Maria Kahle

This article is about the writer Maria Kahle. For people with similar names, see Marie Kahle .

Maria Kahle (born August 3, 1891 as Maria Keßler in Wesel , † August 15, 1975 in Olsberg / Sauerland ) was a völkisch German writer and partisan of the Nazi regime.

Life

Empire and Weimar Republic

Maria Kahle was the daughter of a railway official and spent the first twelve years of her life in Wulfen / Westphalia. In 1908 the family moved to Olsberg ( Ruhr ). After attending elementary and commercial school as well as private music and language studies, Maria Kahle worked as an office worker in Münster / Westphalia . In 1913 she went to Brazil to visit an aunt who lived there. She made contact with the German colony in Brazil. After the beginning of the First World War made it impossible for her to return to Europe in 1914 , she trained as a journalist and worked as an editor for the German-language newspaper Der Urwaldbote in Blumenau . She was particularly committed to the concerns of the German settlers in her host country. Towards the end of the war, she spent a period of retreat in the interior of Brazil. From 1919 she was a foreign correspondent in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo , and she also went on lecture tours throughout South America , the proceeds of which she donated to the " Ostmarkhilfe " which she founded .

From 1920 Kahle stayed again in Europe , where she continued her lecture tours. In the following years she was active in the völkisch-national movement of the Weimar Republic and came into contact with the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic " Young German Order ", for which she was an editor at the Kassel daily newspaper Der Jungdeutsche from 1924 to 1926 . In 1923, after the failed Hitler-Ludendorff putsch , she wrote a poem Adolf Hitler , which she equated with the Prussian anti-French officer Schill , as did Hitler with a “blazing heart” with unfortunately failed “liberation sword”, among whose “disciples” she too "Once" will belong.

At the end of the 1920s, like Josefa Berens-Totenohl , Christine Koch and Heinrich Luhmann , she joined the völkisch Sauerland Artists' Circle (SKK) founded by Georg Hermann Nellius . In the following years, the circle was headed by Hans Menne , NSDAP member since 1924. After the transfer of power, the SSK was viewed by the NSDAP as a representative association of the Sauerland culture bearers. The “National Socialist Revolution” filled its members “with great joy”, as they announced in a joint declaration in the Westphalian Central-Volksblatt of the center . The SKK was a member of the Rosenbergs Kampfbund for German culture . Steffen Stadthaus from the literature commission of the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association sees her together with Josefa Berens-Totenohl as a “political activist” in the national scene. Her poem Volk, Freiheit, Vaterland (1927) offers an insight into her poetological perspective during these years .

In 1928 she worked as a factory worker for a while as a student.

National Socialism

She celebrated the transfer of power with exuberant words and in the sense of a future aggressive state expansion, since "Adolf Hitler ... from early youth had held the holy conviction" that state borders are not national borders and that Germany extends further than the borders of the German Empire. "Unbelievably great things" happened in 1933, she declared in her text The German Woman and Her People . "We" - the German population was meant to the exclusion of the "non-German" minorities - had been awakened by a "strong leader out of an overwhelming love for Germany".

Kahle was one of the staunch propagandists of the new regime, for which she gave speeches to “ethnic Germans” on a trip to South America in 1934 and which she supported unconditionally until the end of the Second World War . In 1939 she applied for membership in the NSDAP and was admitted in 1940. Before that, she was a member of two associations affiliated with the party, the Deutsches Frauenwerk and the Volksbund für das Deutschtum Abroad . For this as well as z. B. for the “ National Socialist Community Kraft durch Freude ” (KdF) she undertook numerous propaganda lecture tours. As early as 1935 the VDA honored her “ethnic German” efforts by awarding its highest award, the “Silver Plaque”, and in the same year she was personally received by Rudolf Hess, Reich Minister and “Deputy Leader”.

In 1941, Kahle and other regional authors such as Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Heinrich Luhmann or Fritz Nölle declared themselves "soldiers of the word" in a war confession by Westphalian poets in the Nazi magazine Heimat und Reich , the central organ of Westphalian cultural and literary policy .

From 1942 Maria Kahle suffered from a serious illness, as a result of which she had to severely limit her literary activities.

Maria Kahle began writing religious and nature poetry under the impression of her stay in Brazil . Her works from the 1920s and 1930s, which thematically often deal with German abroad , but also with their Westphalian homeland, are shaped by their national and racist worldview.

After the end of National Socialism

It was not until 1949 that Kahle applied for denazification and at that time claimed to have "neither had a party member ... nor any office in party organs". She was a "candidate without membership card 1942". You had to endure a "feud ... by the party" and the "struggle of the [German] women and ... [their] boycott". In a list of her publications between 1923 and 1942 she was limited to 14 harmless titles. She submitted declarations of discharge from, among others, Josef Bergenthal , Friedrich Castelle , Christine Koch and Wilhelm Münker . The denazification committee took over her information about her alleged non-membership in the NSDAP, claimed that Kahle had "demonstrably served the home movement and the poor" as a writer and speaker "and categorized her as" exonerated "(category V).

In the Soviet occupation zone and the German Democratic Republic , many of her writings were placed on the list of literature to be segregated.

After 1945, Kahle switched to writing non-political literature for young people and homeland .

After the writer was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1957, her earlier positive appreciation has given way to critical analysis. In 1994 it was said that she had fought the Weimar constitutional state “offensively and publicly and full-time”, had opened up to anti-Semitism and represented “a biological-racist image of society”. As recently as 1943, she had put forward “system-stabilizing perseverance slogans”.

Reception in public files, criticism, withdrawals

"Maria Kahle School" in Schwäbisch Gmünd (2011)

• 1936: A school in Schwäbisch Gmünd is named after the author
• 1937: Second recipient of the Westphalian Literature Prize, which was awarded every two years from 1935 to 1943 and endowed with 10,000 Reichsmarks, after Josefa Berens-Totenohl and ahead of Karl Wagenfeld , Heinrich Luhmann and Christine Koch
• 1952: Proposal by the Wulfen local community to name the street after Kahle, which is not implemented for unknown reasons.
• 1957: Federal Cross of Merit
• 1960: Awarded the Agnes Miegel plaque from 1959 to 1993 by the “Tatenhauser Kreis” (Warendorf) for “services to East German culture and the integration of the displaced”. The forerunner of the award was an Agnes Miegel plaque awarded by the Nazi cultural community since 1936.
• 2004: Publication of a text by Kahle in the Heimatbuch Wulfen - history and present , compiled by the history group of the Wulfen Heimatverein

After 1945, streets in various Westphalian towns were named after Kahle, but in recent times some have been renamed again in view of the recipients' Nazi involvement, such as Sundern and Olsberg in 2013. In Olsberg, Josef Rüther , a left-wing Catholic publicist who was subject to restrictions and arrests during National Socialism, was the new namesake. A discussion in the 1990s about the renaming of a street in Dorsten-Wulfen after her ended with the rejection of the proposal.

In Schwäbisch Gmünd, the name was withdrawn in 2010. Opposition came in 2013 from one of the Pius Brotherhood , known for its anti-Semitic traditions, known as the Catholic Youth Movement . It was said that Kahle was "denounced post mortem" by the spiritual descendants of the 68ers. Only "initially" was she a Nazi supporter, since she mistakenly considered the Nazi movement to be "a deeply religious movement". In defense of Kahle as a “popular” poet, the author refers to the prominent Catholic anti-Semite Julius Langbehn and, on the question of naming, to the criticism of the right-wing magazine Junge Freiheit of “politically correct cleansing” of Nazi-polluted names.

An undated biographical representation of the Münster University Library (around 2013) counts Kahle as "intensely" or "strongly" "committed" to the German "völkisch-national movement " of the time and then from 1933 as an "important propagandist of the Nazi regime". This is supported by the "religiously disguised folk ideas" that she widespread, but which she represented before and after 1933 without a break.

A web publication published in 2014 by numerous experts on Westphalian literary history gave it a consistently critical assessment both from a literary perspective (with reference to the “serious literary criticism”: “Schwulst”) and from a historical perspective.

Fonts

• German Fleet Song , Rio de Janeiro 1915
• Love and Home , São Paulo 1916
• German poetry in Brazil , Blumenau 1917
• German words , São Leopoldo [u. a.] 1917
• Hail, Queen! Mönchengladbach 1921
• Primeval forest flowers , Mönchengladbach 1921
• Am Rhein , Kassel 1923
• Ruhrland , Mönchengladbach 1923
• People, freedom, fatherland , Hagen 1923
• People crucified , Kassel 1924
• Corpus Christi in an old German town , Mönchengladbach 1927
• Judas , Mönchengladbach 1928
• From Jesus and his mother , Mönchengladbach 1928
• Pieceworker , Gladbach-Rheydt 1930
• German Volkstum in the World , Weimar 1930
• Proletarian , Weimar 1931
• Bleeding borderland and German loyalty , Paderborn 1933
• German brothers and sisters abroad , Paderborn 1933
• German people abroad , Oldenburg 1933
• The German woman and her people , Warendorf 1934
• Germans across the borders , Halle 1934
• German heroism beyond the borders , Paderborn 1934
• German women abroad and in the colonies , Leipzig 1937
• German homeland in Brazil , Berlin 1937
• German heart between home and foreign , Münster i. W. 1937
• Our Westphalia , Münster i. W. 1937
• Settlers at Itajahy , Reutlingen 1938
• Westphalian farmers in the East , Berlin 1940
• Green mountainous region between Ruhr and Sieg , Iserlohn 1941
• Sauerland mountain home , Iserlohn 1941
• Detour via Brazil , Berlin 1941
• The school in the jungle , Berlin 1942
• German heart between home and foreign , Münster 1943
• What the turtle said , Reutlingen 1950
• Girls in the jungle , Freiburg 1953
• Land of high forests , Bielefeld 1954
• Wolter von Plettenberg , Münster i. W. [u. a.] 1955
• The legend of the prisoner son , Münster i. W. 1956
• The trip to Brazil , Göttingen 1958
• Heart of the woman , Münster i. W. 1959
• Paradise lost , Emsdetten i. W. 1960

Translations

• Pedro Sinzig: Buried alive? Freiburg im Br. 1922

literature

• Peter Bürger : The national wing of the Sauerland homeland movement. About Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Georg Nellius, Lorenz Pieper and Maria Kahle - at the same time a contribution to the street name debate. Eslohe 2013, pp. 48–64, 67–70, PDF
• Peter Bürger (ed.): Maria Kahle (1891-1975), propagandist in the service of the National Socialists - Contributions by Hans-Günther Bracht, Peter Bürger, Karl Ditt , Walter Gödden , Wolf-Dieter Grün, Roswitha Kirsch-Stracke, Werner Neuhaus, Iris Nölle-Hornkamp and Friedrich Schroeder. Eslohe 2014, PDF
• Erasmus Raabe: Maria Kahle, the German seer and singer . Paraná 1934
• Johannes Stöber: List of ancestors of the Westphalian poet Maria Kahle . Cologne 1990

Web links

• Literature by and about Maria Kahle in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Maria Kahle  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about Maria Kahle in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Maria Kahle in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Regional personal lexicon on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Maria Kahle
• Maria Kahle's estate in the University and State Library of Münster

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-71832004000200007
2. ↑ Hans-Günther Bracht, Maria Kahle - as a local poet and publicist, a pioneer of National Socialism ?, in: Peter Bürger, Der völkische Flügel der Sauerland Heimatbewegung. About Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Georg Nellius, Lorenz Pieper and Maria Kahle - at the same time a contribution to the street name debate, in: daunlots. Internet contributions from the Christine Koch dialect archive at Museum Eslohe, No. 60, Eslohe 2013, pp. 63–71, here: p. 67, see: [1] .
3. ^ Peter Bürger, The völkisch wing of the Sauerland homeland movement. About Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Georg Nellius, Lorenz Pieper and Maria Kahle - at the same time a contribution to the street name debate, in: daunlots. Internet contributions from the Christine Koch dialect archive at Museum Eslohe, No. 60, Eslohe 2013, see: [2] .
4. ↑ Steffen Stadthaus, Heinrich Luhmann. Homeland poet and National Socialist ?! Expert opinion on behalf of the city of Hamm, o. O. (Hamm) o. J. (2012), p. 5, see: [3] .
5. ↑ All information in this section based on: Steffen Stadthaus, Heinrich Luhmann. Homeland poet and National Socialist ?! Expert opinion on behalf of the city of Hamm, o. O. (Hamm) o. J. (2012), see: [4] .
6. ↑ Steffen Stadthaus, Heinrich Luhmann. Homeland poet and National Socialist ?! Expert opinion on behalf of the city of Hamm, o. O. (Hamm) o. J. (2012), see: [5] .
7. ↑ Full text see here: Erika Richter, Theodor Pröpper - Maria Kahle. A letter exchange worth considering, in: HP des Sauerländer Heimatbund (SHB), see: Archived copy ( memento of the original from May 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
8. ↑ Maria Kahle, Maria Kahle tells of her visit to the German settlers in Brazil (series: German Brothers, No. 7), Paderborn 1935.
9. ↑ Maria Kahle: The German woman and her people. Warendorf 1934.
10. ↑ Hans-Günther Bracht, Public appearance and teaching materials show Maria Kahle as a people's propagandist in the service of National Socialism (1933-1937), in: Peter Bürger, Der völkische Flügel der Sauerland Homeland Movement. About Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Georg Nellius, Lorenz Pieper and Maria Kahle - at the same time a contribution to the street name debate, in: daunlots. Internet contributions from the Christine Koch dialect archive at Museum Eslohe, No. 60, Eslohe 2013, pp. 72–78, here: p. 78, see: [6] ; See also your denazification documents in: Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, NW 1.090-327.
11. ↑ Regionales Personenlexikon, article Maria Kahle .
12. ↑ See e.g. B. Münster University Library, Maria Kahle estate, in: [7] .
13. ↑ Maria Kahle back home, in: Heimat und Reich 1935, p. 35.
14. ↑ Kleine Rundschau, in: Heimat und Reich 1935, p. 447.
15. ^ ^{A b} Maria Kahle in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
16. ^ Wilhelm Vernekohl, war confession of Westphalian poets, in: Heimat und Reich, born 1941, p. 124 f.
17. ↑ Regionales Personenlexikon, article Maria Kahle .
18. ↑ polunbi.de
19. ↑ polunbi.de
20. ↑ polunbi.de
21. ^ Hans-Günther Bracht, Maria Kahles Work in the Völkisch Movement, Part I. and II., In: Strunzerdaal 13, 1994, no. 1, pp. 9-11; H. 2, pp. 68f.
22. ↑ Birgit Markert: Driven by wanderlust and homesickness . In: Gmünder Tagespost , August 15, 2006.
23. ↑ WulfenWiki, Lemma Maria Kahle , see: [8] .
24. ↑ Regionales Personenlexikon, article Maria Kahle .
25. ^ Literaturportal Westfalen, Schauplatz-ABC, keyword Hörste-Stockkämchen , see: [9] .
26. ↑ Embarrassing! Wilhelmshaven will soon be the only city with an Agnes Miegel school. Headwind, April 1, 2009, accessed October 20, 2017 . 
27. ↑ WulfenWiki , Lemma Maria Kahle , see: [10] .
28. ^ Peter Bürger, The völkisch wing of the Sauerland homeland movement. About Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Georg Nellius, Lorenz Pieper and Maria Kahle - at the same time a contribution to the street name debate, in: daunlots. Internet contributions from the Christine Koch dialect archive at Museum Eslohe, No. 60, Eslohe 2013, see: [11] .
29. ^ Culture committee without ifs and buts for a renaming , Westfalenpost, June 2, 2013.
30. ↑ Maria-Kahle-Strasse is to become Josef-Rüther-Strasse. (No longer available online.) Bigge-online, February 16, 2013, archived from the original on October 20, 2017 ; accessed on October 20, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
31. ↑ [12] .
32. ↑ The Maria Kahle School was renamed overdue . In: Gmünder Tagespost , August 19, 2010; Remove the name Maria-Kahle . ( Memento from January 31, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Gmünder Tagespost .
33. ↑ Andreas Weißinger: "And every sharp thorn wore red rose florets". The Catholic poet Maria Kahle . 2013, see: [13] .
34. ^ Nachlass Maria Kahle, Zur Person, around 2013, see: [14] .
35. ↑ Christine-Koch-Museum together with the Kreisheimatbund Olpe and “Bunt statt Braun - Menden Initiative for Street Renaming” (Ed.), Maria Kahle (1891-1975), propagandist in the service of the National Socialists, contributions by Hans-Günther Bracht, Peter Bürger , Karl Ditt , Walter Gödden , Wolf-Dieter Grün, Roswitha Kirsch-Stracke, Werner Neuhaus, Iris Nölle-Hornkamp and Friedrich Schroeder. daunlots. internet articles from the christine-koch-dialect archive at the eslohe museum, no. 71, Eslohe 2014, pp. 20, 28, 63, 77, see: [15] .
36. ↑ Christine-Koch-Museum together with the Kreisheimatbund Olpe and “Bunt statt Braun - Menden Initiative for Street Renaming” (Ed.), Maria Kahle (1891-1975), propagandist in the service of the National Socialists, contributions by Hans-Günther Bracht, Peter Bürger , Karl Ditt , Walter Gödden , Wolf-Dieter Grün, Roswitha Kirsch-Stracke, Werner Neuhaus, Iris Nölle-Hornkamp and Friedrich Schroeder. daunlots. internet articles from the christine-koch-dialect archive at the eslohe museum, no. 71, Eslohe 2014, pp. 20, 28, 63, 77, see: [16] .