Richard Billinger

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Richard Billinger (born July 20, 1890 in St. Marienkirchen near Schärding , † June 7, 1965 in Linz ) was an Austrian writer. His work marks the change from a naturalistic folk piece to a mythical-religious representation of demonic natural forces. It is heavily influenced by Billinger's home in the Innviertel .

Billinger was a successful author during the National Socialist era . His dramas, which, however, contain no racist remarks, were mistakenly subsumed under the blood-and-soil literature popular at the time due to their folkloric references . Today Billinger, whose most important works were illustrated by the book illustrator Alfred Kubin , is considered one of the most representative representatives of nature-mystical literature.

Billinger's birthplace in St Marienkirchen near Schärding
Blackboard at the birthplace

Childhood and youth

As the third and youngest child of merchants from St. Marienkirchen, Billinger began to write poems and dramas in his school days . Billinger's childhood was marked on the one hand by the daily farm work in his father's fields, on the other hand by auxiliary work in his mother's grocer . He was originally supposed to be a priest, but left the Petrinum in Linz , attended high school in Ried im Innkreis and subsequently studied philosophy and German in Innsbruck , Kiel and Vienna , but without a degree.

The two-meter-tall giant and muscle man Billinger initially wanted to be a circus athlete and boxer, but his passion for literature gained the upper hand.

First successes as a poet

In 1922 Billinger was discovered in the Viennese Café Museum by the dancer Grete Wiesenthal , who heard him recite her own verses in a hushed voice and broke his friendship with Hugo von Hofmannsthal . Billinger was able to recite his poems at his castle in Rodaun near Vienna. He was also sponsored by Max Mell . In 1923 the volume of poetry "Praise God" was published by Rudolf Haybach and shortly afterwards by Ernst Rowohlt the volume of poetry, "About the Fields". In 1924 Billinger received the City of Vienna's Literature Prize for this. Hofmannsthal announced in the American magazine "The Dial" "the appearance of a new lyric poet".

Billinger wrote eruptively, intermittently, some reminiscent of Expressionism . With his poetry he wanted to "arrive at original words that must sound like prayers ".

Dramas

In 1924, Billinger's marionette play , Das Spiel vom Knecht, was premiered in the Wiener Konzerthaus , a “dramatic poem for larger marionettes” , which he subsequently reworked into the drama “Perchtenspiel”.

In 1924 he wrote the play Reise nach Ursprung , which is the original cell of many of Billinger's dramas.

In 1928, at the opening of the Salzburg Festival , Billinger caused a sensation as a playwright with his play The Perchtenspiel (see Perchten ) in the Festspielhaus, a "dance and magic play of the foolish farmer, the bride of the wind and the saints" (premiered July 26, 1928 by the Exl stage directed by Eduard Köck , set design: Robert Kautsky , with Grete Wiesenthal as the actress of the "beautiful Perchtin") and immediately made a name for herself. Carl Zuckmayer praised the "eeriness, the horror, the burden" in it and believed that he could feel the "secret devastation of bones and souls of country life" on his own body.

“The piece has a real eerie quality, a twilight of tangible real things, as I only know from Strindberg. The double play of the masks, the disguise and the real events, the larvae and human faces, is simply great. " (Carl Zuckmayer)

Billinger already draws himself in the Perchtenspiel . He is the farmer Peter over whom the demonic has power. It forces him to cast off his wife, to leave the farm, regardless of the hard work that the old parents now have to do alone, he goes on an adventure. When he returns empty, he is not redeemed, but obsessed with experiencing the demonia that mysteriously lives under the fields and in the woods. But since he betrayed the mysterious forces by his escape, the schiechen Perchten are now chasing him to death.

Those who come from the village will always want to see the paradise things of home. The shower sprouts from the temple of the thunderstorms, the stars, the springs, the ears of wheat that shake hands like hands, the forests that are still bathing in mystery. Who banished the parents to the house, to the chair and table and Pfühl? Woke up the stars, did the angels come running? Or did the demons produce animal spirits? Did a cloud float over the roof and the village on the night of conception like a fish with golden ether fins? The window was barred, the gate was closed, and the bread, it was resting on the table. (Richard Billinger: "Where I came from")

In many of his works, Billinger described the rural, cultic life of his homeland in the Innviertel , which lies on the border with Bavaria between the Danube and the Inn . As a farmer's son and a Jesuit pupil , he demonstrated his close familiarity with the secrets of ancient customs and traditions . His first stage poems emerged from the contrast between his heroes' instinct for nature, which on the one hand encompasses the demonic, pagan myth and on the other hand the Catholic spirit, and the overriding longing for the adventure that the civilization of the big city promises.

In the drama Rauhnacht (1931), Billinger humanizes the demons who were masks, ghosts and fairy figures in the “Perchtenspiel”. The hero, Simon Kreuzhalter, escapes into the city and studies theology. He returns, lost to inner powers and therefore driven into crime. The greed for unknown psycho-physical ecstasies lures him to the country, instead of ghosts he finds the very real, but outsider shopkeeper, Kreszenz. Billinger's first great success had its world premiere on October 10, 1931 at the Münchner Kammerspiele under the direction of Otto Falckenberg and with Alfred Kubin with Käthe Gold , Ewald Balser and Will Dohm, and was placed by Falckenberg right next to August Strindberg's “ Ghost Sonata ” . The actor Ferdinand Marian had his breakthrough in the performance of “Rauhnacht” at the Hamburg Thalia Theater (director: Erich Ziegel ) .

Hans Baldung Grien : The bewitched groom (woodcut, 1534), suggestion for Billinger's drama Rosse (1931)

In many of Billinger's works, the mother is the last stop, only she takes it up again and again - this also corresponds to the autobiographical trait. She is the last grace , also as Magna Mater and in the form of a begging woman or a witch . At the same time, her voice becomes the voice of conscience: When asked “What should I fear?” She replies: “Not outside, inside. "(" Rauhnacht ").

The piece Rosse (1931, see Rosse ) marks a clear change in Billinger's dramatic work: the groom Franz remains caught in the circle of demonic nature and breaks at the explosion of his threatened self. Here is, in contrast to the "Perchtenspiel" and the " Rauhnacht ”the main character is not a mirror image of Billinger's being, but freely invented. “Rosse” anticipates Peter Shaffer's horse drama “ Equus ”, its consequence is perhaps even more frightening than the piece by the Englishman. On April 19, 1931, the original version of the piece was performed as a "sketch" at the Münchner Kammerspiele . The composer Winfried Zillig used this version as the libretto for his opera of the same name, which premiered on February 11, 1933 in Düsseldorf under the direction of Walter Bruno Iltz with the conductor Jascha Horenstein . With a new version of this play, Billinger made its first appearance at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin (1933, with Maria Koppenhöfer ) and at the Vienna Burgtheater (September 15, 1933, with Franz Höbling in the leading role). Billinger received the inspiration for the piece from the picture “The bewitched stablehand” by Hans Baldung Grien , who, like Pieter Brueghel and Alfred Kubin , can be described as a soul mate with Billinger. Kubin dealt with Billinger's literary oeuvre in several graphic sheets after he had drawn the draft scenes for the premiere of “Rauhnacht” in 1931 - Billinger in turn dedicated several poems to Kubin.

With his dramas Billinger became known far beyond the borders of his homeland, he became the most played playwright of his time alongside Carl Zuckmayer . His Bavarian-Austrian baroque theater with the pagan allusions were hardly ever heard tones that exerted a special charm in their exciting mixture of zest for life and piety. Billinger's radical turn from the materialistic peasant poetry of the 19th century astonished and enthusiastic critics and audiences. Where, for example, the figures of Ludwig Anzengruber , Karl Schönherr and Franz Kranewitter still corresponded to a naturalistic reality and the tradition of the old Viennese folk piece , Billinger created a surrealistic truth with his "shadows" and "masks" , that of the mythical-religious works of the boy Gerhart Hauptmann ( Hanneles Himmelfahrt 1894, Die versunkene Glocke 1896, Und Pippa tanzt!, 1906) were influenced.

On October 21, 1937, Billinger's drama Der Gigant was premiered at the Berlin State Theater under Jürgen Fehling with Eugen Klöpfer , Käthe Gold , Maria Koppenhöfer , Pamela Wedekind , Kurt Meisel , set design: Rochus Gliese . In 1942 the piece served as a template for the Prague film “ The Golden City ” by Veit Harlan with Kristina Söderbaum Eugen Klöpfer, Annie Rosar and Kurt Meisel.

The National Socialists valued Billinger's inclination towards peasant subjects, but they were suspicious of his actual interests, the disclosure of demonic worlds of imagination or accumulated instinctual energies. Billinger's “ Rauhnacht ” was banned, the comedy Stille Berge (1933), in which the main character is the pure girl Hedwig Bachstelzer, a hunchback whose face “wears the pale sheen of alluring beauty ”, found no favor with the National Socialist press. The bizarre figures of a loving butcher widow, a fortune teller and a hysteric imitating Empress Elisabeth were too decadent for her. Even the first performance in Leipzig with Luise Ullrich was unsuccessful, the piece was only performed six times; the Berlin performance at the Deutsches Theater (director: Karlheinz Stroux ) was accused in the National Socialist “ The Attack ” that Billinger wanted to “tickle a morbid audience from the Weimar period of decay with erotic perversions” . This had an effect, Billinger's next pieces were comparatively unsavory.

With the artist melodrama Gabriele Dambrone (1939), Billinger left his home world, as he had before with “The Gigant” , turned away from the demonic and rural and tried to match the mood of the sentimental sound film. He set the piece in the big city. With the title character, he created another delicately innocent girl character, a “sweet Viennese girl” from the suburbs, whose fulfillment is acting. The Berlin premiere took place on February 16, 1939 at the Staatstheater under Jürgen Fehling with Käthe Gold and Gustav Knuth under the title “Am hoch Meer” . At the Vienna Burgtheater the play with the final title “Gabriele Dambrone” with Gusti Huber and Raoul Aslan took place directed by Herbert Waniek on November 22, 1941. The play was filmed in 1943 with Gusti Huber and Siegfried Breuer (director: Hans Steinhoff ).

In Melusine (1941, see Melusine ), the story of the double love of a rich young man for mother and daughter, Billinger modernized an old fairy tale into an Ibsen- style marriage drama and operated like in the Heimatfilm , which shows the changeability of the weather on human fate and sensitivities transmits, with metaphors and comparisons, which signal emotional struggle, decision-making and the dangers of sensual and instinctual seduction. OW Fischer played Aurelio Türk in 1942 in a performance of the Deutsches Volkstheater Wien in the "Comedy" in Johannesgasse, directed by Walter Ullmann and in the set design by Gustav Mankers .

With the comedy Die Fuchsfalle (1942) Billinger returned to the realm of the bizarre and demonic, the victory of the country over the city, located in Lungau in Salzburg . The piece was premiered in Munich and shortly afterwards on November 19, 1943 by the Exl-Bühne , which had already performed Billinger's debut in 1928.

Nature as a threat

The Upper Austrian Innviertel near Wollöster

The Innviertel on the Danube was Billinger's human and artistic home; he was deeply rooted in this stretch of land between the Danube and Inn , even if his life path led him to Vienna and later to Munich . The river Inn is of major importance in Billinger's work. He demands human sacrifices, he gives birth to seductive female figures, in one of Billinger's poems it says: "He created me, the river."

In most of Billinger's plays, the author is the hero himself; personal experiences are often exaggerated to the point of bizarre. In doing so, Billinger also characterized the fate of his generation; Rural exodus, decadence and the advance into the transcendent. In Billinger's book "Aus der Assche des Pegefeuers" (Story of a Village Child, 1931), a strangely bizarre childhood story, there are already many motifs sketched out that would later determine his dramatic work. There you can follow the psychological development directly. Billinger's return from the city to his rural homeland, which has become strange, is not shaped by the longing for relaxation, as is the case with the average city dweller, but by the urge to become the “demon of nature”, to the spirits of his homeland, where pagan and Catholic customs coexist in the Innviertel to this day to be cared for. For Billinger, the country is not an idyll , but a threat. Carl Zuckmayer calls Billinger "a 'terrified child' of the peasantry , of the country":

“He doesn't lift it, it doesn't arouse longing, no blissful voice, no hymn-like chorus in him. The land is hard, cruel, stony, full of dust, full of thorns, its days are punished for work, blinded by sweat, its nights are sultry and dangerous, the bad weather lurks in the darkness, the brook murmurs angrily, chatty, the beams crackle Everywhere the last breath of the dead is coughing, dogs are yapping under the moon, it is grinning from pale sacks of grain, from slimy algae green. The utter plague, the profit of which is thrown to pieces by a hail, the workload that winter sheds, the peasant yoke anew every spring, the dull narrowness of the lower living quarters, the small community life, the dull brutality of the peasant, the hardship of the parents against the children, the boy against the old man, the farmhand against the cattle, the merciless sky over the turning-windy earth, so frightens, frightens, crushes him the reality of being there at home, until he, in the spellbound, releasing word, the secret booze, the milk and receives the sweetness of the ripe fruit. "

This atmosphere and an irrepressible imagination, which inspired even the most bizarre thoughts in the parents' grocer's shop, shaped Billinger. As a giant two meters tall by nature, he felt more connected to dwarfs and cripples than to the honest average person.

Homosexuality and the Nazi era

Billinger was homosexual and was imprisoned by the National Socialists from January to March 1935. He had temporarily employed a Reichswehr soldier as a secretary and housed him, who turned out to be a spy. Billinger narrowly escaped conviction in Munich in 1935 because Heinrich Himmler intervened for him. "If you wanted to send him something, you were asked to give 'unnatural fornication' as the reason for the detention".

With earthy peasant songs ( “We farmers do not tolerate ridicule / To our Lord and Master God!” ) The “ Innviertel Dionysus ” soon won the attention and benevolence of the National Socialists , which he, however, with fervent hymns to Faun ( “He rests naked. He slumbers carefree The star that produced him, in mild parents, wanted him strong. "), Beautiful monastery brothers and the nakedness of St. Sebastian also irritated:

You only one whom the church gave to worship him naked,
throw off your rusty lances that harm your body
and walk happily among us, show yourself to the tree, the rivers
naked as a god! Swell as a star whom we whisper to greet!
( Sankt Sebastian , in: Across the fields, This world - beyond, 1923)

In 1938 Billinger was represented in the “Confession Book of Austrian Writers”, which was published by the “ Association of German Writers in Austria ” and enthusiastically welcomed the Anschluss . Billinger published the following poem in the magazine " Das Innere Reich " (1938, 1st half-year volume, p. 1):

“ Whose spirit comes from the fire,
Will never perish!
The sign flames forever -
a resurrection!
(To Adolf Hitler on March 13, 1938 ) "

Billinger's works were useful for the National Socialists because they believed they recognized a blood-and-soil theme . Billinger took advantage of the misunderstanding and ingratiated himself: As a homosexual, he feared persecution. Billinger's best dramas are set in the peasant milieu, but they are less about the problems of the peasant class than about the unleashing of the demonic forces that underlie ancient customs. As a Nazi follower, Billinger was a top literary earner. "He wasn't a Nazi, there are no racist statements from him. He just played along and enjoyed it," says the curator of the Billinger exhibition "Heimat. Körper. Kunst." in the Stifter House in Linz, Klaus Kastberger, 2013.

Carl Zuckmayer , an ambivalent friend from his early days, wrote in a report for the American foreign secret service , the “ Office of Strategic Services ”, for which he wrote 150 character studies of writers, publishers, musicians, directors, actors, dancers and journalists who remained in Nazi Germany , and characterized Billinger from exile as a "degenerate farmer, perfumed farmer and village decadent"  :

Billinger comes from the same corner of Austria as Hitler [...] - between Passau, Schärding, Wasserburg and Burghausen, - seems to be a special ground for the growth of shady second-faced media or pathologically deformed half-geniuses or all-charlatans ... (.. .) He is vain, vengeful, completely unreliable, incredibly cowardly and always ready for any betrayal.

However, 30 years later Zuckmayer revised the picture and classified Billinger in 1976 (in "Call to Life") among the "unjustly forgotten ".

Billinger's opera Die Hexe von Passau (music: Ottmar Gerster ) was banned by the Nazis after its premiere in 1941 and performances in Magdeburg, Bremen, Essen, Liegnitz and Italy because the opera was "too depressive".

With novels such as Life from God's Hand (1935), Das verchkte Leben (1937), Billinger also established himself as a narrator, he wrote and delivered scripts, for example for Peer Gynt (1934) with Hans Albers and for Luis Trenker's Der Berg ruft (1937) the template for films based on his plays Der Gigant (1942), Gabriele Dambrone (1943) and Melusine (1943).

From 1913 Billinger was a member of the artists' association MAERZ and also belonged to the Henndorfer circle around Carl Zuckmayer .

Wolfgang Schoor set Richard Billinger's poems to music , Winfried Zillig composed, in addition to "Rosse" (Der Roßknecht) op. 14, Billinger's "Die Windsbraut" op. 25 (1940; 1941 Leipzig) and the television opera "Bauernpassion" op. 39 (1955, Rundfunk München )

Post war and old age

Richard Billinger's grave in Hartkirchen, Eferding district

Billinger settled in Niederpöcking on Lake Starnberg and lived there with his partner in the midst of magnificent farmhouse furniture, statues of the Madonna and masks, and became addicted to alcohol. He lived primarily from his well-off female supporters, who remained loyal to him. After the war he also wrote numerous radio plays. He spent his old age in Linz , where he used to shout his poems in the inns to people who had no idea who it was who shouted these rhymed prayers, curses and visions at them.

The Nazi literary historian Josef Nadler points out that the following stanza from the poem A Loaf of Bread is an example of Billinger's worldview.

Ears of corn in the hallways praise
you, O bread, in flames.
Sister Host, chaste and cool,
greets you with a feeling of God

The Upper Austrian state parliament supported Billinger for life with a monthly gift of 2000 schillings. He spent the evening of his life in Hartkirchen , where he was buried in an honorary grave in the province of Upper Austria after his death .

Honors

Honorary Citizenship Certificate for Richard Billinger, 1960
Primary school named after Billinger in St Marienkirchen near Schärding

Works

Dramas

  • 1924: The farmhand's game
  • 1928: The Perchtenspiel
  • 1931: Rauhnacht
  • 1931: Rosse
  • 1935: The Witch of Passau
  • 1937: the giant
  • 1941: Melusine
  • 1942: Erasmus Grasser's game
  • 1943: Paracelsus, Festival
  • 1953: The heavy bag
  • 1955: The Augsburg Millennium Game
  • 1955: The farmer's passion
  • 1959: Danube ballade

Scripts

Literary templates for films

Novels, prose

  • 1931: From the ashes of purgatory
  • 1934: The Guardian Angel House
  • 1937: The life given away
  • 1951: Palace of Youth (autobiography)

Poetry

  • 1923: Across the fields
  • 1931: sickle in the sky
  • 1935: The night watch
  • 1942: Holder Morgen

Total expenditure

  • 1955–1960: Collected works , 12 volumes
  • 1972–1983: Collected Works , 7 volumes

Publications also in the magazines Das Innere Reich , Jugend , Der Weiße Rabe and Die Kolonne .

literature

Web links

Commons : Richard Billinger  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stifterhaus Linz: Homosexuals during the Nazi era: Richard Billinger Show in Linz. Retrieved December 10, 2017 .
  2. ^ Letter to Gustav Hartung dated September 30, 1929
  3. ↑ quoted from: Edwin Baumgartner: Only a peasant poet? On the 115th birthday of Richard Billinger, Wiener Zeitung, July 20, 2005
  4. ^ Hamburger Abendblatt, December 15, 1951
  5. ↑ quoted from: Arnulf Klaffenböck: "Thoughts on the Zuckmayer dossier on Richard Billinger", in: "Zuckmayer Yearbook No. 5, Wallstein Verlag 2002"
  6. ^ Heinz Gerstinger: Foreword to the dramas, Stiasny Verlag 1960
  7. ^ Carl Zuckmayer : Secret report (Eds. Gunther Nickel and Johanna Schrön) Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2002
  8. ↑ quoted from: Katia Mann : My unwritten memoirs . Stuttgart 1974, p. 74.
  9. ↑ "Makes literature war. Austrian literature under National Socialism. ”Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 1998. ISBN 3-205-98451-X .
  10. ↑ “Confession Book of Austrian Writers”, published by the Association of German Writers Austria , Krystall-Verlag Vienna, with contributions by Richard Billinger, Bruno Brehm , Egmont Colerus , Hans Deißinger , Walther Eidlitz , Arthur Fischer-Colbrie , Franz Karl Ginzkey , Paula Grogger , Robert Hohlbaum , Mirko Jelusich , Linus Kefer , Hans Kloepfer , Max Mell , Hermann Heinz Ortner , Erwin H. Rainalter , Friedrich Schreyvogl , Karl Springenschmid , Franz Spunda , Karl Hans Strobl , Karl Heinrich Waggerl , Josef Weinheber , Julius Zerzer u. a. The camouflaged National Socialist “Association of German Writers Austria” was founded under the presidency of the Catholic Greater German Max Mell in order to “pave the way for the liberation of their people and to complete it” ( Max Stebich 1938).
  11. ↑ quoted from: Joseph Wulf : Culture in the Third Reich. Literature and poetry . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 1989, ISBN 3-550-07056-X , p. 410.
  12. ↑ quoted from: Thomas Sessler Verlag Wien, publishing program
  13. ↑ Homosexual in the Nazi era - Richard Billinger show in Linz http://diepresse.com/home/kultur/literatur/1464676/Homosexuell-in-der-NSZeit_RichardBillingerSchau-in-Linz?gal=1464676&index=1&direct=&_vl_backlink= /home/kultur/index.do&popup=
  14. ↑ http://www.zeit.de/2002/19/200219_l-zuckmayer.xml
personal data
SURNAME Billinger, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Marienkirchen near Schärding
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1965
Place of death Linz