Paul Ilg

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Paul Ilg (born March 14, 1875 in Salenstein , TG ; † June 15, 1957 in Romanshorn TG) was a Swiss writer .

Life

Paul Ilg suffered from the stigma of his poor origins throughout his life . Although he repeatedly received literary recognition, he was unable to establish himself permanently in the literary business of his time. He mostly lived in difficult financial circumstances and was always looking for sponsors. These experiences also shape Ilg's socially and socially critical work, which often deals with “that a child who was degraded, humiliated, homeless, homeless, socially disadvantaged by means of business, art and love on the bend and break in the higher spheres, the apparent areas of happiness society, where castles and silver-fringed hotel halls try to cover up memories of poor childhood, trying to rise. "

Childhood, youth and years of professional travel

Paul Ilg wandered through the Appenzellerland as a peddler.
Linocut by Otto Schmid

Paul Ilg was born in Salenstein as the illegitimate son of the farmer's daughter and factory worker Marie Ilg. In the first three years of his life he grew up on his grandparents' farm and after their death he was sent to relatives in Rehetobel as a contracting boy . He also had to work as a peddler in Appenzellerland before he fled to his mother in Rorschach in 1886 at the age of nine . A short time later, the two moved to St. Gallen, where Ilg also attended secondary school. After a scholarship to attend a high school was rejected, Ilg began one after the other a locksmith, cooking and commercial apprenticeship, which he broke off again shortly after the start. An apprenticeship at the bank in French-speaking Switzerland also failed. At the age of 20, Ilg finally found a job as a clerk for a property speculator in Zurich and began to write his first texts. At the age of 21 he was offered a position as secretary of the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896 . At that time Ilg was also a member of the newly founded FC Winterthur , and from October 1897 to April 1898 its fourth president. The budding writer also left a club song that he had composed. Ilg continued to find work as an advertising copywriter at Maggi in Kempttal ; it had set up its own advertising and press office as early as 1886, which had hired Frank Wedekind , then 22 , who was still completely unknown as a writer, to head the office . Paul Ilg said: “I worked out lectures on the benefits of Maggi products that our travelers had to give housewives, and I also wrote little newspaper articles and dialect poems in praise of the soup flavoring . [...] Ten years earlier, Frank Wedekind, who has since become famous as a poet, held this position in the Maggi house for a short time. Why shouldn't I also succeed in making a name for myself as a freelance writer and finding a good living? "

Writing and family

Berlin, 1914, a «racing turntable»

On the recommendation of Ludwig Binswanger , Ilg became an editor at the Berliner Woche in 1902 and lived mostly in Berlin until 1914 , where he worked as a freelance writer and magazine editor. Looking back on his arrival in the cosmopolitan city, he wrote: “I fit into that big business like a milker in a general assembly. Nevertheless, I tried to find ground with all my motherhood. Merciful Heaven! For me this floor was more like a speeding turntable, a dizzying dance bike, from which after about two years of convulsive exertion I was thrown rather helplessly onto the hot pavement of the cosmopolitan city. " During his time in Berlin, Ilg began to publish his first texts and in particular processed his difficult childhood and youth into a tetralogy of novels ( "Das Menschlein Matthias" , "Die Brüder Moor" , "Lebensdrang" , "Der Landstörtzer" , 1906-13) which also brought him a wide audience in Germany. He was sponsored by Annemarie von Nathusius , with whom he traveled to the Engadine, the Riviera and northern Italy and lived together in Munich in 1904 and 1905, in a financially distressed situation . From 1914, Ilg lived in Switzerland again, but repeatedly moved to Germany. However, he finally left the country when the National Socialists came to power . In Zurich he married Frieda Alwine Gertrud in 1918 and their son Kaspar, who later became a painter, was born three years later. In 1925 the marriage was divorced again and Ilg married Elise Hausammann, with whom he stayed until his death.

Old age in Uttwil

Paul Ilg's retirement home in the guest house of the «Villa Sternheim», Uttwil

Finally in 1939 Ilg and his second wife accepted the invitation of the writer Emanuel Stickelberger to Uttwil and settled in the village on Lake Constance. Mare Stahl , an activist in the literary scene, described Uttwil as “Little Ascona on Lake Constance” after the Second World War, and even the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde , who bought a house there in 1919, dreamed of founding an artists' colony in Uttwil . Although van de Velde's dream did not materialize, Uttwil repeatedly attracted artists. For example, the writer René Schickele , the pacifist Annette Kolb and the playwright Carl Sternheim , who later built a villa on the lake shore, where he and his wife Thea Künstler lived, followed. Already in 1925 and 1926 Ilg had got to know Uttwil and the Sternheims through stays, which received guests like the author Klaus Mann or the painter Conrad Felixmüller . The Uttwil furniture manufacturer Nicolas Schubert remembered: “He [Paul Ilg] stayed with his blond boy in the rural inn by the lake. Often one saw the two dissimilar figures, Ilg and Sternheim, walking through the streets of the village or sitting in the hotel garden. The one with a half-bald, narrow-cut head, wedged into a suit that always seemed too tight, accompanying his words with nervous torn gestures. The other, more casual, bohemian and more down to earth. " Years later, Walter Kern , Davos’s traffic director , became the new owner of the Sternheim villa with its servant's house. He made the small house on his property available to Ilg and his wife as an apartment from 1942. Ilg met regularly with his host and patron Kern, the entrepreneur and writer Emanuel Stickelberger and other friends once a week for literary soirées in the “Bad Uttwil” restaurant. In the "Dichterhäuschen" himself he revised his four life novels into an autobiography, of which "Das Menschlein Matthias" was filmed in 1941 by Edmund Heuberger . Until his death in 1957 Paul Ilg lived with his wife in the simplest conditions and interest-free in the guest house of Walter Kern's "Villa Sternheim". His estate is now in the Swiss Literary Archives .

effect

Contemporary authors have repeatedly compared Ilg's work with Gottfried Keller in terms of its effect ; Kurt Münzer wrote : “I believe that only a Swiss who is so firmly established can put people so firmly on earth. It is not only strong, tough people, but also delicate, fragile, lyrically fine people. Gottfried Keller is the wonderful source from which all young Swiss draw. But Ilg is neither an imitator nor actually a student, but a human being in whom there is only Keller's strength. " Or Ludwig Finckh : «Ilg is a real poet; he gives truth, bluntly rough reality, but transfigured by genuine art. His figures are excellent and full of life, his language is full of powerful, simple sound. "

The motivation and source of inspiration for Ilg's writing was always his own social advancement; Topics such as “ambition”, “to get high” or the almost insurmountable “border between rich and poor” are constants in his work. The literary scholar Martin Stern : "Ilg's heroes come from below without exception, want to rise and show their success."

The central work consists of the four volumes “Das Menschlein Matthias” , “Die Brüder Moor” , “Lebensdrang” and “Der Landstörtzer” (1906 to 1913), which describe Ilg's youth and wandering time in the sense of the development novel. The Germanist and literary critic Charles Linsmayer says of his artistic strength: "The depiction of his childhood in the novel ' Das Menschlein Matthias' is still one of the most touching depictions of young people in Swiss literature."

Ilg's pacifist novel “The Strong Man” (1916), which caricatures a fanatical Swiss militarist and deals with militaristic tendencies in Switzerland during the First World War , was received negatively in Switzerland . The journalist Harry Rosenbaum said: “With his anti-war novel ' The Strong Man' , published in 1916, Paul Ilg burst right into the unbroken First World War enthusiasm, which at that time was still shared by authors such as Gerhart Hauptmann , Thomas Mann and Robert Musil . The novel was created under the impression of the looming great battles of nations and is at the same time an accounting for the Prussian authoritarian leadership style that was also widespread in the Swiss army at the time. [...] After the novel was published, Ilg, whose socially critical and proletarian literature was based on the French novelist Émile Zola and the early Guy de Maupassant , was described as “anti-German”. The German media called for a boycott of his books, and in Switzerland too he was considered to be “destructive to the human body”. The sale of Ilg's books fell massively in the entire German-speaking area. " A project by Ernst Lubitsch , who wanted to film the book, failed. The UFA argued that a pacifist film would not succeed in the world market and blocked the loan.

Ilg achieved a last sensational success in 1922 with «Probus» , a novel about the Swiss aviation pioneer Oskar Bider . After that, however, he was no longer able to build on past literary achievements. Charles Linsmayer states: "Ilg tried out many new approaches without really finding a convincing new spelling and topic." And the journalist and author Max Rychner said in 1923: "We are in a state of forced hope for great people and works to come, because such half-achievements of one who is getting closer and closer to the goals, where they can also be achieved by others."

Chiel Weissmann from the film distribution company Emelka showed the film Das Menschlein Matthias in 1941 . Directed by Edmund Heuberger . The main actors were u. a. Röbi Rapp , Leopold Biberti , Sigfrid Steiner , Hermann Gallinger , Petra Marin, Hans Fehrmann, Waldburga Gmühr, Ditta Oesch, Marga Galli and Edwige Elisabeth.

Awards and honors

  • Prize from the Swiss Schiller Foundation
  • Prize of the German Schiller Foundation
  • Prize of the Fastenrath Foundation, Cologne

Works

Paul Ilg-Weg, near the shore of Lake Constance in Uttwil
  • Sketches and Poems , Dresden [a. a.] 1902
  • Urge to live , Stuttgart 1906
  • Poems , Berlin 1907
  • Der Landstörtzer , Berlin 1909
  • The Moor Brothers , Leipzig [a. a.] 1912
  • The little human being Matthias , Stuttgart [u. a.] 1913
  • What was mine , Frauenfeld in 1915
  • Maria Thurnheer , Frauenfeld [a. a.] 1916 ( Swiss storytellers 1)
  • Sunday love, Constance a./B. 1916
  • The strong man , Frauenfeld 1916
  • The Führer , Leipzig 1918
  • Probus , Zosingen 1922
  • In passing , Leipzig [u. a.] 1923
  • A happy couple , Basel 1924
  • The good comrade and other stories , Berlin 1924
  • Man of God , Leipzig 1924
  • The rebellious head , Frauenfeld 1927
  • The escape to the Creux du Van , Bern 1933
  • The girl of the Bastille , Zurich [u. a.] 1933
  • Summer at Salagnon , Bern [a. a.] 1937
  • Father's house , Zurich [u. a.] 1941
  • Faithful to the earth , Zurich 1943
  • Cruel life , St. Gallen 1944
  • The Passion of Margarete Peter , Zurich 1949
  • The pike in the waterspout , Arbon 1953
  • The Apostle of Nature , 1955 ( e-periodica )
  • The little human Matthias: tetralogy, consisting of the novels "Das Menschlein Matthias", "Die Brüder Moor", "Lebensdrang" and "Der Landstörtzer" . Huber, Frauenfeld 2017, ISBN 978-3719315986
  • The hunger tower: a time novel (fragment of a novel). Chronos, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-0340-1442-7

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles Linsmayer: Childhood and career of the Swiss writer Paul Ilg as reflected in his tetralogy "Das Menschlein Matthias" . In: Paul Ilg: The little human Matthias . Huber, Frauenfeld 2017, ISBN 978-3719315986 , p. 734.
  2. ^ A b Franziska Meister, Charles Linsmayer: Paul Ilg. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . January 26, 2007 , accessed July 6, 2019 .
  3. ^ Presidents. In: FC Winterthur archive. Retrieved June 10, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Football fever breaks out again in Winterthur. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 14, 2006.
  5. ^ Paul Ilg: From businessman to writer . In: time bells. Sheets of entertainment and knowledge , supplement to the Luzerner Tagblatt , No. 8, April 22, 1937, p. 59.
  6. ^ Paul Ilg: From businessman to writer . In: time bells. Sheets of entertainment and knowledge , supplement to the Luzerner Tagblatt , No. 8, April 22, 1937, p. 59.
  7. ↑ Kaspar Ilg on the “Uttwil Art Foundation” homepage
  8. ↑ Homepage of the community of Uttwil
  9. ↑ Ralph Brühwiler: Sketches and notes from Uttwil - A walk through the history of important houses. Edition Frohsinn, Uttwil 2017, ISBN 978-3-906155-20-3 , p. 64.
  10. ↑ Online inventory in the Swiss Literature Archive
  11. ^ Paul Ilg: The little human being Matthias . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, p. 252.
  12. ^ Charles Linsmayer: Childhood and career of the Swiss writer Paul Ilg as reflected in his tetralogy "Das Menschlein Matthias" . In: Paul Ilg: The little human Matthias . Huber, Frauenfeld 2017, ISBN 978-3719315986 , p. 780.
  13. ↑ Harry Rosenbaum: Sidelined as an anti-war author. The socially critical writer Paul Ilg (1875–1957) from Uttwil in Thurgau was one of the few who wrote against the First World War. In: WOZ Die Wochenzeitung , November 27, 2014.
  14. ↑ Harry Rosenbaum: Sidelined as an anti-war author. The socially critical writer Paul Ilg (1875–1957) from Uttwil in Thurgau was one of the few who wrote against the First World War. In: WOZ Die Wochenzeitung , November 27, 2014.
  15. ↑ Charles Linsmeyer: Paul Ilg 1875-1957, in: Website of Charles Linsmeyer , called on July 17, 2015
  16. ^ Charles Linsmayer: Childhood and career of the Swiss writer Paul Ilg as reflected in his tetralogy "Das Menschlein Matthias" . In: Paul Ilg: The little human Matthias . Huber, Frauenfeld 2017, ISBN 978-3719315986 , p. 792.
  17. ↑ Movie poster for "The little human Matthias". Schweizer Film = Film Suisse: official organ of Switzerland, accessed on June 15, 2020 .
  18. ↑ First performance "Das Menschlein Matthias". Schweizer Film = Film Suisse: official organ of Switzerland, accessed on June 15, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Ilg, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Salenstein
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 1957
Place of death Romanshorn