Paul Eisner

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Pavel Eisner (unknown photographer, 1928)

Paul Eisner (born January 16, 1889 in Royal Vineyards , Austria-Hungary ; died July 8, 1958 in Prague ) was a Czechoslovak publicist, translator and literary mediator.

Life

Paul Eisner was the son of the Jewish businessman Moritz Eisner and his wife Klara. Eisner converted to Protestantism in 1918 . He married Margarete Wagner (1888–1955), a descendant of Richard Wagner , and they had a daughter.

Eisner attended secondary school and after completing a secondary school leaving certificate, he studied Slavic, Romance and German studies at the German University of Prague from 1910 , where he received his doctorate in Czech translations in July 1918 with the dissertation Lessing, Goethe, Schiller (unprinted). During his studies he was friends with both German and Czech writers in Prague, including Franz Kafka and Max Brod among the Germans and František Xaver Šalda and Otokar Fischer among the Czechs.

Eisner headed the translation department of the Czech Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Prague and also worked as an editor in their newsletter. During the German occupation of the Czech Republic in 1939, he was dismissed by the Czech authorities. In the next six years he was threatened with deportation to the concentration camps because of his Jewish origins, but was also protected by the so-called privileged mixed marriage . His friends temporarily hid him in the Nemocnice Na Bulovce Infection Hospital in Prague .

Eisner wrote poems that were printed in Prague newspapers, including the Prager Tagblatt . As a literary critic, he published a large number of essays in the Prague press . He edited anthologies of Czech and Slovak literature that he himself had translated into German. He was able to translate into Czech from thirteen European languages. In 1931 he translated Jaroslav Křička's opera Spuk im Schloss into German for a production at the New German Theater . He is considered to be the first translator of Franz Kafka's works into Czech. Among the German-speaking authors translated into Czech are Alfred Döblin , Louis Fürnberg , Grimmelshausen , Gerhart Hauptmann , Heinrich Heine , Heinrich von Kleist , Thomas Mann , Friedrich Schiller , Theodor Storm , Richard Wagner and Franz Werfel . He worked on a German-Czech concise dictionary.

The University of Naples made him an honorary professor in 1946.

Fonts (selection)

  • Na skále: dvanáct zastavení Máchovských . Prague: Karel Voleský, 1945
  • Marie-Odile Thirouin (Ed.): Correspondence. Rudolf Pannwitz / Otokar Fischer / Paul Eisner . In connection with the German Literature Archive Marbach and the Památník Národního Písemnictví (Prague). Stuttgart: Cotta, 2002 ISBN 978-3-7681-9810-3
Editions and translations into German
  • Folk songs of the Slavs . Leipzig, 1926
  • The Czechs: An Anthology from Five Centuries . Munich: R. Piper, 1928
  • Compatriots. German prose from Czechoslovakia from Adalbert Stifter to Franz Werfel . Prague: State Publishing House, 1930
  • Prague in German poetry . Prague: State Publishing House, 1932
  • František Halas : The old women . Prague: Ms. Borový, 1936
  • Emanuel Lešehrad : Two Cosmic Seals . Prague: Orbis, 1936
  • František Pala (ed.): Josef Bohuslav Foerster . The pilgrim: memories of a musician. Introductory study . Prague: Artia, 1955
  • The Little Bird of Luck and many other Czech fairy tales . Illustrations by Otto Schubert . East Berlin: Altberliner Verlag, 1955
  • Ladislav Šip: On the history of Czech and Slovak music . Prague: Orbis, 1959

literature

  • Eisner, Paul (Pavel). In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 231-237.
  • Tilman Kasten: "an unprecedented moral success in the history of the Czech book". On the genesis and publication history of Jaroslav Durych's (and Paul / Pavel Eisner's) Friedland . In: Slovo a smysl , 12, 2015, pp. 126–154
    • Tilman Kasten: Pavel Eisner a 'Bloudění' Jaroslava Durycha. Literární transfer, tvorba kánonu a identita . Česká literatura 62, 2014, No. 6, pp. 745–783.
  • Ines Koeltzsch; Michaela Kuklová; Michael Wögerbauer (ed.): Translator between cultures: the Prague publicist Paul / Pavel Eisner . Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011, ISBN 9783412205508 [not used here]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eisner, Paul (Pavel) In: Lexicon of German-Jewish authors. Volume 6, Saur, Munich 1998, p. 231.
personal data
SURNAME Eisner, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eisner, Pavel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak publicist, translator and literary mediator
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Royal vineyards
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1958
Place of death Prague