René Taube

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René Simon Taube (born October 8, 1919 in Vienna ; † February 19, 2013 in Silver Spring ) was an Austrian Jew who had to flee from the Nazis to Ecuador in 1938/1939 . He received his doctorate in chemistry in Quito and later in German literature in the USA. He taught in this subject at Howard University in Washington, DC until his retirement

From Vienna to Quito

René Taube was the son of the Viennese businessman Arthur Taube. In June 1937 he passed his matriculation examination at the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna and began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in the winter semester of 1937/38 .

After the annexation of Austria , René Taube was forced by the Nazis to drop out of studies for racist reasons, and in the summer semester of 1938, his second semester, he had to leave the University of Vienna .

René Taube and his family managed to emigrate to Ecuador. René Taube began studying chemistry and received his doctorate in this subject at the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito in 1948 .

In Quito, Karl Löwenberg , who emigrated from Germany, founded the Kammerspiele in 1944 , a semi-professional theater by German-speaking actors for predominantly German-speaking emigrants in Quito.

Vera Kohn (left) together with René Taube (right)

In addition to the female star of this small theater company, Vera Kohn , René Taube was “the outstanding actor of those early years”. Another member of the ensemble was apparently not quite as well known: Renate Aron (1926–2009). She became René Taube's wife in 1952 and lived with him for almost 58 years until her death. The two children Marcel and Vivian Taube emerged from the marriage.

Not much is known about Deaf's stay in Quito. Two at Maria-Luise Kreuter printed program notes of intimate theater is seen that in the play he 1946 Esther (presumably Esther by Jean Racine starred) and in the American premiere of Jean Anouilh play Antigone to Creon gave. Renate Aron was the ismene in this piece .

Excursus: The Aron family

Like René Taube, Renate Aron came from a family that had emigrated to Ecuador. Her parents were the Jewish lawyer Werner David Aron (1898–1967) and his non-Jewish wife Margot Lundehn Aron (1900–1989). They lived in Königsberg and had two other children in addition to Renate: Gert (born October 7, 1927 in Königsberg) and Marianne (born January 9, 1929 in Königsberg; † May 18, 2005 in Quito).

Werner Aron was one of those who underestimated the danger posed by the Nazis. After the First World War, he renounced the Jewish religion, trusted the protective mechanism of the front-line soldiers' privilege , and only then decided to emigrate when it was almost too late. Since as a lawyer he had no chance of entering many of the countries of refuge , he had only two alternatives: the visa-free Shanghai as a place of refuge for European Jews or Ecuador. The decision in favor of Ecuador was made because Margot Aron's sister and her husband, Annemie and Gerhard Zwirner, had lived in Ecuador since the mid-1920s and helped them to obtain the entry documents. Entry was tied to two conditions: the willingness to start a farm in a remote region of the country and to leave $ 1,000 as a deposit for entry. The latter was achieved with the help of a distant relative living in London who worked for a Quaker refugee organization . With a lot of luck, he managed to get a passage on the HAPAG ship Patria for himself and his family on April 1, 1939 .

The Arons were disembarked off Salinas on April 21, 1939 . Her equipment consisted of 21 shipping boxes, and her first stop after Guayaquil was Ambato . From here, the formalities in Quito had to be cleared before the family could leave for the jungle in mid-May. They could cover the first part of the route to Baños by bus, the rest to their destination Puyo by horse and mule.

In Puyo, the Arons secured land in the immediate vicinity of their relatives, the Zwirner family, and decided to keep cattle and grow bananas. They named their farm La Libertad - in memory of the freedom they lost in Germany.

Life in the wilderness and the inexperience of the colonialists were not without consequences: “The mistakes and mishaps of the first two years brought us almost to the point of total bankruptcy. The overpriced purchase of the first cattle from the wrong region, the underestimation of the required pasture and other wrong decisions consumed our capital, which was not too abundant at the beginning. We couldn't even say that we lived from hand to mouth, because even the bananas, the universal emergency food in Ecuador, take almost two years to bear the first "cabeza", the head of the bananas. While our neighbors allowed us to harvest all the bananas we could find, these old stocks were horribly neglected and produced very few bundles. "

The purely agricultural operation was later supplemented by a bakery, mainly operated by Margot Aron, whose products could be sold in Puyo, and by a weaving mill for tablecloths, placemats and upholstery fabrics.

Despite the remote location, the farmers kept getting visitors from Quito. The first visitors included the Hungarian artist Olga Fisch and the industrialist Hans Neustaetter, for whom the Prague architect Karl Kohn built the famous Quito villa Neustaetter in 1955 .

Renate Aron, who was a member of the executive committee of a sports club in Puyo, was the first of the Aron family to leave the jungle. She moved to Quito in 1942 at the age of sixteen and worked there in Olga Fisch's shop. In the evenings she attended English courses. It was in this environment that the contact with Karl Löwenberg and the Kammerspiele and also with René Taube probably arose . Four years later, in 1946, the long-awaited road between Baños and Puyo was opened, which made contact with the outside world much easier. For the Arons, however, it became apparent that they could no longer operate their farm for economic reasons. The jungle adventure ended in December 1948 and the Aron family moved to Quito, where they rented a house. After his farming career, Werner Aron started some not very successful business ventures in Quito, before he joined an import agency founded by a friend and achieved relative prosperity. Mother Margot successfully ran a weaving mill until the 1970s.

Neither Renate nor her siblings had attended school in Ecuador and neither had a qualification from Germany. However, the Arons' luggage also included two transport boxes full of books, and based on these, Werner Aron designed the educational program for his children during evening family rounds. “However, we had brought two boxes with a total of almost 300 pounds of books, ranging from light and humorous novels to informative volumes on history, geography, basic research and art, astronomy and classical works by Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare and others. I myself grew up in a system of general humanistic education, and I did my best to awaken an interest in intellectual thinking in the children in addition to the practical training they received to survive. "

Gert Aron, who had previously completed a correspondence course in hydrology , took a job in a hardware store in Quito and was also able to work as an assistant engineer on a hydraulic engineering project. From his brother-in-law, René Taube, he was taught the basics of algebra, trigonometry and analysis in a kind of crash course. In 1953 he went to the USA and was admitted to engineering studies from Ohio State University without a formal school leaving certificate. In 1969 he received his doctorate in hydrology from the University of California and then taught at Pennsylvania State University until his retirement in 1991.

Marianne Aron married George Chrambach (1918–2002) from northern Germany, who had been sent by his parents in 1936 to a camp for political refugee children in England. After the outbreak of World War II, he was brought to South Africa and then served as a British soldier in North Africa. After the end of the Second World War he went to Ecuador, where his parents had been able to emigrate. The Chrambachs ran a farm near the Arons, and after Marianne and George married, they ran a Fram until the end of the 1950s, before George got himself a dry cleaner in Quito.

From chemist to literary scholar

After Maria-Luise Kreuter, the Antigone play mentioned above was performed by the Kammerspiele in 1949. Soon afterwards René Taube and Renate Aron must have moved to the USA. They went to Baltimore , which is probably where their wedding took place in 1952. What induced René Taube to start a course that was quite contrary to his previous training as a chemist, namely German literature, has not been passed down. In any case, he obtained his master's degree in German literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1952 with his thesis on " CF Meyer's system of egoistic morality and the involuntary egoism of Thomas Becket " and received his doctorate in the same subject from Ohio State University in 1958 . His dissertation was entitled " The Image of Max Stirner in German Literature in the Middle of the 19th Century ".

René Taube started his academic career as an assistant professor for German literature at the University at Buffalo in the US state of New York and in 1969 became full professor for the same subject at Howard University in Washington, DC Here he retired in 1974.

One of the few surviving literary studies comes from René Taube's time at Howard University . He took part in a discussion on realism, the contributions of which were published in 1967. In his contribution, Taube asks whether the "Literature of the Founding Era", that is, the one after the German Empire was founded from 1870–71, was the literature of a new era - which he denies. “All I see in this literary phenomenon is the swelling, the becoming visible of a pseudo-realistic current that has long been embedded in bourgeois realism and has steadily increased in strength since the failure of the revolution of 1848. [..] The fact that the French campaign is so often reflected in hymns of the twilight of the idols and so seldom in realistic descriptions, raises the question of the new 'literary generation'. The 'Literature of the Wilhelminian Period' was by no means launched by young poets, but by richly old poets, many of whom broke with their political past, but none with their stylistic past. The first bards of the Wilhelminian era were the same poets who had previously cultivated the monumental rhapsody, the apocalyptic vision of history, the cult of noble hardness: mossy conservative warriors, and above all radicals, who had approached the victorious aristocratic reaction by leaps and bounds or by degrees. " The protagonists of this direction are Ferdinand Freiligrath with his ode Die Trompete von Gravelotte , Emanuel Geibel's poem Germany as a Profession and Richard Wagner's libretti . "I leave it open whether this literature of aristocratic pseudo-idealism or anti-realism is not the Maelstrom who washed on certain ideas, forms and catchphrases through all epochs of literary history from the hidden sources of romanticism to Nazi literature."

Renate Aron remained employed in the USA and usually took on accounting work. After retiring from work in a large residential complex, she was named “Employee of the Decade”.

Works

  • CF Meyer's System of Selfish Morality and Involuntary Egoism Thomas Beckets , Baltimore, 1952. The work relates to Meyer's 1879 novella The Saint .
  • Max Stirner's picture in German literature around the middle of the 19th century , dissertation, 1958. New edition: Verlag Max-Stirner Archive, Leipzig, 2000, ISBN 978-3-933287-26-7 .
  • Paradise Lost Forever. A Study of the German Philosophical Epics of the Nineteenth Century , in: The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, Volume 35, 1960, Issue 3, Pages 185–201.
  • Monthly booklets for German lessons, German language and literature. Official organ of the German Section of the Modern Language Association of the Central West and South , University. of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1946-1998
    • Realism: A Symposium. Discussion between Henry Hatfield, Frank G. Ryder, René Taube, Egon Schwarz and Jost Hermand , Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 1967), pp. 118-1307. René Taube's contribution relates to Jost Hermand and is in German.
    • Review: William H. McClain: Between Real and Ideal: The Course of Otto Ludwig 's Development as a Narrative Writer , Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1966), pp. 175-177.

literature

  • Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? Exile in an unknown country 1938 to the end of the 1950s , Metropol, Berlin, 1975, ISBN 3-926893-27-3 .
  • Werner D. Aron and Gert Aron: The Halo of the Jungle, 1999–2008, ISBN 978-0967059709 and 2012, ISBN 978-0967059761 . The afterword by Carl Aron says about this book: “The halo of the jungle has become a task for three generations. It was originally written in German by my grandfather Werner Aron, completed by my father Gert Aron, then translated into English by my mother Jean Aron, edited and entered into the computer and finally formatted in HTML by me and printed on the Internet and in this first Edition published. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, all biographical information is based on the sources Obituaries (obituaries): Rene S. Taube, German literature professor and University of Vienna: Entry for René Taube in the memorial book for the victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna 1938 (see web links ) .
  2. ^ A b Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 253-262
  3. ↑ a b Obituaries (obituaries): Rene S. Taube, German literature professor
  4. ↑ The following information about the Aron family is all based on the book by Werner and Gert Aron (see literature ). Due to the confusing structure of the e-book (the pages are counted chapter by chapter and always starts at 1), no direct page references have been made.
  5. ^ Gert Aron: The mistakes and misfortunes of the first two years brought us nearly 'to the point of total bankruptcy. The overly expensiye purchase of the first cattle from the wrong region, the underestimate of pasture needed, and other wrong decisions ate up our capital which was not too abundant to begin with. We couldn't even say that we lived from hand to mouth, because even the bananas, the universal emergency food in Ecuador, require nearly two years before they bear the first “cabeza”, or head of bananas. True, our neighbors allowed us to harvest whatever bananas we could find, but those old stands were terribly neglected and yielded very few bunches.
  6. ↑ THE AMAZING WORLD OF OLGA FISCH & Charles Fenyvesi: The Artistry Of Olga Fisch , The Washington Post, May 28, 1982
  7. ↑ Werner Aron: “We had, however, brought along two boxes with a total of almost 300 pounds of books, ranging from light and humorous novels to informative volumes on history, geography, basic science and arts, astronomy, and classic works by Schiller , Goethe, Shakespeare, and others. I myself had been brought up under a system of humanistic general education, and I tried my best to install in the children an interest in intellectual thought, in addition to the practical training which they received as a matter of survival. "
  8. ↑ For an overview of his extensive list of publications see: Gert Aron in WorldCat
  9. ↑ There is no evidence as to whether they moved to the United States before or after their wedding.
  10. ^ Monthly Bulletin - Realism: A Symposium. Discussion , p. 123
  11. ^ Text: The trumpet of Gravelotte
  12. ^ Monthly Bulletin - Realism: A Symposium. Discussion , p. 124
  13. ↑ René Taube in WorldCat
  14. ^ "The Halo of the Jungle has turned into a three-generation task. It was originally written in German by my Grandfather, Werner Aron, finished by my Father, Gert Aron, then translated to English, edited and entered into the computer by my mother, Jean Aron, and finally formatted in HTML and published on the web and in this first printed edition, by me. ”The book is available on the Internet as an eBook: The Halo of the Jungle by Smashwords
personal data
SURNAME Taube, René
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Taube, René Simon (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar of Austrian descent, emigrant
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2013
Place of death Silver Spring