Paul Hard

Paul Mühsam (born July 17, 1876 in Brandenburg an der Havel ; died March 11, 1960 in Jerusalem ) was a lawyer , translator and writer .

Life

Paul Mühsam attended the humanistic grammar school in Chemnitz and studied law in Freiburg , Munich and Berlin . In October 1899 he passed his exam. In 1900 he received his doctorate. iur. and settled in Görlitz in 1905 . In February 1909 he opened his own law firm in Dresden .

Laboriously worked for the Red Cross in Berlin during the First World War . He then returned to Görlitz at the end of 1918 and began to write books about the state of the population. In 1920 Paul Mühsam was sworn in as a notary , and in March 1930 he joined the international artists' association Porza . There he worked from 1932 to 1933 as a translator of various books.

On September 6, 1933, he and his wife Irma emigrated to Palestine because of revocation of their license to practice law and the burning of his books . Paul Mühsam is considered the first Jewish emigrant from Görlitz. In December 1938, he became a Palestinian citizen. He failed to learn Hebrew and regain his license to practice law.

Three volumes of memoirs and a volume of poetry were written in Palestine in memory of his wife, who died on September 19, 1946. In August 1948 he moved to Jerusalem and added to the memoirs that had not been continued since emigrating to Palestine. In November 1955 he finished the last volume of his memoirs.

He wrote in German until the end of his life. Writers like Stefan Zweig or Shalom Ben-Chorin valued his work extremely highly, not least because he formulated central questions about Judeo-Christian understanding.

Since July 28, 1909, he was married to Irma Kaufmann. They had three daughters: Else (1910-2004), Charlotte Antonie (* 1912) and Hilde (* 1918). Paul Mühsam was a cousin of the writer Erich Mühsam .

A street in Görlitz has been named after Paul Mühsam since 1990.

Major works

• Conversations with God , 1919
• The Eternal Jew , 1924
• The meaning of life , 1926
• Defense speech of Socrates , 1931
• Sonnets to Death , 1949
• Memories, 1959
• Memoirs:
  • I was human in 1970
  • My way to me , 1978
• Selection of works Your house has been hammered since creation , ed. by Else Levi-Mühsam, 1970

literature

• Gernot Wolfram: Paul Mühsam. The resistance of the words; a life between Germany and Palestine (1876–1960) . Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-938485-37-8 .
• Christoph Hamann: The hard work. Story of a family . Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag Teetz 2005. = Jewish Memoirs 11. ISBN 978-3-938485-00-2 .
• Caroline Jessen: Difficult, Paul. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 382-384.

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Mühsam in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Paul Mühsam  in the German Digital Library
• Paul Mühsam's estate in the German Literature Archive in Marbach