Verlag, Berlin 1935.
  6. ↑ Michael Nagel: Between self-assertion and persecution. German-Jewish newspapers and magazines from the Enlightenment to National Socialism. Olms, 2002, p. 289.
  7. ↑ Moses Jacobson: Spoken on October 10, 1915 on the stretcher of the volunteer deputy guard Ludwig Franz Meyer who fell in the field of honor. Print by C. Schulze, 1915.
  8. ↑ Martin Nothmann: Ludwig Franz Meyer. Obituary in: blue and white leaves. No. 4 (1915).
  9. ↑ War poems for field gray and navy blue. 1st volume, 1st edition; edited by Philipp Alfons Freiherr Mumm von Schwarzenstein. Alb [ert] Sayffaerth (Otto Fleck), Berlin-Schöneberg 1917.
  10. ↑ Field gray poets. War seals of our soldiers selected and edited by Dr. Bogdan Krieger, Kgl. Home librarian. [1. Ed.], 1. – 20. Thousand. Verlag Kameradschaft, Wohlfahrtsges [ellschaft] mbH, Berlin 1916. (Series: Unterm Eisernen Kreuz 1914/15/16. War pamphlets by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Dank Association of Soldiers' Friends, 55–56).
  11. ↑ Cohn, Emil Moses, Dr. In: Michael Brocke , Julius Carlebach : The Rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945. Walter de Gruyter, 2012, p. 2081 ff.
  12. ^ Dörte Staudt: A thousand years of rabbis. Bonn: A new documentation on the history of the community. In: Jüdische Allgemeine , February 1, 2007.
  13. ↑ The Jewish Child is Cohn's volume of poetry edited by Meyer titled The First Poem ; there noted by Cohn: "LFM wrote this poem when he was 14 years old."
  14. ^ Helge-Ulrike Hyams : Jewish childhood in Germany. A cultural story. Fink, 1995, p. 142.
  15. ↑ The Jewish Children's Calendar 1928–1936. In: Michael Nagel: Between self-assertion and persecution. German-Jewish newspapers and magazines from the Enlightenment to National Socialism. Olms, 2002, p. 287 ff.
  16. ↑ Anna Amelia: Ronda de Imagens: A minha Mãe . In: Diário de Notícias. May 29, 1932, p. 21. ( pdf ).
  17. ↑ On German literature. In: The literary echo . Volume 19, E. Fleischel, 1917, p. 877.
  18. ↑ Robert Weltsch: Comments. In The Jew. A monthly journal. First year 1916–1917. R. Löwit Verlag, Berlin 1917, p. 779.
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Ludwig Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meyer, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish poet
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Gniezno
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1915
Place of death before Sochaczew