Reinhard Goering

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Reinhard Goering (born June 23, 1887 at Bieberstein Castle, Hesse ; † mid- October (?) 1936 in Bucha near Jena ) was a German expressionist writer .

Life

Goering was the son of a government building officer . At the age of ten he went to a boarding school near Traben-Trarbach after his father had committed suicide and his mother had become mentally deranged. Relatives enabled him to attend university after graduating from high school in 1905. Since his brother, who had to learn a trade, felt that he was being relegated to Reinhard, Goering also lost the last member of his actual family.

Goering first began to study law, but shortly afterwards switched to studying medicine at the University of Jena , other places of study were Berlin and Munich. In 1911 he studied in Paris, where he met the art student and Jewish Russian Helene Gurowitsch. Their daughter was born in Zippendorf and in 1912 Goering and Gurowitsch married.

In the same year, texts by Goering appeared for the first time with some poems in an anthology, but just like the novel Jung Schuk , which appeared in the following year 1913 , they remained almost without echo from the audience and criticism. These works were still classically oriented; they were still untouched by Expressionism, which was blossoming at the same time.

Goering completed his studies in Bonn in 1914. He was sent to the Saar area as a military doctor , and a few weeks later, shortly after the turn of the year 1914/15, he contracted tuberculosis , which he tried to cure in Davos , where he stayed until 1918. Here he also wrote his first drama, the sea ​​battle . The premiere in 1918 at the Hoftheater in Dresden under Nikolaus Graf von Seebach turned into a scandal, but another performance in the same year under Max Reinhardt in Berlin was a success. He spent the early summer months of 1915, 1917, 1918 and 1919 in the dropout colony Monte Verità in Ascona, temporarily living as a hermit in the bird catcher tower "Roccolo". Under the influence of the poet and nature prophet Gusto Gräser , he undertook his "Buddhist hike". In an attempt to break free from all social ties, Goering led the life of a wandering beggar for a short time. After returning to the family, he wrote four more plays in quick succession before falling almost completely silent.

In 1922 he worked as a doctor in Braunschweig, his medical interests lay in reform medicine, but also vegetarianism, hygiene issues and vaccination problems. His behavior was irritating for those around him, for example he threw his books on the street to demonstrate his renunciation of property, in winter he was only lightly dressed, with torn pants and without a hat. In 1923, at the urging of the Braunschweig medical community, he was admitted to the insane asylum in Königslutter for observation , and friends obtained his release after six weeks.

At the end of 1923 Goering met Dagmar Öhrbom from Helsinki in Heidelberg, with whom he soon became a close friend. He traveled a lot with the Finnish woman, who was eleven years older than him, including to Finland, but also to France in 1926, where he began to write again and wrote the prose piece Normandy . In the same year Goering and Gurowitsch got divorced. In the operation of Öhrbom he received his doctorate in Leipzig for Dr. med. Several attempts to run his own medical practice failed because of his discontinuity, and he spent the turn of the year 1926/1927 in Finland.

After his return he moved restlessly from place to place, lived with friends, patrons, and at times even in an asylum, where he pretended that he wanted to study the insane. Like his places of residence, his plans changed too. He tried to found a “sanatorium for intellectual workers”, planned a magazine (Spielbühne) , around Easter 1928 he was missing for several weeks. Friends found him in a Berlin guesthouse and took him to Grete Höger, a teacher friend of mine, where he read Robert Falcon Scott's diaries and began work on his play The South Pole Expedition of Captain Scott , which he completed in Davos in November and December.

In 1929 Goering worked with Carl Maria Holzapfel on an aviation calendar, which was published in 1930 as the first German aviation calendar. During the numerous flights that took him and Carl-Maria Holzapfel to cities all over Europe, numerous flight poems were written that appeared in Der Sturm . In February 1930 his South Pole expedition was successfully premiered in Berlin under Leopold Jessner ; the piece was played on stages in Darmstadt and Würzburg, among others. In October he was awarded the Kleist Prize for this . In 1931 he began a relationship with his friend's only sixteen-year-old daughter, Marilene Holzapfel, after ending a relationship with his mother. An unsteady life began again, the couple moved from place to place, Goering ran different practices. In 1933 he was diagnosed with an intestinal ailment, which made spa stays and operations necessary in the following years. The son Reinhard was born in 1932, his second son Knut-Stefan in 1934, and the couple only married in the spring of 1935.

Goering joined the Association of Rhenish Poets and became a member of the NSDAP in 1932 , albeit excluded again in June 1933. According to his friend and brother-in-law Siegfried Holzapfel , he was also a member of the KPD for a short time .

At the beginning of 1936 he began work on the libretto for Winfried Zillig's opera The Sacrifice , a revision of the South Pole expedition . Again he traveled a lot, but in October he suddenly disappeared from Berlin. On November 5th, the family learned that Goering had already committed suicide in Bucha (near Jena) in mid-October . Shortly before, he had an encounter with Alfred Mombert in Heidelberg and burned whole bundles of manuscripts.

In November 1937, one year after his death, The Sacrifice was premiered, but Zillig's twelve-tone music and the England-friendly libretto Goering prevented further performances.

Works

  • Young Schuk . Novel. 1913
  • Naval battle . Tragedy. 1917
  • The first . Play. 1918
  • The rescuers . Tragic game. 1919
  • There? . Last version of The Rescuers . 1919
  • Scapa Flow . Play. 1919
  • The second . Tragedy. 1919
  • Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition . Game in three parts. 1930
  • The victim. Libretto for an opera by Winfried Zillig. 1937

Honors

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Anonymus (Dieter Hoffmann): Foreword In: Reinhard Goering: Prosa - Dramen - Verse , 1961, pp. 8-29
  2. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture 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. 188.

literature

  • Robert Chapin Davis: Final Mutiny: Reinhard Goering. His Life and Art. Lang, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 1987.
  • Dagmar Fäth: Problems of world orientation in the dramas Reinhard Goering. Frankfurt a. M. 1999.
  • Frank Milautzcki: Reinhard Goering - a stranger on the mountain of truth. An essay and comments on three prose sketches by Reinhard Goering. Verlag im Proberaum 3, Klingenberg a. M. 2007.
  • Kurt Mueller-Vollmer:  Goering, Ludwig Reinhard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 529 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Bo Osdrowski, Tom Riebe (Eds.): Reinhard Goering . (= Versensporn - booklet for lyrical stimuli; No. 12). Edition poetry tastes good, Jena 2013
  • Frank Pommer: Variations on the Failure of Man. Reinhard Goering's work and life. Lang, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 1996.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Goering, Reinhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Bieberstein Castle (Hesse)
DATE OF DEATH October 1936
Place of death Bucha