Moritz Reich

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Moritz Reich (born April 20, 1831 in Rokitnitz i. Adlergebirge , † March 26, 1857 in Stiebnitz ; actually Moses Josef Reich ) was a German-Bohemian writer .

Life

Moses Josef Reich, who later called himself Moritz (or Moriz), grew up as the youngest of five siblings in the Bohemian Eagle Mountains on what was then the Bohemian-Prussian border. In the mountain village of Rokitnitz, his father Joachim Reich was a slaughterer and prayer leader for the Jewish community. His mother Caroline, called Golde, came from the Rhineland.

Although the family lived in modest circumstances, Moritz Reich was able to attend high school in Reichenau ( Rychnov nad Kněžnou ).

From 1847 he continued his studies in Prague. Here he earned his living as a tutor and wrote his first poems, articles and short stories. The acquaintance with Seligmann Heller , who was the same age and to whom he was a close friend, was important for his further career . Heller valued Reich's talent highly and offered to share the accommodation with him and to earn a living for two, so that Reich could devote himself to writing. Reich had been unsuccessful as a tutor and, like his mother and one of his sisters, had contracted tuberculosis, which is why Heller's offer helped him in more ways than one.

At the beginning of 1852 Moritz Reich met the doctor and writer Alfred Meißner in Prague . Meißner became Reich's most important mentor and sponsor.

In 1853 Reich moved to Vienna. Here he lived in modest to poor conditions of articles and feature pages that he wrote for various Austrian and German daily newspapers and magazines. The magazine Unterhaltungen am domestic stove published by Karl Gutzkow in Dresden publishes , among other things, Reich's novellas “Nur ein Schreiber” (1854). The short novella “Veilchen” (1854) appears in the Viennese magazine Salon, the stories “Mariechen” and “Mammon auf den Bergen” (1856) also appear in the Pest-Ofener Zeitung, as well as “Das Jägerhaus” and “Das Jägerhaus” in the Austrian Lloyd. Child trafficking ”(1855).

Reich tried to publish dramas or offer them to theaters, but was unsuccessful. For some time, Alfred Meißner tried to find a publisher for all of Reich's short stories and novellas. Finally, the publisher Carl Bellmann in Prague agreed to publish a collection of Reich's stories. When Moritz Reich learned of this success from Alfred Meißner at the end of 1856, he was already too weakened by illness, poverty and failures to be able to draw strength from it again.

In March 1857, Reich traveled to his home in the Eagle Mountains. Here he obviously experienced some disappointments among friends and family. Reich was last seen on March 26 in the Zdobnice area, where he was staying at a friend's house. Reich's body was found on April 6, 1857; he had taken his own life. Alfred Meißner took care of the organization of his literary estate. He added an extensive foreword to the collection of Reich's stories, which was published at his instigation by Carl Bellmann in Prague in 1858, with an extensive foreword, which forms the basis of all subsequent research on Reich's life and work.

Work and meaning

The stories of the now almost forgotten empire are an important part of German-Bohemian literature, whose representatives include Adalbert Stifter , Josef Rank , as well as Uffo Horn , Moritz Hartmann , Leopold Kompert , Isidor Heller and Jacob Kaufmann .

The stories of the villages make up the most important part of Reich's work. These include novellas such as “Mammon in the Mountains”, “The Hunter on the Mountains”, the night plays, including “Veilchen”, “Half Caspar” and his humoresques (“The Cabinet”, “The Uncle from Petersburg”). Compared to the village history of Berthold Auerbach or Adalbert Stifter, Reich's stories are short and little elaborated. They often depict family and neighborhood conflicts that end in a most tragic, even brutal way. Reich's contemporaries, however, valued his careful observation of the mountain dwellers, who become hard and callous through poverty and hardship.

The short novella “The child trafficking” depicts an important aspect of the coexistence of Germans and Czechs in Bohemia. Two farmers exchange their children so that they can learn the language and farm work from the other. At the end of the story, the sons have to pay with their lives for an argument between the fathers that has been going on for years.

Reich addresses Jewish life in his short night play "Veilchen". Veilchen, daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant, succeeds in getting engaged to a teacher she has chosen against her father's resistance. After the father finally agrees to the marriage, Violet's feelings change, she despairs of her decision and kills herself the night before the wedding. This irritating psychological study with its enigmatic ending shows Reich's narrative power and his special style, which distinguishes him from his contemporaries.

Works

  • Reich, Moritz: At the border . From the estate of Moritz Reich. Ed .: Meißner, Alfred. Carl Bellmann's Verlag , Prague 1858.
  • Reich, Moriz: Selected Works . In: Rudolf Fürst , Society for the Promotion of German Science, Art and Literature, Böhmen (Hrsg.): Library of German writers from Böhmen . 1st volume. Prague, Vienna, Leipzig 1894.
  • Mammon in the mountains . In: German Novellenschatz . Edited by Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz. Vol. 9. 2nd ed. Berlin, [1910], pp. 1-45. In: Weitin, Thomas (Ed.): Fully digitized corpus. The German Novellenschatz . Darmstadt / Konstanz, 2016. ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )

literature

personal data
SURNAME Reich, Moritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reich, Moses Josef (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Bohemian writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1831
PLACE OF BIRTH Rokitnitz i. Eagle Mountains
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 1857
Place of death Stiebnitz