Otokar fisherman

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Fischer's literary-psychological approach and his work as a theater consultant - all'ermeneutica - are currently unproven

This article is about the translator, literary scholar and dramaturge Otokar Fischer. For the magician see Ottokar Fischer .

Portrait of Otokar Fischer

Otokar Fischer,
caricature by Hugo Boettinger (1917)

Monument to Otokar Fischer

Otokar Fischer (born May 20, 1883 in Kolín , Austria-Hungary , † March 12, 1938 in Prague ; pseudonyms: Otakar Skála , Ben Amort, Bratr Morf, Norbert Krenn, O. Frey, Pavel Horák ) was a Czech translator , literary scholar , Writer and dramaturge .

Fischer belonged to the pragmatic generation of 1914. He studied German , Romance studies and comparative literature in Prague and Berlin , was a lecturer at Charles University , where he was also appointed dean in 1933 , and was a dramaturge at the Prague National Theater ( Národní divadlo ) and later Director of the theater. With his wife, the painter Vlasta Vostřebalová-Fischer (1898–1963), born Boskowitz , he had the son Jan Otakar Fischer (1923–1992).

Life

Otokar Fischer, who came from a Jewish family, was the son of a German-Czech factory owner and brother of the philosopher and resistance fighter Josef Fischer . In 1895 the family moved to Prague, where the father hoped for a financially better future. In Prague, Fischer attended the secondary school in Royal Vineyards (today: Vinohrady ), where he graduated from high school in 1901. After graduating from high school, Fischer, who grew up bilingual, attended both lectures at the Czech University and lectures at the German University of Prague. Fischer's professors included Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk at the Czech university and August Sauer at the German university. Between 1903 and 1904 Fischer studied for a year in Berlin and received his doctorate in Prague in 1905 with his thesis on HW v. Gerstenberg's reviews in the Hamburgische Neue Zeitung 1767–1771 .

After completing his doctorate, Fischer began to work as an intern in the Prague University Library (today: National Library of the Czech Republic ) and was eventually promoted to assistant to the director. At the same time, Fischer taught as a private lecturer at Charles University , where he completed his habilitation in the subject of the history of German literature in 1909 with Die Träume des Grünes Heinrich and was appointed associate professor in 1917 .

Between 1911 and 1912 Fischer was briefly a dramaturge at the Národní divadlo , but was forced to resign after public protests against his program. The main criticism was that Fischer wanted to perform a play by Friedrich Hebbel , who had previously written an anti-Czech poem and had therefore fallen out of favor with the Czech population.

After the First World War , Fischer was appointed to Charles University in Prague in 1919 and was also a visiting professor in Ghent between 1926 and 1927 . On his return to Prague in 1927, Fischer was appointed professor of German literary history and five years later dean of the faculty of philosophy. Fischer, who initially had a negative attitude towards Judaism , appeared early on as a staunch opponent of National Socialism and joined several aid associations. In addition to some associations to support German and Austrian exiles, Fischer was also a member of the Committee Výbor pro pomoc Demokratickému Španělsku , which supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War .

From autumn 1935 Fischer worked again as a dramaturge at the Národní divadlo and during this time expanded his research focus to include 19th and 20th century Czech literature .

Works

see also list of Czech writers

Fischer devoted himself to monographs on German writers ( Heine , Kleist and Nietzsche ) and wrote literary studies on Hebbel , Kraus , Strindberg , Wedekind , Březina , Čelakovský , Šalda and Vrchlický . He also wrote poems, the best known of which are the collections Voices ( Hlasy , first published in 1923) and Rings ( Kruhy , first published in 1921). He wrote about the difficulties of the Jews in his book Enlightened Windows ( Ozářená okna ) , published in 1916 .

In his theoretical works he used the literary-psychological method. He published essays on cultural policy , reviews and translations in the magazines Národní listy ( national newspaper ), Právo lidu ( popular law ), Scéna , Prague press and Lidové noviny . He also worked as a theater advisor for the Volkszeitung. He published his essays in the book Seele und Wort ( Duše a slovo , first published in 1929) and Wort und Welt ( Slovo a svět , first published in 1937).

Less well known are his dramatic works The Przemyslids ( Přemyslovci , first published in 1918) or Slaves ( Otroci , first published in 1925). He made a name for himself as a translator of Goethe's Faust, works by William Shakespeare , Rudyard Kipling , Molière , François Villon , Heinrich Heine and others.

Web links

Commons : Otokar Fischer  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Otokar Fischer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature and other media by and about Otokar Fischer in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fischer, Otokar. In: Common Authority File (GND). GND cooperative, accessed on April 13, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t} V. Petrbok: Fischer, Otokar (Ottokar). In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon from 1815 (2nd revised edition). Institute for Modern and Contemporary History Research, November 25, 2016, accessed on April 13, 2020 .