Mela Spira

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mela Spira (born October 10, 1893 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , as Mela Hartwig ; died April 24, 1967 in London ) was an Austrian actress and writer .

Life

Mela Hartwig was a daughter of the sociologist Theodor Herzl, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1895 and took the name Theodor Hartwig . After graduating from high school , she began to study pedagogy in Vienna, but soon switched to the Vienna Conservatory to study singing and acting. From 1917 to 1921 she was active on various stages in Austria and during this time also belonged to the ensemble of the Berlin Schiller Theater . In 1921, at the age of 28, she married the Jewish lawyer Robert Spira . In the same year she left the stage and lived with her husband in Gösting near Graz . There she began her first literary work.

Spira made her debut as a writer in 1927 with the story “Das Verbrechen”. This story was awarded a prize in a literary competition organized by the magazine Die literäre Welt , and through the mediation of Alfred Döblin and Stefan Zweig , Hartwig was able to publish her collection of novels, Ecstases , the following year . In 1929 her novel The Woman is a Nothing was published and, like her novels, caused a scandal. Through her acquaintance with the painter Alfred Wickenburg and the poet Hans Leifhelm , she was also close to artistic circles.

After the connection of Austria to the German Reich in 1938 Mela Spira emigrated with her husband to London, where they make a living as a translator could earn. Through this work she met Virginia Woolf , who gave her a job as a language teacher. In London, Hartwig also became a member of the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad .

After the war, the couple visited Styria twice, but decided to stay in London because of the treatment they received. Mela Spira died there in 1967 at the age of almost 74, shortly afterwards her husband too.

Posthumously experienced the literary work Mela Spira's a small renaissance.

Honors

  • 1929 - Poet Prize of the City of Vienna
  • In 2012, Mela-Spira-Gasse was named after her in Vienna- Donaustadt (22nd district) , and Mela-Spira-Straße in Graz since 2014

Works

  • Am I a superfluous person? Novel. Droschl, Graz 2001 ISBN 3-85420-574-0
  • Ecstasies. Novellas . Ullstein, Frankfurt 1992 ISBN 3-548-30281-5
  • Inferno . 1948
  • Reflections. Poems . Gurlitt , Vienna 1953 (Kleine Gurlitt series, 6)
  • The crime. Novellas and short stories . Droschl, Graz 2004 ISBN 3-85420-659-3
  • The lost dream . 1944
  • Woman is nothing. Novel . Droschl, Graz 2002 ISBN 3-85420-615-1
  • The miracle of Ulm. Novella . Phénix, Paris 1936

literature

  • Spira, Mela. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 10: Güde – Hein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-22690-X , pp. 237-240.
  • Walter Fähnders: About two novels that were not allowed to appear in 1933. Mela Hartwig's “Am I a superfluous person?” And Ruth Landshoff-Yorck's “Novel of a Dancer”. In: Regional cultural space and intellectual communication from humanism to the age of the Internet. Festschrift for Klaus Garber . Edited by Axel E. Walter. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi 2004, pp. 161-190.
  • Ernst Schönwiese: Literature in Vienna between 1930 and 1980 , Amalthea-Verlag, Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-85002-116-5
  • Petra Maria Wende: A forgotten border crosser between the arts. Mela Hartwig 1893 Vienna -1967 London. In: Ariadne. Almanach of the Archives of the German Women's Movement, Issue 31, May 1997, pp. 32–37
  • Hartmut Vollmer: Hartwig, Mela. 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. 191f.
  • Hartwig, Mela , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 463
  • Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager: Exile and literary production: The example of Mela Hartwig , in: No complaint about England? German and Austrian exile experiences in Great Britain 1933–1945, ed. by Charmian Brinson , Richard Dove, Anthony Grenville, Marian Malet and Jennifer Taylor. iudicium Verlag, Munich 1998 (Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London School of Advanced Study, Vol. 72), pp. 88–99
  • Vojin Saša Vukadinović: Afterword. In: Mela Hartwig: Inferno . Graz, Vienna: Literaturverlag Droschl 2018, pp. 196–215.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mela and her sister Greta were awarded to their father after a divorce process; There is no further information about the mother (after Petra Maria Wende, p. 37, fn. 5)
  2. ↑ See the statement by Bettina Fraisl , the author of afterwords to Mela Hartwig's new editions, on confusion due to the name Theodor Herzl in various reviews; ditto in DIE ZEIT, 49/2002 .
personal data
SURNAME Spira, Mela
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hartwig, Mela (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian actress and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1967
Place of death London