Margaret Susman

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Margarete Susman (married Margarete von Bendemann ; born October 14, 1872 in Hamburg ; † January 16, 1966 in Zurich ) was a Jewish - German journalist , essayist and poet . She first wrote poetry, then books and essays on poetry, feminism , love for women and Judaism , its religion and its position in a Christian environment.

Life

Margarete Susman came from a wealthy assimilated Jewish-German merchant family from Hamburg, where she attended a private school. After her father Adolph Susmann (1836–1892) moved to Zurich in 1883, she first attended elementary school there and then went to the secondary school for girls. After the death of her husband in 1893, the mother Jenni, née Katzenstein, (1845–1906) and her two daughters moved to their hometown of Hanover , where she died in 1906 after a long illness and care by their daughters.

Only after the sudden death of her father, who had prevented her from studying, did Margarete Susmann begin studying, after initially reading primarily naturalistic literature and works by Friedrich Nietzsche , including Zarathustra , but also painting and poetry painting and the arts and crafts in Düsseldorf and Munich and from 1903 in Paris , where she met her fellow student from Düsseldorf, Eduard von Bendemann (1877–1959), the son of Admiral Felix von Bendemann and grandson of the painter Eduard Bendemann . In 1906 she married him. Later she studied philosophy with Theodor Lipps in Munich and with Georg Simmel in Berlin , who dedicated his book, published in 1906, "Die Religion" to her. In Munich she met Gertrud Kantorowicz and she Karl Wolfskehl , both Jewish-German members of the George circle know, and is the former in Berlin in the circle around Georg and Gertrud Simmel introduced to the Ernst Bloch , Bernard Groethuysen and Martin Buber belong with whom she and her friend Gustav Landauer have lifelong friendships.

In 1901 her first volume of poetry, Mein Land, was published . In Berlin, she came into closer contact with philosophy, with Plato and Spinoza , and, on behalf of Simmel, translated the Introduction à la métaphysique by the French philosopher Henri Bergson , one of the founders of the philosophy of life also represented by Simmel , which was for her and hers further work will prove to be formative. In the same year she experienced a reading of poems by Stefan Georges in the Wolfskehl house , whom she soon got to know personally, but without stepping closer to the circle, despite praise from George on her volume of poems. In 1914 there was another encounter with George because of her treatment of his poetry in her book Das Wesen der Moderne Deutschen Lyrik . However, dealing with his work becomes one of her life themes.

She lives with her husband, the painter and art historian Eduard von Bendemann, in Rüschlikon near Zurich and in Säckingen . On December 21, 1906, still in Berlin, the son Erwin († March 17, 2006 in Epsom, Surrey) was born, later a journalist.

From 1907 she works inter alia. as an essayist for the Frankfurter Zeitung . The essence of modern German lyric poetry emerged from the articles published here in 1910. In Stefan George's work, it celebrates the climax of symbolist poetry, elevated to the status of an art religion in modern times, which replaces the dead myth with a new myth created by the poet. She resumed her confrontation with George in a lecture given in Pontigny in 1928, in which she assigned poetry the task of bringing about "recall of a realm of ideas, the archetypes of things" in the sense of the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis , and praised George's self- image as Poeta Vates and herald of the divine embodied in the form of the beautiful body as the embodiment of the poetic par excellence. In the sense of the orthodoxy of the George circle, she assigns objectively valid truth to the truth seen by the poet and made visible as “shape”, while the merely subjective expression of individual feelings can in no way be the object of true art.

Her second volume of poetry, Neue Gedichte , was published in 1907 . In 1912 she moved to Rüschlikon near Zurich in Switzerland, where she returned after a stay in Frankfurt from 1915 to 1917. The lovers appear in 1907 . After separating from her husband, with whom she lived in a farmhouse near Bad Säckingen, she moved to Arosa, from where she later returned to Germany.

After the First World War, she was committed to the social and political goals of the women's movement and, in a critical turn against the image of women in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also against the men's alliance of the George Circle, called for the creation of a female self-image. In 1918 her lecture The Revolution and the Woman appears . In 1921 she met Franz Rosenzweig and gave a pioneering review of his main work, Der Stern der Erlösung . From 1926 she is a permanent employee of “ Der Morgen. Monthly journal of the German Jews ”. In 1926 she published there the essay The Women's Problem in Today's World , with which, due to her determination of the specifically female mission as the mandate, “via the detour through the de-divine world of the male spirit, the soul uprooted in our world [...] to lead them back into their own realm and thus to re-establish our world in the divine “far from the concrete social and political goals of the organized women's movement. At the same time there was also a turn to Judaism and Zionism . Here, too, however, she is not primarily concerned with questions of emancipation and equality, but with a special soteriological mission for the world, for which the Jews are predestined precisely because of their homelessness in space and time. Zion is "a heavenly home, a future of the soul," as she says in The Revolution and the Jews of 1919. In the essay Die Brücke between Judaism and Christianity , published in 1921 , she emphasizes “that the Jew [...] has no ultimate goal in any temporal constellation, in any form of historical life and therefore does not find his final home in any real state or country can. ”In 1928, the year she divorced from her husband Eduard, she moved to Frankfurt again, where she continued to be politically active.

After Adolf Hitler came to power , she immediately emigrated to Switzerland, where she worked in the circle of the theologian Leonhard Ragaz and, from 1935, wrote for his magazine “ Neue Ways ”. The experience of radical anti-Semitism and the Holocaust - her sister Paula Hammerschlag (1870–1942), who had been widowed since 1934, had killed herself when the deportations began - reinforced her religiously motivated turn to it, which had already been initiated in the 1920s Jewish spirituality.

In her book The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People , published in 1946, she interprets the Holocaust in a meaningful way as a test of faith. Under the influence of Martin Buber, ultra-orthodox Hasidism gains importance for them as "the last great, explicitly religious, that is, manifestation of the Jewish spirit that is connected to the manifest God and living from him."

She lived in a small attic apartment in Zurich until her death. Her political activities against National Socialism call the Swiss Aliens Police onto the scene, which imposes a ban on her, a foreigner, from speaking and publishing. In 1934, after a decade-long break in the house of the Dutch religious philosopher Gerbrand Dekker in Meilen near Zurich, he met again with Wolfskehl, which led to intensive contacts and an exchange of ideas, which, despite a serious rift due to misunderstandings and accusations, continued by letter until his death becomes. In 1948, on the occasion of the second edition , she provided her work Job with a new foreword in which she dealt with the establishment of the State of Israel . In 1953 her collected poems are published by Diana-Verlag, Zurich , under the title From Changing Times . In 1964, she presented her autobiography I Have Lived Many Lives , which she has to dictate almost blind, which she experiences as such a severe impairment to her work opportunities that she asks her readers for indulgence that they only have a fragment in front of them.

In old age she tried to understand Paul Celan's poems, which she visited several times in Zurich. Although she maintains contact with intellectuals like Ernst Bloch from Germany, she never traveled to Germany again after the Second World War . She died in Zurich in 1966 and was buried there on January 21st in the Jewish cemetery in Oberer Friesenberg .

Honors

In 1959 she received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin .

Works (selection)

  • My country. Schuster & Loeffler, Berlin 1901.
  • New poems. R. Piper & Co., Munich 1907.
  • The essence of modern German poetry. Strecker & Schröder, Stuttgart 1910.
  • From the sense of love. Diederichs, Jena 1912.
  • The loving ones. 3 dramatic poems. Wolff, Leipzig 1917.
  • The revolution and the woman. Tiedemann & Uzielli, Frankfurt am Main 1918.
  • Songs of death and redemption. Poems. Three masks, Munich 1922.
  • Expressionism. Municipal School of Applied Arts, Frankfurt am Main 1925.
  • The women problem in the contemporary world. In: Der Morgen 2 (1926), 431–452.
  • The women of romance. Diederichs, Jena 1929; 3rd, expanded and changed edition. Joseph Melzer, Cologne 1960.
  • Susman on Stifter's Abdias , compared with Shakespeare's and Rembrandt's picture of the Jew.
  • The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People. Steinberg, Zurich 1946.
  • Interpretation of a great love: Goethe and Charlotte von Stein . Artemis, Zurich 1951.
  • Shapes and circles. Diana, Zurich 1954.
  • From changing times. Poems . Diana, Zurich 1953.
  • Interpretation of biblical figures. The biblical figure of Moses . Ezekiel , the prophet of repentance. Saul and David , two eternal figures. The Prophets' Message of Peace. Diana, Zurich 1955.
  • The spiritual figure of Georg Simmel . Mohr, Tübingen 1959. (Online see web links, Susman pages).
  • I've lived many lives. Memories Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1964. (Memoirs of life. Online see web links, Susman pages).
  • From the secret of freedom. Collected essays 1914–1964 . Agora, Darmstadt 1965.
  • "The being near and far of the stranger". Essays and letters. Jewish publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3633540563

literature

  • Manfred Schlösser: On a split path. (Festschrift for Margarete Susman's ninetieth birthday). Erato-Presse, Darmstadt 1964.
  • Willi Goetschel: Margarete Susman. In: Werner Weber: Helvetic profiles. 47 writers from German-speaking Switzerland since 1800. Artemis, Zurich / Munich 1981, ISBN 3-7608-0540-X , pp. 247–253.
  • Ursula Renner : Margarete Susman . In: Bernhard J. Dotzler , Pamela Moucha (Hrsg.): Fundamentals of literary studies: Exemplary texts. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1999, ISBN 978-3-412-07598-9 , pp. 221-223.
  • Petra Zudrell (Ed.): The demolished dialogue. The intellectual relationship Gertrud Kantorowicz - Margarete Susman or the Swiss border near Hohenems as the end point of an attempt to escape. (Writings of the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck and the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Vol. 4). Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck / Vienna 1999. ISBN 3706513439
  • Charlotte Ueckert : Margarete Susman and Else Lasker-Schüler . European Publishing House, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-434-50212-2 .
  • Martina Steer: "It turned out that the man had no more world to offer her." Margarete Susman and the question of women's emancipation. Winkler, Bochum 2001. ISBN 3930083647
  • Barbara Hahn: The Jewess Pallas Athene. Also a theory of modernity . Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2002 ISBN 3827004446
  • Jürgen Egyptien : Margarete Susman and the George Circle. Personal relationships, poetry theory and femininity design. In: Ute Oelmann (ed.): Women around Stefan George. (Castrum Peregrini New Episode 3). Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 9783835305137 , pp. 157-171.
  • Jürgen Egyptien: Susmann, Margarete. In: Achim Aurnhammer et al. (Ed.): Stefan George and his circle. A handbook , Vol. 1-3. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, here vol. 3, ISBN 978-3-11-018461-7 , pp. 1702-1706.
  • Anke Gilleir, Barbara Hahn (Ed.): Borderlines between poetry, philosophy and cultural criticism. About Margarete Susman. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012 ISBN 9783835310919
  • Kristina Schulz: Switzerland and the literary refugees (1933–1945). Akademie, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-05-005640-1 , pp. 154-166.
  • Elisa Klapheck : Margarete Susman and her Jewish contribution to political philosophy. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-95565-036-0 .
  • Giuliano Lozzi: Margarete Susman ei saggi sul femminile . Firenze University Press, Florence 2015, ISBN 978-88-6655-914-6 .
  • Susman, Margarete. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors. Volume 20: Susm - Two . De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3110269074 , pp. 3–17 (with an extensive catalog of works and bibliography).
  • Thomas Sparr: Susman, Margarete. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 491-493.
  • Martina Steer: '... it turned out that the man had no more world to offer her.' Margarete Susman and the question of women's emancipation. Winkler, Bochum 2001, ISBN 978-3-930083-64-0 .
  • Martina Steer: Margarete Susman. In: Historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): New German biography. Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , pp. 711-712, freely accessible at https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118620096.html#ndbcontent

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. on their relationship to George and his circle Jürgen Egyptien, Margarete Susmann and the George circle (see literature below).
  2. ↑ Margarete Susman, The essence of modern German poetry (see works below) p. 15f.
  3. ↑ Margarete Susmann, Gestalten und Kreise (see works below) pp. 202f.
  4. ↑ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/2895450
  5. ↑ Margarete Susman, The women's problem in the present world. In: “The near and far being of the foreign” (see works below) p. 161.
  6. ↑ Margarete Susman, The Revolution and the Jews. In: From the secret of freedom (see works below) p. 135.
  7. ↑ Margarete Susman, The Bridge Between Judaism and Christianity. In: From the secret of freedom (see works below) p. 19.
  8. ↑ Margarete Susman, The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People (see works below).
  9. ↑ Margarete Susmann, The near and far being of the foreign. Essays and letters (see works below) p. 219.
  10. ↑ See Jürgen Egyptien, Margarete Susmann and the George Circle (see literature below) pp. 161–164.
  11. ↑ See below works.
  12. ↑ hr-online.de
personal data
SURNAME Susman, Margarete
SHORT DESCRIPTION German philosopher, journalist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1966
Place of death Zurich