René Prévot

René Prévot (born December 14, 1880 in Moosch , Alsace , † June 10, 1955 ) was a German journalist of French descent. A maternal cousin was the French sculptor Auguste Rodin , just as Prévot had a number of relatives in Paris and the surrounding area. During the First World War , Prévot, who holds a doctorate in political science, was editor-in-chief of the Gazette des Ardennes , a very successful French-language newspaper that was published by Section 6 of the German military secret service IIIb in Charleville from 1914 to 1918 for northern France, but was also active in neutral foreign countries ( western Switzerland ) Spread. The newspaper was even regularly sent to French members of parliament by Swiss informants from the German secret service.

Life

Prévot came from a middle-class family of manufacturers and was personally very Francophile, romantic and adventurous. Because his parents wanted him to have a French-language education, René Prévot attended the Lycée in Belfort as a pupil . Nevertheless, he passed his Abitur in 1899 at the grammar school of Mulhouse in Alsace. After a stay in Paris from 1899 he studied law and political science as well as political economy at the universities of Munich and Strasbourg . He was finally “seminar assistant” with the well-known Munich economist Lujo Brentano and received his doctorate in 1905 with a dissertation on “The welfare institutions of employers in France”, which was published in volume 114 of the “Schriften des Verein für Socialpolitik ” in the same year .

During his student days in Strasbourg, René Prévot belonged to the literary circle of the "strikers", which besides him a. a. the later well-known writers Otto Flake and René Schickele as well as the later SPD member of the Reichstag Hermann Wendel belonged. After traveling through southern France, Spain, Morocco, the Balkans and Scandinavia, he tried unsuccessfully as a dramaturge in Strasbourg , and in Munich a little more successfully as a screenwriter, director and actor in the emerging silent film industry. From around 1909 he became a journalist in Munich, where he was the discoverer and promoter of Hans Bötticher ( Joachim Ringelnatz ). His first wife Anita b. Traboldi, a half-Italian woman, separated from him after a short marriage and died of influenza after the divorce in 1912. In 1912 he became the Paris correspondent for the Munich Latest News and the Express, which appeared in Mulhouse . In Paris he belonged to the association of the foreign press and married an Austrian named Hedwig (Henriette) from Vienna.

When war broke out in 1914, he returned to Munich, before moving to Charleville in the same year, mediated by the Foreign Office , to work as editor-in-chief of the Gazette des Ardennes . Prévot was requested through the Foreign Office by Walter Nicolai , the head of Department IIIb of the General Staff - the military intelligence service of the Supreme Army Command . His work as editor-in-chief was recognized as very efficient even by his French opponents. In 1917 he took on the Bavarian nationality and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class at the suggestion of the editor of the Gazette des Ardennes Rittmeister Fritz H. Schnitzer .

After the war, Prévot moved back to Munich, where he felt at home in the bohemian region. He has recorded his experiences from this time in the book “Little Swarm for Schwabylon”. His close circle of friends in Munich also included Erich Mühsam , Vera Sassulitsch , Annette Kolb , Frank Wedekind and Detlev von Liliencron  u. a. m. Neither in the Weimar Republic, nor in the Third Reich, nor in the later Federal Republic, Prévot never emerged again politically, but from 1945 onwards he was active in the field of Franco-German reconciliation.

From 1918 Prévot worked primarily as a theater and film critic. He dreamed of becoming a real “ novelist ” until death and writing at least ten great novels in the style of “human comedy”. However, his talent was more in the field of novelists and in the feature section. His last residential address in Munich was " Ungererstraße 130"; he is buried in the north cemetery in Munich . His two children (son and daughter) became medical professionals and worked in Africa after 1945.

literature

• Jürgen W. Schmidt: The writer and journalist René Prévot from Moosch in Upper Alsace - wrongly completely forgotten today . In: The West (newsletter of the Erwin von Steinbach Foundation). Volume 60, No. 3/4, 2013, pp. 6-13.
• René Prévot: Small crush for Schwabylon . Allitera, Munich 2008. _{Reprint of the first edition from 1954}
• Andreas Laska: Presse et propagande allemandes en France occupée: des Moniteurs officiels (1870–1871) à la Gazette des Ardennes (1914–1918) et à la Pariser Zeitung (1940–1944). Herbert Utz, Munich 2003. ISBN 3-8316-0293-X . _{(especially p. 139f. and biography on p. 406)}

Individual evidence

1. ^ Laska: Presse et propagande allemandes en France occupée ..., p. 139.
2. ^ Laska: Presse et propagande allemandes en France occupée ..., p. 140.