Reinhold Schneider

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Reinhold Schneider on a German special postage stamp from 2003

Reinhold Karl Werner Schneider (born May 13, 1903 in Baden-Baden ; † April 6, 1958 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German writer whose works contributed to the Christian-conservative resistance against National Socialism .

Life

Origin and youth

Reinhold Schneider was the son of Wilhelm Schneider and his wife Luise Wilhelmina Augusta, geb. Messmer. The parents ran the renowned Hotel Messmer, where the German imperial couple Augusta and Wilhelm I stayed for decades during their regular stays in Baden.

From 1912 to 1921 Reinhold Schneider attended the Baden-Baden high school, today's Markgraf-Ludwig-Gymnasium . During this time, the German Empire disintegrated and the First World War raged , which not only had an impact on the entire country, but also hit the Reinhold Schneiders family in particular. The Messmer Hotel faced insurmountable financial difficulties and had to close. The mother left the family, and shortly after Reinhold Schneider's 19th birthday, his father shot himself. Reinhold Schneider also tried, but unsuccessfully, to put an end to his life. After the suicide attempt, Schneider drew new courage to live through his friendship with Anna Maria Baumgarten (1881–1960), who became the “companion of his life”.

From the Weimar Republic to 1945

After completing a commercial training and working for a total of seven years at Stengel & Co. in Dresden , Schneider started working as a freelance writer in Berlin and Potsdam in 1928 . There he experienced the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the National Socialism . He dealt intensively with this totalitarian regime and wrote against it, e.g. B. with the poem Now the madness builds . The first literary creative period, which began in 1930, was characterized by the engagement with the history and especially with historical figures of the Iberian Peninsula, whereby a strong proximity to the literary and ideological renewal movement of the Renouveau catholique is recognizable.

Due to the double sponsorship of the grandparents of Kaiser Wilhelm II to mother and godmother Reinhold Schneider, he was repeatedly invited to Haus Doorn , the exile of the former German emperor.

In 1938 he came to Freiburg im Breisgau and moved into an apartment in the villa of the glass painter Eduard Stritt . Here he became a member of the conservative Catholic " Freiburg Circle " around the publicist Karl Färber (not to be confused with the Freiburg Circle of Economists). In the same year his critical sequence of scenes Las Casas appeared before Charles V , in which oppression, racial madness and misunderstood religiosity are denounced. Ultimately, Reinhold Schneider's works were banned - like those of many other authors of the “Inner Emigration” . Courageous publishers like Karl Borromeo Glock published them anyway. During the Second World War , especially his sonnets against megalomania and war were secretly passed from hand to hand, which, like his other writings, were published by Alsatia-Verlag in Colmar , Alsace . The printing paper was easier to obtain there. Although Schneider's name was repeatedly on the list of undesirable authors, Las Casas could still appear until 1943. Despite the final writing ban in 1941, a brochure was published in 1944 under the title Das Gottesreich in der Zeit. Sonnets and essays . Also for the magazine Weisse Blätter published by Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg . Journal of History, Tradition and State , he could continue to write articles regularly.

In the spring of 1944 the Gestapo searched his Freiburg apartment. Schneider hid and finally went into hiding in a Protestant pen . A charge of high treason from April 1945 did not come up for trial because of the collapse of National Socialism .

With his Sonnet The tower of Freiburg Minster Schneider put this a literary monument. It contains u. a. the line “You will not fall, my beloved tower.” What is remarkable is that Schneider wrote it months before the bombing, in which the tower was hardly damaged.

the post war period

Aerial view of the city center of Freiburg destroyed on November 27, 1944 (summer 1945 or later)
Grave of Reinhold Schneider and his family in Baden-Baden. It is located on the same Friedhofsweg diagonally across from Otto Flakes

In 1946, under the impression that Germany had become a desert of rubble and “the secret of our abysmal guilt”, he dealt with the question of how this catastrophe could have come about in Die Heimkehr des Deutschen Geistes : “Who can truly control the course [of history] explored, will make the discovery that the current has not broken through a dam that the spirit has not rummaged through before and no rock gate burst without the explosive power of the spirit ”.

He saw the responsibility for the historic dam breach in the works of German philosophers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , who took the view that it is better to be wrong in the search for truth all your life than if you partake of the truth. According to Schneider, this thesis can only be seriously defended if one does not see Jesus as the Redeemer, but only as “a teacher”. In a similar way Schneider also examined “the image of Christ” of other representatives of German idealism ( Kant , Fichte , Hegel , Schelling and Nietzsche ) and thus tested “the German spirit” in the sense of 1 Jn 4.1–3  EU , with the aim to redeem this spirit "from itself".

In the following years Schneider experienced a period of multiple honors and great recognition; he was considered the "conscience of the nation". In 1948 he was awarded on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff the Memorial Prize of the Baden state government (together with Gertrud von Le Fort ). In 1949 he was accepted into the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and the German Academy for Language and Poetry . In 1952 he was made a knight of the order “ Pour le Mérite ”, peace class, on the proposal of Federal President Theodor Heuss . In 1952 he was admitted to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and in 1955 to the Berlin Academy of the Arts . When the Federal Republic of Germany was formed and the debate about remilitarization began, the devout Catholic opposed this project with all means at his disposal. With formulations such as “the 'grace of misfortune' grows the mandate to peace”, he appealed to his compatriots not to start arming again immediately after the last cruel war, but to work towards the reunification of Germany by peaceful means .

This attitude and his numerous peace essays, which appeared in magazines close to the KPD and even in Neues Deutschland , resulted in the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1956 on the one hand, but also in complete professional isolation on the other. His work for newspapers and radio stations was no longer in demand. Only a few of his comrades-in-arms from the time of the “inner emigration” stayed in contact with him, especially Werner Bergengruen , with whom he had a deep friendship until the end. After the publication of the last book Winter in Vienna , Schneider experienced posthumous rehabilitation in public .

This second stay in Vienna, the subject of this book, from November 5, 1957 to March 6, 1958, served, among other things, to accompany the preparations for the world premiere of Schneider's drama The Great Renunciation .

When the Hotel Messmer was demolished in 1957, Reinhold Schneider set a literary monument to the house and the spa town of Baden-Baden in the autobiographical sketch Der Balkon .

Reinhold Schneider died as a result of a fall in Freiburg and was buried on April 10, 1958 in the Messmer / Schneider family grave in the main cemetery in Baden-Baden . Werner Bergengruen gave the funeral speech .

Reinhold Schneider's extensive estate , which in particular contains tens of thousands of letters, is in the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe . In the course of the past decades, numerous bequests and partial collections were acquired from Schneider's companions, so that an extensive Schneider archive has now been created there.

reception

Reinhold Schneider's house in Freiburg at Mercystraße 2
Memorial plaque on Mercystraße 2

Reinhold Schneider is the namesake of the culture award of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau and a Freiburg school. Freiburg also honors the poet with the name of a street, as well as his native city Baden-Baden and the cities of Offenburg, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Osnabrück and Potsdam.

Schneider's former residence in Freiburg, the villa of the court glass painter Eduard Stritt at Mercystraße 2, was classified as a cultural monument in 2009 and given a plaque.

The keystone of the Freiburg Minster bears an inscription by Reinhold Schneider referring to the destruction of Freiburg on November 27, 1944 .

Works (selection)

Reinhold Schneider has published almost 200 titles.

  • The suffering of the Camões or the fall and consummation of Portuguese power. First edition: Hellerau 1930. Union, Berlin 1976.
  • Portugal. A travel journal. Munich 1931 (currently: Frankfurt a. M. 2003, ISBN 3-458-34589-2 ).
  • Philip II or Religion and Power. Leipzig 1931.
  • Emperor Lothar's crown. Life and reign of Lothar of Supplinburg . Leipzig 1937 (new edition with an introductory essay by Wilfried Hartmann and some contemporary sources: Manesse, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-7175-8084-1 ).
  • Las Casas before Charles V. Scenes from the time of the conquistadors. Insel, Leipzig 1938 (currently: Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1990, ISBN 3-518-38222-5 ).
  • The Lord's Prayer. Alsatia, Kolmar 1941.
  • After the great war. Alsatia, Kolmar 1941
  • Apocalypse. Sonnets by Reinhold Schneider. Hans Bühler Jr., Baden-Baden 1946.
  • The homecoming of the German spirit. About the image of Christ in 19th century German philosophy. Hans Bühler Jr., Baden-Baden 1946.
  • And Peter got out of the ship. Hans Bühler Jr., Baden-Baden 1946.
  • The magic hat (= Insel-Bücherei . Vol. 486/2). Insel, Wiesbaden 1951 (drama about Siegfried and the Nibelungs).
  • Rulers and saints. Jakob Hegner, Cologne / Olten 1953.
  • Veiled day. Cologne / Olten 1954.
  • The silver traffic light. A novel. Cologne / Olten 1956.
  • The big renunciation . Drama. 1957, first performance 1958 (Bregenz).
  • Innocent and Francis. Drama. 1952, first performance 1954 (Essen).
  • The balcony. Notes of a loiter in Baden-Baden. Wiesbaden 1957 (currently: Insel, Frankfurt a. M. 2000, ISBN 3-458-34305-9 ).
  • Winter in Vienna. From my notebooks 1957/1958. Freiburg i. B. 1958 (currently: Herder, Freiburg i. B. 2003, ISBN 3-451-28113-9 ).
  • Charles V inheritance and renunciation. Cologne / Olten 1958.
  • Innocent the Third. Cologne / Olten 1960.
  • Collected works in ten volumes. On behalf of the Reinhold Schneider Society, ed. v. Edwin Maria Landau . Frankfurt a. M. 1977-1981.
  • Francis de Sales . Johanna Franziska von Chantal . Eichstätt 2004, ISBN 3-7721-0271-9 .
  • Kleist's end. Munich, Karl Alber, 1946.
  • About the suicide. Hans Bühler Jr., Baden-Baden 1947.

literature

Web links

Commons : Reinhold Schneider  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Reinhold Schneider  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reinhold Schneider's godmother - Augusta Maria Wilhelmine Brenner , b. Messmer (1863-1956) - was herself the godchild of Empress Augusta . See Cordula Koepcke: Reinhold Schneider. A biography. Würzburg 1993 (conclusion from the register entry on Augusta Brenner and the entries on pages 9 and 237, also confirmed by the Baden-Baden city archive). The godfather of his mother Wilhelmina was Kaiser Wilhelm I , see Franz Anselm Schmitt (Ed.): Reinhold Schneider - Life and Work in Documents. Olten 1969, p. 207. His relative Eduard Meßmer also had contacts with the then Wilhelm von Prussia .
  2. ↑ Scherer, Schmitt: Reinhold Schneider. 1973, p. 34; Excerpt from Google Books.
  3. ↑ Cordula Koepcke: Reinhold Schneider - A biography. Wuerzburg 1993.
  4. ^ Carl Borromäus Glock: "Obituary for Reinhold Schneider", in "Reflection" (1958)
  5. ^ 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. 536.
  6. ^ Monarchieforum der Deutschen Monarchistische Gesellschaft, Schriftenarchiv: Directory of digitized issues of the Weisse Blätter. ( Memento from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ^ Reinhold Schneider, The Tower of the Freiburg Minster. Retrieved May 24, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Reinhold Schneider: The homecoming of the German spirit. Baden-Baden 1946, full text ( memento from March 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ↑ Reinhold Schneider Archive. Website of the Baden State Library . Retrieved February 15, 2018
  10. ↑ Babette Stadie (Ed.): The power of truth: Reinhold Schneider's "Memorial Word for July 20th." In: Reactions from survivors of the resistance. Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-033-7 , p. 53.
  11. ↑ PDF on the 1956 award.
  12. ↑ The speech is printed as an appendix in Schneider's book Winter in Wien .
  13. ^ Babette Stadie: The Reinhold Schneider Archive in the Badische Landesbibliothek. In: Badische Heimat. Volume 83, No. 2, 2003, p. 311f.
  14. ↑ Reinhold Schneider School in Freiburg i. Br.
  15. ^ Simone Lutz: Freiburg's new cultural monument. In: Badische Zeitung , January 21, 2009.
  16. ^ Anton Ritthaler : Review. ( Memento from September 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: White sheets . Issue August / September / October 1942.
  17. ↑ Warning voice. In: Die Zeit No. 20, May 14, 1953.
personal data
SURNAME Schneider, Reinhold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schneider, Reinhold Karl Werner (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden-Baden
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1958
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau