Max Fürst (writer)

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Max Fürst (born June 2, 1905 in Königsberg , † June 21, 1978 in Stuttgart ) was a German writer.

Life

He was born the only son of a German-Jewish family with five children, his father was a businessman. In 1920, together with his childhood friend Hans Litten , he turned to the German-Jewish youth group with social-revolutionary ideas "Black Pile", which until 1927 belonged to the liberal comrades, the German-Jewish Wandering Association and dissolved in 1928. Here he also met his future wife Margot Meisel, with whom he later had two children (Birute Hanna, born on May 27, 1930; Hans Elnis, born on February 18, 1933).

With the decision to leave the Realgymnasium and start an apprenticeship as a carpenter in 1924, he consciously turned his back on the bourgeois Jewish world of his parents' home, left Königsberg in 1925, helped set up a Jewish youth group and founded the advice center “Jugend berät Jugend” in Berlin. In 1933 he and his wife were imprisoned in the Gestapo and later in the Oranienburg concentration camp . After his release in 1934, he had the first and only meeting with his sister-in-law Hilde Meisel , who later became known as Hilda Monte as a resistance fighter. In his work Talisman Scheherazade he set a monument to her.

In 1935 he and his family managed to escape to Palestine . In 1945 his lifelong friendship with the later writer Ludwig Greve began here .

In 1938 all four members of the Fürst family were stripped of their German citizenship ( expatriation list published on May 23, 1938 in the German Reichsanzeiger and Prussian State Gazette ).

In 1950, Max Fürst was able to return to Germany with the help of the Quakers . Zionism and Jewish nationalism as he experienced them did not correspond to his worldview. By Minna Specht that he had met in the 1920s, were Max and Margot Prince a job in the Odenwald School until 1951. Together with HAP Grieshaber was the couple Prince then in the monastery Bernstein in Sulz am Neckar in the Bernsteinschule operate a private art school which served as an academy replacement for artists and art students in the post-war period.

Stolperstein , Zolastraße 1a, in Berlin-Mitte

In 1973 his autobiography Gefilte Fisch appeared , which Heinrich Böll described as a "small miracle". The sequel with Talisman Scheherazade followed three years later . Both books became bestsellers in Germany. Max Fürst worked as a carpenter and furniture restorer in Stuttgart until his death in 1978.

In May 2006 , a stumbling block was laid in front of his former home in Berlin-Mitte , Zolastraße 1a .

Works

literature

  • Markus Malo: Claimed subjectivity. A sketch on the German-language Jewish autobiography in the 20th century. Conditio Judaica series, 74. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2009 ISBN 3-484-65174-1 . Diss. Stuttgart, 2008.
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume II, 1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 350
  • Fürst, Max , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 108

Web links

Commons : Max Fürst  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

notes

  1. ↑ next to W. are dealt with in detail: Werner Kraft , Gershom Scholem , Jakob Wassermann , Ernst Toller , Ludwig Greve , Ruth Klüger and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt .
personal data
SURNAME Prince, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 1978
Place of death Stuttgart