Paul Polte

This article is about the poet Paul Polte. For the sculptor see Paul Polte (sculptor) .

Paul Polte (born August 24, 1905 in Dortmund ; † March 5, 1985 there ) was a German working-class poet.

Life

Paul Polte was born on August 24, 1905 in Dortmund as the son of the technician at the United Steelworks Paul Polte senior (1879–1955) and his wife Ida Hennes († 1947). He grew up in the proletarian north of Dortmund . After school he was an errand boy at a china shop before he had reached the age of starting a commercial apprenticeship at Mannesmann . After graduating, Polte first worked in the automotive industry in Dortmund, later at the Deutz gasometer works in Münster and from 1928 to 1930 in Chemnitz .

In the Great Depression Paul Polte became unemployed and began the first writing poetry. After his return to Dortmund, Polte joined the Hörder vagabond painter Hans Tombrock and went on a journey with him. A short report on a traffic accident, which he sent to the General-Anzeiger for Dortmund , drew the editor-in-chief Jakob Stöcker's attention to Polte. From 1930 to 1932 he published short stories and poems regularly in the Generalanzeiger as a freelancer. He now devoted himself entirely to art. In 1930 Polte joined the Communist Party of Germany . In 1931 Paul Polte founded the Dortmund branch of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers , in the same year he published the first issue of the journal Die Ruhrstadt together with Hans Tombrock. Because of a satire about Adolf Hitler in this issue, he was dismissed from the Generalanzeiger.

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Polte was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Steinwache . In May 1936 he was released due to an amnesty for convicts. House searches and another arrest followed. In order to avoid this harassment, Polte left Dortmund and worked again in his profession, among others in Kirn , Düsseldorf and from 1942 in Essen . As an employee of a war-important wholesaler for vehicle accessories, he escaped military service.

After the war he moved to Horn and returned to Dortmund in 1951. There he worked as an independent tool and machine dealer for vehicle parts until 1970. Paul Polte was married to Else Kubbe (1915–1989) and had two daughters and a son with her. He died on March 5, 1985 at the age of 79 in Dortmund.

Others

Part of his estate is located in the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World in Dortmund .

plant

Polte's first literary activities go back to love poems that he published as a teenager. In the late 1920s he wrote poems that are reminiscent of Erich Kästner and Kurt Tucholsky in style . Through his contacts with the Socialist Workers' Youth , Polte was politicized at an early stage and already at this time sensed the danger of a new war. He published anti-militarist and anti-fascist poems and short stories in, among others, the Munich Simplicissimus , the Leipziger Kulturwillen and the magazine Vagabund; most of the publications were made in the Dortmund Generalanzeiger.

Under the pseudonym Peter Polter he gave readings of his works with Bruno Gluchowski and Erich Grisar in the Café Wien in Dortmund. Together with the graphic artist and printer Bernhard Temming , he published the graphic series "Proletarian Poets and Drawers of the Ruhr Area". In 1932 Polte founded the political cabaret group Henkelmann . During the National Socialist dictatorship he was banned from writing, but some poems got to friends. In exile in Switzerland, Hans Tombrock published Polte's poem “Grüne Minna”, the collection “From earlier days” appears in a friend's edition of 150 copies.

After the war, in 1946 Polte devoted himself to working in the “Aufbau” society and in the “Association of Art and People in the Ruhr Area”. In 1961 he was one of the founding members of Group 61 . Until 1969 he worked frequently with Bernhard Temming and published the "Tendenz-Drucke", which followed on from the papers by proletarian poets and draftsmen published in 1930. After differences within group 61, Polte left it and founded the Dortmund workshop in 1970 with other authors in the work group literature in the world of work . In 1977 the book "Despicable" was published, a collection of his works from 1923 to 1977.

literature

• Fritz Hüser: Paul Polte . In: Düsseldorf workshop of the working group literature in the world of work (ed.): The red grandfather tells. Reports and narratives by veterans of the labor movement from 1914 to 1945 . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 122 f .
• Josef Reding: Paul Polte. Asphalt poetry . In: Paul Polte (Ed.): Despicable. Poetry, reports, short stories 1923–77 . Dortmund workshop in the work group literature in the world of work, Dortmund 1977, p. 3 f .
• Peter Paul Polte: Some remarks about Paul Polte as a papa, poet, pipe smoker and pint stool . In: Paul Polte (Ed.): Despicable. Poetry, reports, short stories 1923–77 . Dortmund workshop in the work group literature in the world of work, Dortmund 1977, p. 164 f .

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Polte in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of the Fritz Hüser Institute
• Paul Polte in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Paul, Lotte and the Henkelmann group ( Memento from March 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file; 871 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Gregor Vogt: Polte, Paul . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 1 . Ruhfus, Dortmund 1994, p. 114 ff .