Paul Fechter

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Paul Fechter 1933

Paul Fechter (born September 14, 1880 in Elbing , † January 9, 1958 in Berlin ) was a German theater and art critic , editor and writer .

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on Franziusweg 48, in Berlin-Lichtenrade
Paul Fechter's gravestone at the Lichtenrade cemetery in Berlin-Lichtenrade

Paul Fechter was the son of a long-established bourgeois and craftsman family in Elbing / West Prussia . His younger brother was the marine engineer Admiral (Ing.) Hans Fechter .

Fechter graduated from high school in 1899. This was followed by a degree in architecture, mathematics and physics. In 1905 he received his doctorate from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Dr. phil.

From 1906 to 1910 Fechter was the features editor for the Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten , from 1911 to 1915 for the Vossische Zeitung . He became known to a larger audience through his book Der Expressionismus , published in 1914 , a style that he later advocated.

During the First World War he worked in the press department Upper East in Vilnius . There he met u. a. on Arnold Zweig , Herbert Eulenberg , Richard Dehmel , Hildebrand Gurlitt , Oskar Kühl , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Magnus Zeller , Hermann Struck (painter) . This is where the relationship with Cornelia Gurlitt, Hildebrand Gurlitt's older sister, comes about, who finally came to an end when Cornelia Gurlitt committed suicide in May 1919.

After the First World War , Fechter was again a feature editor at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . He left the DAZ in the fall of 1933 in the early days of National Socialism to found the weekly German Future with Fritz Klein and Peter Bamm , of which he remained co-editor until 1940. From 1933 to 1942, Fechter edited the Deutsche Rundschau together with Rudolf Pechel . From 1937 to 1939 he was editor of the Berliner Tageblatt . In 1939 he returned to the DAZ's feature pages .

Between 1937 and 1941 he wrote for the monthly “ Weiße Blätter” by Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg . From 1938 on, Fechter was a member of the Wednesday Society , a "learned and sociable group for scientific entertainment", in which, since 1939, key protagonists of the Hitler assassination of July 20, 1944, namely Ludwig Beck and Johannes Popitz , the Wednesday Society as a whole did not coincide with the group of conspirators. Fechter describes the Wednesday society in his book People and Times , published in 1948 . Encounters from five decades.

Are mainly known fencer three literary histories from the years 1932, 1941 and 1952. In his history of literature from 1941 he commented conformist Nazi and stylized Hitler's Mein Kampf to a literary work of art: " The book that all the various tendencies and trends of the major Nazi Movements summarized in itself, which most sharply completes the transition to the new form of speaking to the reader and thus creates the basis of literature, [...] is Adolf Hitler's confession book ›Mein Kampf‹ . "

His comedy The Magician of God was to have its world premiere on November 2, 1941 in Koenigsberg , the premiere was postponed to January 11, 1942 and banned after the dress rehearsal. According to Fechter's own statements, this happened at the direction of the Reich Propaganda Ministry and at the insistence of the SS and SD . The premiere then took place on October 23, 1948 in the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg.

In September 1943, as he describes it in his book, Fechter was summoned to the Berlin District Court by the Reich Association of the German Press on charges of “being an enemy of the National Socialist worldview”. According to Fechter, the cause was his work on a book about Barlach in 1935, the comedy Der Zauberer Gottes , as well as the overall impression that led to him being put on the “party's black list”. However, Fechter was able to avoid the process with the help of Minister Johannes Popitz and lawyer Carl Langbehn due to their relationships with SS-Obergruppenführer Müller .

After the Second World War , Fechter wrote, among other things, for the features section of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . In the German Democratic Republic , Fechter's History of German Literature ( Knaur , Berlin 1941) was placed on the list of literature to be discarded. In recent years he has been working on a biography of the befriended West Prussian sisters Siewert, the writer Elisabeth Siewert and the painter Clara Siewert , the completion of which he postponed in favor of a revision of his manuscript on "European Drama". His unfinished fragment of the Siewert biography was published by Carl Lange in the West Prussia yearbook in 1964 after his death .

Fechter's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar .

Fonts

  • Expressionism. Reinhard Piper, Munich 1914.
  • Walking hours in Vilnius . oO, 1915 under the pseudonym Paul Monty
  • The tragedy of architecture. Lichtenstein, Weimar 1922 (2nd edition).
  • Six weeks in Germany. Bibliographisches Institut AG, Leipzig 1936
  • The waiter. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, Berlin 1940.
  • The magician of God. A comedy , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1940.
  • History of German Literature. Knaur, Berlin 1941.
    • Revised new edition: Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1954.
  • People and times. Encounters from five decades. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1948.
  • At the turn of time. People and encounters. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1949.
  • Small dictionary for literary conversations. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1950.
  • All power to women. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1950.
  • Between the lagoon and the Vistula. Years of youth. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1954
  • German East. Pictures from West and East Prussia. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1955. (The little book; 76)
  • People on my way. Encounters yesterday and today . Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1955.
  • West and East Prussia. Pictures from the German East. Mohn, Gütersloh 1962. (The small book; 76; 1st edition under the title German East. )

literature

  • Paul Fechter. In: Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 1: A-G. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 .
  • Paul Fechter. In: German Biographical Archive (DBA) , (New Series), Munich 1989–1993.
  • Andreas Zeising: revision of the view of art. Paul Fechter and the art criticism of the press during National Socialism. In: Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters , Barbara Schellewald (eds.): Art history in the “Third Reich”. Theories, methods, practices. Akademie, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-004448-4 , pp. 171-186.
  • Andreas Zeising: Paul Fechter: "Expressionism" . In: Uwe Fleckner, Maike Steinkamp (ed.): Juggler festival under the gallows. Expressionism between "Nordic" modernism and "degenerate" art (= writings of the Research Center Degenerate Art , Vol. 9). De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-036338-8 , pp. 96-101.
  • Günther Cwojdrak : The Fechter case. A polemic. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1955.
  • Rüdiger Frommholz:  fencer, Paul Otto Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 39 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Paul Fechter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas Zeising: revision of the art view. Paul Fechter and the art criticism of the press during National Socialism . In: Ruth Heftrig u. a. (Ed.): Art history in the “Third Reich”. Theories, methods, practices. Akademie, Berlin 2008, p. 171, ISBN 978-3-05-004448-4 .
  2. ↑ Paul Fechter: People and Times. Encounters from five decades . Gütersloh 1948, pp. 365-417.
  3. ^ A b Paul Fechter: History of German Literature. From the beginning to the present . Th. Knaur, Berlin 1941, p. 758; Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 147.
  4. ^ A b Paul Fechter: People and Times. Encounters from five decades , Gütersloh 1949, p. 387.
  5. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-f.html
  6. ^ Paul Fechter: The European Drama. Spirit and culture in the mirror of the theater. 3 volumes, Mannheim 1956–1958.
  7. ^ Paul Fechter: The Siewerts. In: Westpreußen-Jahrbuch , Landsmannschaft Westpreußen (ed.), Volume 14, 1964, pp. 63–65. See also the following remarks by the editor Carl Lange, pp. 65–68.
  8. ^ Portal literary travel guide through Vilnius : Fechter, Paul (1880-1958)
personal data
SURNAME Fencer, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fechter, Paul Otto Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater critic, editor and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Elblag , West Prussia, Prussia, Germany, today Elbląg, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Poland
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1958
Place of death Berlin , Germany