Max Mell

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Max Mell (born November 10, 1882 in Marburg an der Drau (now Maribor , Slovenia ), † December 12, 1971 in Vienna ) was an Austrian poet.

Life

Max Mell memorial plaque on the house where he lived and where he died, Vienna 13. Donated by the Josef Weinheber Society for his honorary member
Gravesite of Max Mell

Max Mell was the son of the lawyer Alexander Mell and his wife Marie Rocek. The future actress Mary Mell was his sister. His brother-in-law was the painter and set designer Alexander Demetrius Goltz .

Mell came to Vienna in 1886 at the age of four, where his father had taken over the management of a home for the blind.

After a humanistic education at what is now Kundmanngasse High School , Mell studied German and art history at the University of Vienna . He completed this course in 1905 with a dissertation on Wilhelm Waiblinger . Mell made his poetry debut during his studies.

Mell did not belong to any literary circle, but neither did he initiate his own "school". He was friends with Felix Braun , Hans Carossa , Hugo von Hofmannsthal (long correspondence) and Anton Wildgans .

From 1916 Mell took part in the First World War as a one-year volunteer and then experienced the collapse, which had a strong impact on him. At the suggestion of Viktor von Geramb , he engaged in festival and folk plays and thus received inspiration for his own literary production, which combined the mysterious with the extremely realistic.

Mell was a supporter of Austrofascism in the 1930s . In 1933 he and other Austrian authors demonstratively resigned from the PEN Club , since the latter had condemned the book burning in Germany in May 1933 , and thereby committed himself to the national camp. In 1937 he was promoted to president of the " Association of German Writers Austria ", which was close to the Nazi regime during the period of prohibition, and after the Anschluss he published in various Nazi anthologies such as the "Confession Book of Austrian Poets" in 1938, which enthusiastically welcomed the "Anschluss" .

Mell's relationship to National Socialism is, however, to be assessed ambiguously: he refused the proposed leadership of the Reichsschrifttumskammer Vienna. In 1940, Joseph Goebbels issued a performance ban for Mell's drama Das Spiel von den Deutschen Anhnen and in the following year for Sieben gegen Theben . In 1940 Goebbels also opposed the award of the Grillparzer Prize to Max Mell; after the advocacy of the literary scholar Josef Nadler , Mell finally received the award. On June 1, 1940, Mell was accepted into the NSDAP , but withdrew his application for membership. However, he maintained a good relationship with Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach , who also awarded him the Ring of Honor of the City of Vienna on the occasion of his 60th birthday. In 1944 he published in the National Socialist Bozner Tagblatt . After the end of the war, Mell was exempted from the obligation to register in the course of denazification , as he claimed in an application that he only wore the NSDAP badge as protection against hostility and, for example, saved his fellow writer Wladimir Hartlieb from persecution and the 87-year-old Baroness Gabriele Oppenheimer helped me leave the country. He was able to prove both in letters from Hartlieb and Oppenheimer from 1942.

After 1945 he became one of the most prominent representatives of Catholic poetry in Austria.

In the 13th district of Vienna in 1985 in the district part of hacking at the Erzbischofgasse named the Max-Mell-Park after him. In 2013, in the research report Street Names Vienna since 1860, Mell's National Socialist attitude was discussed as political places of remembrance (see here , p. 202). In Graz-Geidorf there is a Max-Mell-Allee (including the address of the university sports center) ⊙ . In 2018, a commission from the city of Graz classified the Max-Mell-Allee there as historically highly questionable.

His final resting place is in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 32C, number 58) in an honorary grave of the City of Vienna .

Awards

Works (in selection)

Poetry

  • The wreathed year , 1911
  • Poems , 1919
  • Poems , 1929

Stories and short stories

  • Latin short stories , 1904
  • The three graces of the dream , 1906
  • Jägerhaussage and other short stories , 1910
  • Barbara Nader's cattle stall , 1914
  • The glasses , 1916
  • Hans Hochgedacht and his wife , 1920
  • The Easter celebration , novella in verse, 1921
  • Morning paths , stories and legends, 1924
  • My brother and I , 1933
  • The Danube Female , 1938
  • Adelbert Stifter , 1939
  • Styrian song of praise , 1939

Plays

  • Wiener Kripperl from 1919 , 1921
  • The Guardian Angel Game , 1923
  • The apostle game , 1925
  • The Discipleship Game , 1927
  • Seven against Thebes , 1931
  • The game of the German ancestors , 1935
  • The Nibelunge Not , 1951
  • Joan of Arc , 1956

As editor

  • Heroic deeds of the German masters 1697-1914 . Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1915 - Austrian Library 2
  • The Austrian lands in poetry . Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1915 - Austrian Library 14

literature

  • Encounter with Max Mell, ed. v. Margret Dietrich u. Heinz Kindermann. Vienna u. a .: Böhlau. 1982. ISBN 3-205-07192-1
  • Christoph Heinrich Binder: Max Mell. Contributions to his life and work. Graz: (Styrian regional government). 1978. (= works from the Styrian State Library ; 16)
  • Christoph Heinrich Binder: Greater German Desires and National Socialist Reality. Max Mell's attitude from 1933 to 1945. In: Blätter für Heimatkunde (Graz) 63 (1989) I, 3-9.
  • Christoph Binder:  Mell, Max. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 17-19 ( digitized version ).
  • Isolde Emich: Max Mell. The poet and his work. Attempt at an interpretation. Vienna: Amandus-Verl. 1957.
  • Vajda György: Mells Jeanne d'Arc and Paul Claudel. In: Numinoses and holy things in Austrian literature , ed. v. Karlheinz F. Auckenthaler. Bern u. a .: Lang 1995. (= New Yorker contributions to Austrian literary history; 3) ISBN 3-906753-88-3
  • Paul Anton Keller : triumvirate. Josef Weinträger, Max Mell, Josef Friedrich Perkonig. Encounters, memories. Maria-Rain: Verlag Bertl Petrei . 1963.
  • Renée Liliane Stahel: Max Mells tragedies. Zurich: Juris Dr. u. Ed. 1967.
  • Tragedy and Harmony, ed. v. Christoph Heinrich Binder. Vienna u. a .: Böhlau. 1984. ISBN 3-205-07239-1
  • Walter Troxler:  Max Mell. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 16, Bautz, Herzberg 1999, ISBN 3-88309-079-4 , Sp. 1051-1058.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Time of liberation. Wiener Theater after 1945. Ed. Hilde Haider-Pregler u. a. Vienna: Picus 1997. ISBN 3-85452-413-7
  • Jan Zimmermann: The culture prizes of the FVS Foundation 1935 - 1945. Presentation and documentation. Edited by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation FVS Hamburg: Christians 2000

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Association of German Writers Austria (ed.), Confessional Book of Austrian Poets, Krystall Verlag, Vienna 1938
  2. ↑ a b Vienna's street names since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 202f, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
  3. ↑ Karin Gradwohl-Schlacher et al .: "Through our hard work this country became German and we want to preserve it German". Styrian literature under National Socialism . Edition Strahalm, Graz 1988, p. 18.
  4. ↑ Bozner Tagblatt , issue of September 28, 1944, p. 2 (online at digital.tessmann.it )
  5. ↑ 20 “highly questionable” street names in Graz. In: steiermark.orf.at . March 23, 2018, accessed March 26, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Mell, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian playwright and poet
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Maribor
DATE OF DEATH December 12, 1971
Place of death Vienna