Otto Alscher

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Otto Alscher (1880–1944)
The photo was probably taken in 1933/1934.

Otto Alscher (born January 8, 1880 in Perlasz , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary , † December 29, 1944 in Târgu Jiu , Kingdom of Romania ) was an Austrian and Romanian-German writer. In the history of literature he is also mentioned as "a German poet of Hungary". He was particularly well known for his animal stories and descriptions of animal life.

Origin and family

Otto Alscher was born as the eldest of three children of a photographer in Perlasz, a military border community . In 1891 the family settled in Orschowa and opened the region's first photo studio there. Otto Alscher married the literarily ambitious kindergarten teacher Leopoldine Elisabeth Amon (alias Else Alscher ) in 1904 ; the marriage had three children. Alscher later left his family and lived in a relationship with the twenty years younger teacher Elisabeth Amberg, who had five children.

Life

Alscher attended the Hungarian school and completed an apprenticeship as a graphic artist in the kk teaching and research institute for photography and reproduction processes . Alscher was close to nature, revered Nietzsche and made contact with the Viennese bohemian circles . He became a writer and journalist and after his marriage he built a house in the Gratzka valley, near Orschowa, where he lived and worked. From 1911 he worked as a journalist in Budapest . Here he worked for various daily newspapers such as Pester Lloyd in the feature section and for a time held a leading position at the Budapest Tageblatt , where he promoted German authors such as Nikolaus Schmidt, Johann Eugen Probst and Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn .

In 1915 Alscher was called up for military service. Initially he had propagated the First World War , but later developed into an opponent of the war. After his service at the front, he was retired in 1916 because of malaria and then worked in the press. From 1918 he was editor of the Banater Bauernblatt . He worked for the Belgrader Zeitung and from 1919 worked as an editor for the German daily newspaper in Budapest. He was also a member and secretary of the German People's Council , where he campaigned for the rights of the German minorities in Hungary and for the annexation of Banat to the Kingdom of Romania . For political reasons he had to leave Budapest and then worked in Timișoara for the daily newspaper Deutsche Wacht and then for the newspaper Schwäbische Volkspresse . Here he was together with Franz Xaver Kappus - with whom he had previously worked - an advocate for Germanism in the region. On the occasion of a ceremony of the Chamber of Culture of the German Ethnic Group in Romania on January 16, 1943 in Timișoara, " People's Group Leader " Andreas Schmidt awarded him the honorary title of a Cultural Council "in view of the high merits in the field of cultural achievement" .

Alscher then returned to the house in Gratzka. During the Second World War , Romania sided with the Allies after the royal coup in August 1944 . Alscher was interned in Târgu Jiu in September . According to his daughter Edith, he escaped in October 1944 and walked about 100 km home, but was arrested again in downtown Orschowa and died a short time later in the internment camp in Târgu Jiu.

plant

The love for nature is characteristic of Alscher's stories. Alscher is represented in the streams - seven stories by recent poets from 1919 with the short story "The Dogs". Alscher confronts his characters with an existential decision during an Arctic expedition. In the feeling of being part of the laws of evolution, the narrator attributes the failure of the collaboration between researchers and sled dogs to the fact that abstract thinking people are not familiar with the nature of the landscape and that of the sled dogs.

A synthesis of human and animal experiences occurs in the novel Gogan und das Tier, published in 1912 , which is indicated by a timeless voice in Gogan's inner monologue. As the train travels through the native landscape, the protagonist (Alscher's alter ego) anticipates its realization as “a moment and a soul”. The novel was preprinted in 1912 by the expressionist magazine Der Brenner . Also in 1912, the novel's hunting scene appeared in the anthology The 26th Year of S. Fischer-Verlag.

In 1917 Alscher's first volume with animal stories, Die Kluft, Calls from People and Animals, was published by Albert Langen (Munich). Both the predator figures and the dogs , which Hermann Hesse selected as "newer poetry", as it says in the preface, are superior to humans in their perception and their moral decisions.

In 1919/20 Alscher followed up on the aesthetic and ethical standards of the Vienna Secession with the sequel novel Fighters . Here, on the one hand, his characters allow themselves to be involved in the interplay between the art of living and the struggle for existence in nature; on the other hand, grotesque animal and human figures languish against the background of a bourgeois backdrop.

The volume Tiergeschichten.Tier und Mensch stands in the tradition of animal history in world literature. Here he uses themes of nature and the human-animal relationship, similar to Jack London . Alscher's broken toe tells of a wolf who killed a hunter's dog and betrays himself through the tracks he left in the snow. Alscher's pursuers are about territorial fights between humans and animals. In The Terrible is about the "terrible" invincible son of a captive mother eagle. The eagle terrifies a village while its mother is held captive. This text was published along with London 's reputation sounds and chased by wolves

In 1936 the author was criticized for his ideologically inappropriate interpretation of Nietzsche, which is why Albert Langen-Verlag rejected the manuscript of the novel Two Murderers in the Wilderness , which had already been published in sequels , although Alscher made concessions to a nationalistically arrogant ideology with the character representation of the ethnically correct couple had made.

In 1944 Alscher combined his premonition of death with an idyllic and endangered dream landscape in The Bear in the Summer Blessing and The Bear in the Fruit Blessing . The prose is identical, but in Der Bär im Sommersegen a poem is inserted that moves the experience of nature into an unreachable distance.

The work Die Bärin appeared on Alscher's comeback in the 21st century . Nature and animal stories from Transylvania , a volume with wild animal short stories, a decisive impulse. In 2003 the anthology From the Life of Animals was published. The most beautiful stories from all over the world in Das Beste mit Alscher's works Die Bärin and Mein Freund Walter, der Uhu.

Publications (selection)

  • Gypsies. Novellas, Langen Verlag, Munich, 1914
  • How we live and lived. Stories, Kulturverband Timisoara-Temeschburg, 1915
  • The gap. Calls from people and animals , Langen Verlag, Munich, 1917
  • Belgrade diary. Features from occupied Serbia 1917–1918, (Ed. Franz Heinz ), Kriterion-Verlag, 1975
  • Animal and Human , A. Langen, Munich 1928
  • Interlude in the moonlight. Animal stories , (with Heinz Stanescu), Bucharest Youth Publishing House, 1967
  • The street of the people and other stories , Bukares literary publishing house, 1968
  • Gogan and the Beast , novel, Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest, 1970
  • The lion killer. A primeval world novel , Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest 1972
  • The Enigma of a Wolf , Ion Creangă Publishing House, Bucharest, 1975
  • Animal and hunting stories , Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest, 1977
  • The way out of the woods. Animal u. Hunting stories , Ion Creangă Publishing House, Bucharest, 1980
  • Busy night. Animal and hunting stories , (Ed. Franz Heinz), Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest, 1981
  • Stories , Verlag Landsmannschaft der Banater Schwaben, Munich, 1995, ISBN 973-97541-2-0
  • The she-bear. Nature and animal stories from Transylvania . (Ed. Helga Korodi), Verlag Natur + Text, Rangsdorf, 2000, ISBN 978-3-9807627-0-0
  • I'm a Refugee , Roman, Wentworth PR, 2918, ISBN 978-0341544845

Literature (selection)

  • Essays by Helga Korodi:
    • Beyond civilization - Otto Alscher was born 120 years ago , Südostdeutsche Vierteljahresblätter, Verlag Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Munich, 2000
    • The she-bear. Nature and animal stories from Transylvania , Verlag Natur & Text, Rangsdorf, 2000
    • The mountain failed its blessing , Südostdeutsche Vierteljahresblätter, Issue 3 Verlag Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Munich, 2002
    • The Deceptions of the Wilderness , Südostdeutsche Vierteljahresblätter, Issue 2, Verlag Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Munich, 2003
    • Otto Alscher's water impressions in a philosophical context , presentation on the occasion of the 2nd international EASCLE conference, Klagenfurt 2006
    • Otto Alscher between Vienna and the Banat, between the Alps and the Carpathian Mountains , Verlag Natur & Text, Rangsdorf, 2009
    • Otto Alscher's walks through the Carpathian Mountains of Kakania
    • Otto Alscher's special aesthetic path , case study, Verlag Otto Sagner: Bibliothek und Medien 35, 2015
    • A moment and a soul. In the work of Otto Alscher
  • Franz Brümmer : Lexicon of German poets and prose writers from the beginning of the 19th century to the present, 8th volume, supplements to 1st – 8th centuries. Band, Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig, 1913
  • German-Austrian literary history. A handbook on the history of German poetry in Austria-Hungary, ed. by Eduard Castle, Volume 4, 1890–1918, p. 1460
  • Magyar irok elete es munkai,, p. 449, Gulyas Pal, 1939
  • Who's it Our contemporaries, Ed. Herrmann AL Degener , 10th edition, 1935, p. 274
  • Waldemar Oehlke : Contemporary German Literature , Deutsche Bibliothek Verlagsgesellschaft, 1942, p. 275
  • Kürschner's German Literature Calendar , with Nekrolog 1901–1935 and 1936–1970, vol. 29–52, Gruyter, Berlin, 1907–1952
  • Literature lexicon, authors and works in the German language, Ed. Walther Killy . Vol. I., Bonn: Bouvier, 1950 and 1988, pp. 110-111
  • Gero von Wilpert : German poet lexicon. Biographical-bibliographical dictionary on German literary history (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 288). 3rd, expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-520-28803-6 , p. 112.
  • Biographical Lexicon of the Banat Germans, Anton Peter Petri , 1992, Sp. 19-20
  • German Biographical Encyclopedia, Ed. Walther Killy. Vol. 1. 1995-1999, p. 113 Munich, Saur
  • Lexicon of German-language writers: From the beginnings to the present (Kurt Böttcher, H. Greiner-Mai , Harald Müller and others), Olms, Hildesheim, 1993, vol. 2: 20th century

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Kulturportal West Ost | Alscher, Otto. Retrieved September 19, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c Austrian Biographical Lexicon: Otto Alscher. Retrieved September 20, 2019 .
  3. ^ Klaus Popa : Alscher Otto (1880-1945). In: Völkisches Handbuch Südosteuropa, 2012.
  4. ↑ Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung (Hermannstadt and Temeschburg) 16th episode of January 22, 1943, p. 4. In: Klaus Popa : Alscher Otto (1880-1945). In: Völkisches Handbuch Südosteuropa, 2012.
  5. ↑ The dogs. In: Hermann Hesse , Richard Woltereck (Hrsg.): Strömungen , Verlag der Bücherzentrale für German prisoners of war, Bern, 1918.
  6. ↑ Gogan and the Beast . S. Fischer Verlag , Berlin, 1912.
  7. ↑ Helga Korodi: Otto Alscher's hike through the Carpathian Mountains of Kakania. 2012, accessed September 29, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Animal Stories: Animal and Man. Albert Langen, Munich 1928, translated into Dutch: "Dier En Mensch Schetsen Van Otto Alscher, Vertaald Door, 'Lamp', Uitgave Van De NVUitgevers-Maatschappi - AE. E. Kluwer-Deventer-"
  9. ↑ In: The Wolfsschlucht . Chronos - Animal Series, Gustav Spielberg Chronos Verlag, Berlin 1949.
  10. ↑ The most beautiful animal stories in the world . 3rd edition Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer in cooperation with Kriterion Bucharest, based on an edition in 1958 obtained by Alfred Margul Sperber.
  11. ↑ From the life of animals. The most beautiful stories from all over the world . The best, Stuttgart, Zurich, Vienna 2003.
  12. ↑ Reader's Digest, project management: Erwin Tivig, Stuttgart, Zurich, Vienna, 2003.
  13. ↑ Reader's Digest, project management: Erwin Tivig, Stuttgart, Zurich, Vienna, 2003.
  14. ↑ Otto Alscher's walks through the Carpathian Mountains of Kakania , case study, Helga Korodi
  15. ↑ Helga Korodi (ed.): A moment and a soul - e-book. ( Memento from October 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), Cultural Foundation of German Displaced Persons, Bonn
personal data
SURNAME Alscher, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Perlasz , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1944
Place of death Târgu Jiu , Kingdom of Romania