Otto Zoff

Otto Zoff (born April 9, 1890 in Prague , † December 14, 1963 in Munich ) was an Austrian writer who spent around 20 years as an emigrant in the USA. During his lifetime he was particularly successful with dramas and historical monographs , but is now as good as forgotten.

life and work

The Zoffs family moved to St. Pölten in 1892 and then to Hainfeld , where his sister Marianne was born. The father, Otto Andreas Zoff, was a senior railway inspector. The son studied art and literary history in Vienna from 1906. In 1914 he received his doctorate as Dr. phil. His friends include the writers Felix Braun and Max Mell and the art historian Leopold Zahn . During the First World War , Zoff went to Berlin, where he wrote for various newspapers and magazines, as an employee of the Berliner Tageblatt , the Berliner Börsenkurier and the magazines Neue Rundschau , März , Kunst und Künstler , Wieland and others. a. He was also an editor at S. Fischer Verlag from 1916 to 1917 . In 1917 Otto Falckenberg brought him to the Münchner Kammerspiele as a dramaturge . After two years he became deputy director there (until 1923). Zoff made his literary debut in 1919 with the novel Winterrock . In 1923 he achieved greater success with a free adaptation of Eichendorff's comedy Die Freier , which was played on almost 100 stages.

Gambling

Such processing remains Zoff's strength. He is now establishing himself as a freelance writer and director. From 1931 onwards, Zoff lived mainly in Italy. In 1933 he met Liselotte Kalischer in Berlin. She is significantly younger than Zoff and will be his third wife. Both are politically more left-wing; Zoff is also half-Jewish. They decide to flee Germany because of the increasingly threatening situation. They initially live in Milan , where Liselotte and her sister run an institute for movement therapy. In Germany, Zoff's books are burned and banned. In 1938 Liselotte Zoff gave birth to a daughter, called Stanzi. “Meanwhile Otto was busy with roulette. He and Guido von Kaschnitz , Marie Luise's husband, had decided to only follow their spiritual calling and no longer do bread-and-butter work, but earn money playing games. ”Zoff mostly lost. When the war breaks out, the three Zoffs are in Nice (Zoff often visits Walter Benjamin in Sanremo ). As the German Wehrmacht is getting closer, Liselotte's ex-husband Ludwig Köbner succeeds in obtaining a danger visa in the United States. In 1941 the Zoffs landed in New York . Zoff can live for a while in MacDowell Colony , an artists' colony in New Hampshire. Liselotte bears the main burden of nutrition through her therapeutic work. Zoff often meets with friends such as Alfred Neumann , Helene and Kurt Wolff (publishers), Hermann Kesten , and Bertolt Brecht , who was married to Zoff's sister Marianne for the first time, but he does not join any group and remains a loner. Liselotte suspects that he was afraid of the role of the loser, since he found it difficult to write creatively throughout his life. “He worked a lot, had a great deal of knowledge and was immensely educated. But he lacked spontaneity. ”Apart from the early work, she misses“ a unity with his person ”in Otto's work. "Otto's great ability was to see poetry in what was there, to work on what was there and to empathize with the work of a poet."

The heart is on strike

After the Second World War , Zoff worked as the New York correspondent for Südwestfunk Baden-Baden and the feature pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Trips to Europe fail first because of Joseph McCarthy's suspicion (no passports), then because of a lack of money. “We were only able to drive in 1953 when a rich friend gave us the money,” reports Liselotte. Your best German friend lives in Munich: Lonja Stehelin-Holzing , the sister of Marie Luise Kaschnitz . Her husband's “affairs” only offend Liselotte because of the secrecy in which they take place. In these later years Zoff was successful again with a few dramas, first and foremost King Hirsch . In 1961 the Zoffs stayed in Germany because Otto had a heart condition. He died in his sleep on the night of December 13-14, 1963. Liselotte emphasizes that she has no regrets and that she would marry Otto again in her next life. His books are, if at all, only available in antiquarian fashion. The estate is in the Marbach literature archive .

Works

• The house on the road , Roman, Frankfurt / Main 1913.
• Dungeon and redemption , tragedy, Munich 1918.
• The snowstorm , tragedy, Munich 1919.
• The winter rock , Roman, Munich 1919.
• Poems , Leipzig 1920.
• The life of Peter Paul Rubens , Munich 1922.
• The suitors , comedy, after Joseph von Eichendorff , Leipzig 1923.
• The devotion to the cross , play, after Pedro Calderón de la Barca , Potsdam 1925.
• The lovers , Roman, Berlin 1929.
• The white gloves , comedy, Berlin 1930.
• Roses and forget-me-nots , comedy, Berlin 1933.
• The Huguenots , monograph, Leipzig 1937, Konstanz 1948, Weimar 1949 (also several translations).
• Franz Schubert , biography, Salzburg 1939.
• They Shall Inherit the Earth , on Children under Fascism, New York 1943.
• The great composers: seen by their contemporaries , Bern 1952, Düsseldorf 1960, Zurich 1965 (Swedish 1966).
• König Hirsch , comedy, based on Carlo Gozzi , Vienna 1959.
• The bells of London , dream game, after Charles Dickens , Vienna 1960.
• Diaries from emigration: 1939–1944 , with an afterword by Hermann Kesten , ed. From the estate. by Liselotte Zoff and Hans-Joachim Pavel (Head of the Munich Drei-Masken-Verlag), Lambert Schneider Verlag, Heidelberg 1968, 293 pp.

As editor

• 1809 documents from Austria's war against Napoleon . Insel Verlag, Leipzig, Austrian Library 6 (1915)

Zoff also wrote radio plays; Moreover, he gave anthologies out

literature

• Ulrike Keller: Otto Zoff's dramatic works: from theater to radio play , Munich 1988.
• Ulrike Edschmid : This side of the desk. Life stories of women writing men , Frankfurt / Main 1990, ISBN 3-630-61908-8 , therein pp. 149–187: Liselotte Zoff. A small opening to the light .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hartmut Binder, Peter Mast: Brennpunkt Berlin , p. 294.
2. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid 1990, p. 175.
3. ↑ writers-block ( memento of March 5, 2001 in the web archive archive.today ), accessed on March 1, 2011
4. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid 1990, p. 168.
5. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid 1990, p. 177.
6. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid 1990, pp. 179-184.
7. ↑ Ulrike Edschmid 1990, pp. 181-182.
8. ↑ According to Liselotte Zoff (Ulrike Edschmid 1990, p. 184) they reveal little of the “essence” of the author.

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Zoff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Otto Zoff at litkult1920er.aau.at , a project of the University of Klagenfurt