René Crevel

Jacques-Émile Blanche : Portrait of René Crevel , Musée Carnavalet , Paris

René Crevel (* 10. August 1900 in Paris ; † 18 June 1935 ) was a French writer of Surrealism . Suffering from the rift between Surrealists and Communists and also suffering from kidney disease, he killed himself at the age of 34.

Life

Raised in a middle-class family, he lost his father at an early age, who took his own life in 1914, which his mother wanted to cover up for social reasons. Crevel revolted all his life against the bourgeoisie , which he saw embodied in his mother in particular. In his novels he dealt with civil structures, morality and religion , soul and suicide .

From 1918 to 1922 he studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he had first contacts with the Dadaists and made the acquaintance of Louis Aragon and André Breton . About the latter he said: “My God for me, this is Breton. If he disappoints me, I would kill myself. ”He eventually became a co-initiator of the period of sleep states (1922/23) and a member of the first surrealist group around Breton and Aragon. It was Crevel who created the term for Max Ernst (1891–1976) as the “magician of barely noticeable displacements”.

Crevel's tombstone on the Cimetière de Montrouge, Paris

Since 1925 he suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis and had to spend a few months in Swiss sanatoriums every year . Since 1926 he was friends with Klaus Mann , who also describes him in his autobiography The Turning Point . Crevel traveled to Germany again and again , Êtes-vous fous? published in 1930 by S. Fischer in German.

He was committed to both Surrealism and, from 1927, increasingly also to Marxism, and took part in the international committee for the release of Ernst Thälmann . In 1929 he became a member of the French Communist Party , where he died in 1935 on the eve of the Paris International Congress of Writers to Save Culture in the course of the Breton - Ehrenburg scandal by suicide. He had also learned that he had severe kidney tuberculosis. As described in his novel Détours , he committed suicide by turning on the gas tap. A farewell message was found with the words “Je suis dégoûté de tout” (“Everything disgusts me”).

Crevel has written novels, some of which were published in German as early as the 1930s. “I am convinced that this novel, with Raymond Radiguet's The Devil in the Body, is the most important confession book of European youth after the war,” writes Klaus Mann about The Difficult Death .

Works

• Détours (1924) - German: Detours. Trans. V. Maximilian Gilleßen u. Philippe Roepstorff-Robiano. Zero sharp, Berlin 2019.
• Mon corps et moi (1925) - German: My body and me. Trans. V. Maria Hoffmann-Dartevelle Europaverlag , Vienna, Zurich 1992.
• La mort difficile (1926) - German: The difficult death. Translated by Hans Feist. S. Fischer , Berlin 1930; again: Library Suhrkamp Vol. 987, Frankfurt am Main 1988.
• Babylone (1927) - German: Babylon. Trans. V. Charlotte Jenny. Walter Verlag , Olten and Freiburg i. Br. 1969; again: Europaverlag, Vienna, Zurich 1993.
• Êtes-vous fous? (1929) - German: Are you crazy? Trans. V. Una peacock. Library Suhrkamp Vol. 1083, Frankfurt am Main 1991.
• Les pieds dans le plat (1933)

literature

• Biographical epilogue in Are you crazy?
• Heinz Niermann: Investigations on suicide issues in the French novel between 1925 and 1945. Münster 1988 (on Réne Crevel, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle , Julien Gracq , Louis Guilloux ).
• Torsten Daum: René Crevel. An understanding with a fictitious conversation. Berlin 1989.
• Michel Carassou : René Crevel. Fayard, Paris 1989.
• Dieter Schöneborn: René Crevel: novelist between surrealism, psychoanalysis and revolution. Nodus-Publ., Münster 1990.
• François Buot: René Crevel: biography. Grasset, Paris 1991.
• René Crevel ou l'esprit contre la raison: actes du colloque international, Bordeaux, November 21st, 23rd 2000, études réunis par Jean-Michel Devésa. L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne 2002.
• Lawrence R. Schehr: French gay modernism. Urbana [etc.]: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004.
• Klaus Mann : The turning point. A life story. Extended new edition, edited with text variations and drafts in the appendix and with an afterword by Fredric Kroll . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-49924409-8 .

Web links

Commons : René Crevel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about René Crevel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Beat Mazenauer: The fool at the court of Mr. Breton