Otto Rennefeld

Otto Rennefeld (born January 17, 1887 in Kaldenkirchen , † July 22, 1957 in Köngen ) was an anthroposophical German poet who became known above all in anthroposophical circles. Rennefeld, who went blind at the age of 17, was married to the doctor Ilse Rennefeld , with whom he emigrated to Switzerland during the Third Reich through Company Seven before his Jewish wife was threatened to be abducted. He lived with his wife and their friend Kläre Meumann in a community in Berlin and after the Second World War in Köngen. They lived in what was later known as the Otto Rennefeld House , which developed into a house of cultural encounters.

Life

youth

Otto Rennefeld was born on January 17, 1887, the oldest of three children in Kaldenkirchen am Niederrhein. His father, Otto Rennefeld, was a businessman and came from an artistically open-minded family. His mother Adele was a farmer's daughter from the Eifel and had spent her youth with her uncle Friedrich Wilhelm Weber , the author of the novel “ Dreizehnlinden ”.

A whooping cough in pre-school time led to permanent poor eyesight at Otto Rennefeld. After the family moved to Cologne in 1896, the 9-year-old's eyesight was injured by a punch. As Rennefeld's eyesight decreased noticeably, the parents gave their 16-year-old son to the Düren asylum for the blind in 1903 , where he received school lessons and was trained in broom binding, basket weaving and piano tuning. He was 17 years old when he hit an iron bar and became completely blind as a result. Friedrich Behrmann writes about Rennefeld in a biographical sketch:

“His last eye impression was the red of the evening sun. What he had drunk so devotedly from all natural events in the previous years could only live in memory images, which, however, now deepened internally and later became more and more spiritual, especially through the encounter with anthroposophy. "

At the age of 19, Rennefeld moved to the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Cologne in 1906 , which he left after the death of his father in 1908.

Education

From the winter semester 1908/1909 to the winter semester 1911/1912, Rennefeld studied seven semesters at the Philosophical Faculty of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He took lectures in philosophy, history, German studies and art history and a course on lecture art, which later came in handy when reciting his poems. During his studies, he and fellow students formed a literary association for the care of modern poetry (Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Christian Morgenstern), in which he was spiritually stimulating and leading. The community broke up with the outbreak of World War I because most of his friends died in the war.

From 1910 to 1912 he was able to publish his first poems in the magazines “ Jugend ”, “ Die Schaubühne ” and “ Der Türmer ”. Between 1911 and 1913, Rennefeld published his first volumes of poetry. Through the writer and anthroposophist Hans Hasso von Veltheim , Rennefeld became familiar with anthroposophy during his student days . In 1914 he joined the Cologne branch of the Theosophical Society and heard the first lectures by Rudolf Steiner , the founder of anthroposophy. The recitation of his own poems soon got him noticed in literary circles:

“He impressed not only with the power of words presented like a bard, but - which was to increase in the later work - downright with the force of words, which, however, was always free and never seemed magically compelling. The lot of blindness had awakened inner sounds and images that urged creation. "

Weimar Republic

In 1913 Otto Rennefeld met the Berliner Ilse Bobreker (1895–1984), the daughter of the Jewish grain trader Gustav Bobreker and his wife Emma Bobreker née. Zernik. The occasion of their first meeting was a poetry reading with his poems, which was held at Use's school, the Auguste Victoria School in Berlin. Ilse Brobeker studied medicine in Berlin and Tübingen, together with her friend Kläre Meumann (1894–1980). Both received their license to practice medicine in Berlin in 1920.

Otto Rennefeld and Ilse Bobreker got engaged in Tübingen in 1919 and married a year later on Goethe's birthday on August 28, 1920 in Berlin. Before that, Otto Rennefeld had moved from Cologne to Berlin in 1918 with his mother Adele and sister Leni. The couple and Klare Meumann, the wife's friend, settled in Charlottenburg, first at Kantstrasse 130a, and from 1932 at Suarezstrasse 64. From then on they lived together in a community that was only interrupted for a few years during the Nazi era. Otto Rennefeld's mother Adele, his sister Leni and Ilse Rennefeld's sister Edith lived in the house.

Under Rennefeld's influence, the two friends also became supporters of the anthroposophical movement and took part in Rudolf Steiner's medical courses on holistic medicine in Dornach , Switzerland , in 1921 and 1924 . In their group practice, the doctors practiced medicine on an anthroposophical basis. Initially, they were mainly consulted by patients from the upper middle class in western Berlin. After Countess Eliza von Moltke, also a supporter of the anthroposophical movement, became Ilse Rennefeld's patient, members of the Berlin officer and aristocratic circles also sought medical assistance on her recommendation.

In 1922 two further volumes of poetry by Otto Rennefald were published, one of which was at the suggestion of Rudolf Steiner in the anthroposophical Stuttgart publishing house “Der Kommende Tag”. From 1922 to 1972 over 160 of his poems appeared in the anthroposophical journal “Das Goetheanum”, from 1941 to early 1945 under the pseudonym A. Harfner. During a visit to Dornach around the turn of the year 1922/1923, the couple had to experience the burning down of Steiner's center of the anthroposophical movement, the first Goetheanum . In 1922 Rennefeld met the poet Albert Steffen , who took over the management of the Anthroposophical Society after Steiner's death in 1925 . Both had a lifelong friendship. One year after Rennefeld's death, Albert Steffen published the complete works of Otto Rennefeld together with Ilse Rennefeld and Kläre Meumann.

The “Dreierbund” of the two Rennefelds and their friend Kläre Meumann ran an open house in which concerts, literary readings and work evenings with anthroposophical doctors took place on a regular basis. The two friends bought a piece of land in Spandau near the Havel and had a country house built there for recreation and created a biodynamic flower, fruit and vegetable garden, which they named “Orplid” after a poem by Eduard Mörike. Otto Rennefeld went on many trips with his wife and girlfriend in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Finland, France, England and Russia.

National Socialism and the Post-War Period

For the life of Otto and Ilse Rennefeld under National Socialism and after the Second World War, see: Ilse Rennefeld # National Socialism .

Retirement

In 1957 Otto Rennefeld died in Koengen after almost 37 years of marriage at the age of 70. In 1958 Ilse Rennefeld brought Leni Lamparter, her husband's sister, back from Moscow. She had emigrated to Tbilisi with her husband, an engineer, in 1923 and was deported to Siberia during the war, where she had spent 10 years in a camp. In 1958 the two friends brought out a three-volume complete edition of Otto Rennefeld's poems together with Albert Steffen. Klare Meumann died in 1970 at the age of 86 after 10 years of illness and care from her friend, with whom she had been a close friend for 72 years. Ilse Rennefeld held office hours until she was 87 years old. She died at the age of 88 on January 1, 1984 in Koengen.

Fonts

• Otto Rennefeld: Regina: a seal. Berlin: Oesterheld, 1912.
• Otto Rennefeld: Poems: half soul; Chiaroscuro; Pictures & ballads. Berlin: Oesterheld, 1912.
• Otto Rennefeld: The melody of light. Berlin: Oesterheld, 1913.
• Otto Rennefeld: Companions of the Morning: Sun Children; Moon dreamer; Earth seeker. Oldenburg: Stalling, 1922.
• Otto Rennefeld: First siblings: sun dancers, moon jugglers, earth wallers. Stuttgart: The Coming Day, 1922.
• Otto Rennefeld: A homeless person: three books of poetry with an epilogue from a book of poems for the dead. Basel: Geering, 1945.
• Otto Rennefeld: Seals: seven books in three volumes; Companions of the morning; Hymns of the sun and the melody of light; the transformation of the demon; the stranger; the lonely mountain hiker; the riddle of the rose; a homeless person; the homecoming of man. With a foreword by Albert Steffen . Munich-Unterhaching: Verlag Die Rose, 1958.

literature

• Friedrich Behrmann: From the life and work of the poet Otto Rennefeld. In: Das Goetheanum, volume 66, 1987, pages 167-170. - See also: #Matile 2017 .
• Olaf Daecke: Culture - Art - Economy: Portraits of the Baden-Württemberg region of Köngen and Wendlingen. Stuttgart: Schneider Editions, 2016, pages 50–52, 278–299, 317–319.
• Friedrich Hiebel (editor): Register of authors of the weekly “Das Goetheanum”, year 1-61, 1921–1982, Dornach: Goetheanum, 1983, page 167, pdf . - Poems by Otto Rennefeld: 179-180, poems from 1941 to the beginning of 1945 under the pseudonym A. Harfner: page 168, multiple entries on Otto Rennefeld by other authors.
• Heinz Matile: Otto Rennefeld, pdf . - Abridged and supplemented after #Behrmann 1987 . With literature list.
• Winfried Meyer: Company Seven: a rescue operation for those threatened by the Holocaust from the Foreign Office / Defense in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Frankfurt am Main: Hain, 1993, pages 82-98.
• Peter Selg (editor): Anthroposophic Doctors: Paths of Life and Work in the 20th Century; with a sketch on the history of anthroposophic medicine up to the death of Rudolf Steiner (1925). Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2000, page 200.
• Peter Selg: Ilse Rennefeld: An anthroposophical doctor of Jewish origin in exile in the Netherlands (1939–1942). Arlesheim: Ita Wegman Institute, 2017.
• Peter Selg: Ilse Rennefeld (1895–1984). Career, escape and rescue of an anthroposophical doctor of Jewish origin. To evaluate an extensive estate. In: Annual Report of the Ita Wegman Institute, 2017, pages 9–25, pdf .
• Friedrich Kempter (editor): In memory of Otto Rennefeld. Poems / Otto Rennefeld. Dornach / Switzerland: Verlag für Schöne Wissenschaft, 1965.
• Regulations for students at the Royal Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn. Bonn: Carl Georgi, 1892, § 3, page 4, regulations .

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Rennefeld in the catalog of the German National Library .
• Poems by Otto Rennefeld in the magazine "Die Drei" .
• Otto Rennefeld in the German Literature Archive in Marbach .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Otto Rennefeld's father died in 1908. - Cologne address book .
2. ↑ # Behrmann 1987 , page 167.
3. ^ Matriculation of the University of Bonn . - Rennefeld was taken in accordance with § 3 of the regulations from October 1, 1879 which regulated the admission of students without school-leaving certificate, see #Vorschriften 1892 .
4. ↑ # Behrmann 1987 , p. 168.
5. ↑ German Literature Archive in Marbach - Kallías .
6. ↑ #Rennefeld 1912.1 , #Rennefeld 1912.2 , #Rennefeld 1913 . - The "Poet Awards" of the Johannes Fastenrath Foundation and the Paul Kuczinsky Foundation, which Rennefeld received for his first works after #Matile 2017 , were "honorary gifts " to support writers in need and not literary awards.
7. ↑ # Behrmann 1987 , p. 168.
8. ↑ #Matile 2017 .
9. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , page 10.
10. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pages 10–11, #Meyer 1993 , page 90.
11. ↑ #Meyer 1993 , page 90. - Countess Eliza von Moltke (1859–1932) was the widow of the former chief of staff of the imperial army Helmuth von Moltke ("Moltke the Younger"). He was the nephew of the famous General Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke ("Moltke the Elder") and personal adjutant of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
12. ↑ #Rennefeld 1922.1 , #Rennefeld 1922.2 .
13. ↑ # Hiebel 1983 .
14. ↑ # Rennefeld 1958 .
15. ↑ The villa was on the Weinmeister height in Spandau, address: To Haveldüne 4, Show Map .
16. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pages 17-18.
17. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pages 25, 10, #Daecke 2016 , pages 284–286, 290.