Richard Euringer

Richard Euringer (born April 4, 1891 in Augsburg , † August 29, 1953 in Essen ) was a German writer who joined National Socialism . From 1950 he wrote under the pseudonym Florian Ammer .

Life

After visiting the Benedictine Abbey of St. Stephan in Augsburg and graduating from high school, Euringer became an officer candidate in the Bavarian Army . During the First World War he signed up for the air force and was deployed on the Western Front and with the Asian Corps in Asia Minor and on the Sinai . In 1917 he was appointed director of Aviation School 4 on the Lechfeld near Augsburg.

He described the end of the war and the November Revolution in 1933 from an elitist perspective as the reduction of the German population to an amorphous “mass” and “human pulp”, to which he contrasted the “eternal warriors of the Great War”, to whom he counted himself. He denied the military defeat as "the most infamous lie" and represented the " stab in the back legend ". He had now become a poet because he could no longer be a soldier.

After the war he began studying art history and economics in Munich , but lost his fortune due to inflation and had to drop out. Euringer then managed to get by in several professions, including as a worker in a sawmill and as an apprentice bank. From the mid-1920s he lived in Stadtlohn , Westphalia , the birthplace of his wife. Euringer joined the Nazi movement early on. He was one of the founders of the right-wing, albeit not party-bound, “National Association of German Writers” and, since 1931, its “Führer”. Since 1931 he has been writing for the Völkischer Beobachter , the Essen National Newspaper and numerous other Nazi papers as a cultural and political employee . In 1932/33 he began working on Wilhelm Stack's magazine Deutsches Volkstum . He did not formally join the NSDAP until March 1, 1933. He also supported the NSDAP in the election campaigns by the end of the Weimar Republic at the latest. In April 1933 he gave a programmatic lecture in Stadtlohn in the Schützenhalle on the transfer of power to the NSDAP and its German national alliance partners. It had the title "This is him: the Führer". In 1934 the party newspaper of the Essen NSDAP ruled that Euringer was "not a poet, not a writer, ... not even 'Herr' Euringer, he is so much a National Socialist by nature that the Pg in front of his name is superfluous".

Euringer's first steps in the role of writer failed. His play The New Midas (1920) "was laughed at". Lion Feuchtwanger praised the discipline of the audience because it did not react with stink bombs to the "unwanted and unskilled German nationalist Faust parody". A genre change from playwright to narrator also remained without a positive response for a long time. It was not until 1929 that the team's experience book Aviation School 4th Book achieved a “respectable success” in “national circles” of the same opinion. It was said from this side that the book was a “protest of military discipline against decomposition and pacifism”. He was able to build on this success in 1930 with the novel The Unemployed , written as "Settlement with the 'swamp' of the Weimar Republic" and from the "hatred of the democratic state" (Hillesheim). The writing was praised by the National Socialists as well as by the Catholic publicist and Jesuit Friedrich Muckermann and the writer Josef Winckler. Muckermann, who later became an opponent of the Nazis, still saw a “good core” of National Socialism in 1932, which should be developed further. Winckler was one of those authors who - unlike the ostracized Heinrich and Thomas Mann or Bertolt Brecht - were included in the German literary canon authorized by the National Socialists after 1933. The social democratic review magazine Die Bücherwarte , on the other hand, saw reading in 1931 as “an ordeal” in view of an “unbearable mixture of ideology and intoxication”. After 1933 the book was reprinted several times.

After the transfer of power, Euringer's major works were created. In 1933 his audio work Deutsche Passion 1933 was published , which Goebbels awarded the first national prize. As a piece of political propaganda, it "unites almost all the topoi of National Socialist poetry". In the same year the "up to then almost unsuccessful poet" without a corresponding professional qualification was appointed to his party director of the municipal libraries in Essen "as a thank you for his loyal supporters for years." Here he was responsible for the sorting out of 11,000 volumes that did not correspond to Nazi ideology and some of which were publicly burned . Euringer cheered the burning with the words: “This writing will go up in flames today. It's beautiful, symbolic, pictorial. ”In October 1933 he was one of the 88 German writers who had signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler . In 1934 he became a member of the administrative advisory board of the Reichsschrifttums- and Reichsrundfunkkammer . In 1935 he was appointed Reich Cultural Senator. From 1936 he worked as a freelance writer .

During the Second World War , Euringer found employment as a major in the Richthofen Jagdgeschwader and as a general staff officer in a war history department. The resulting notes were published in Leipzig in 1941 under the title Als Flieger in Zwei Krieges . After the end of National Socialism , he was arrested and interned by the US military government as a burden of Nazism , which he wrote about in his book Die Sargbreite Leben (Hamm 1952). It was an indictment against the US military government and a justification in which he legitimized not only his actions but also those of his “Führer”: “Hitler wanted to create a decent apartment for the millions of unemployed people and for the millions of homeless people. He wanted to free the empire from bondage in Versailles . Through popular diligence, through achievements, work, negotiations, Olympics, bluff. He hoped for the common sense of the people. He clearly held out his hand to England ... ”His biographer Klaus Wisotzky concludes that it is“ an unspeakable book full of self-pity ”. The "constant whining about the prison conditions" should be contrasted with the experiences "made by Soviet prisoners of war in Germany". In this respect, Euringer's conditions of detention “can be described as somewhat bearable”.

In the denazification process, Euringer was classified in category IV (without political, spatial and financial restrictions) of the so-called followers. The Essen committee came to the benevolent conclusion on the basis of Euringer's self- statements and statements of discharge (" Persilscheine ") that Euringer was a staunch National Socialist and campaigned for National Socialism, "but in a humane, loyal and noble way." He was neither a propagandist, nor an activist, nor a militarist.

In the Soviet occupation zone and then in the German Democratic Republic , his writings were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

In evaluating his work in 1995 Jürgen Hillesheim came to the conclusion that Euringer was "one of the most fanatical and unreserved admirers of Hitler and thus one of the main people responsible for the Hitler cult on a literary level". His biography is “exemplary for that of many Nazi poets. Not only a look at his works shows that his literary success was almost entirely due to his political commitment; A comparison with a large number of National Socialist writers, whose lives were very similar in essential points and stations, shows that Euringer is more of a contemporary phenomenon, a type, than an artist personality, which is characterized by individuality, among other things and distinguishes a creative talent. "

Honor

• 1934 National Book Prize (also known as the Stefan George Prize)

Fonts (selection)

• The new Midas , 1920
• Tummel pack. A whole book of stories , 1920
• Dandelions bloomed in the moat , 1920
• Mata , 1920
• The cross in a circle , 1921
• Pinkepottel and his family. The only certified report on the international expedition to the North Pole 1921/22 , 1922
• Vagel Bunt, that's 50 hearty Schwänke , 1923
• Parable of time. Contemplative Stories , 1923
• Pan and the fly. Tiny Stories , 1923
• The unemployed. Novel from the present , Langen Müller, Munich 1930; newly published as metal worker Vonholt. The day of a willing to work. Roman , Deutsche Hausbücherei, Vol. 4, Hamburg 1932
• The German Gorres , 1932
• Aviation school 4th book of the crew , 1929
• The Jobsiade . A bitch, pleasure u. Amateur play based on the immortal Dr. Kortum's comic heroic poem for folk funk renewed , 1933
• German Passion 1933. Hearing unit in 6 movements , 1933
• Three old German imperial cities. Rothenburg, Dinkelsbühl, Nördlingen , 1933
• The battle cry of youth , 1934
• Ludwig legend from a hundred years of anarchy , 1935
• The princes fall. A novel from 200 years of anarchy , 1935
• Dietrich Eckart. Life of a German Poet 1935
• Journeys and distances. Landscapes , 1936
• Chronicle of a German change. 1925-1935 , 1936
• Öhme Örgelköster's childhood. Nine chapters of a story , 1936
• Advance group "Pascha". Novel of the first expedition of German pilots into the desert , 1937
• The train through the desert. Novel of the first expedition of German pilots through the desert , 1938
• Journey to the Democrats. A Graubünden diary , 1937
• The last mill. Westphalian stories , 1939
• The Serasker . Envers end. Wandering and fighting of a daring Turk. Roman , 1942
• Aphorisms , 1943
• (as Florian Ammer): Through heaven and hell. The divine adventures of the young Dante , Herder , Freiburg 1950 & 1951 (2 volumes)
• The lovers. Just a love story , 1951
• (Florian Ammer): The night watch of Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca . A legacy , Herder, Freiburg 1952, 2nd edition 1954
• The width of the coffin life. We are internees , Hamm 1952
• Marco Polo's world tour , Stuttgart 1953
• The soldier and the peace. Reflection and phone call , Bielefeld / Bad Godesberg 1954

literature

• Jürgen Hillesheim : “Heil you Führer! Lead us! ”… The Augsburg poet Richard Euringer. Königshausen u. Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-859-6 .
• Johannes M. Reichl: The thing game. About the attempt at a National Socialist didactic theater (Euringer - Heynicke - Möller). With an appendix about Bert Brecht. Misslbeck, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-926086-20-3
• Klaus Wisotzky: Richard Euringer. Nazi writer and head of the Essen city library. In: Essen contributions. 112 (2000), pp. 128-151
• Klaus Wisotzky: In the service of Nazi ideology - the city library in the years 1933 to 1945. In: The key to the world. 100 years of the Essen City Library. Edited by Reinhard Brenner u. Klaus Wisotzky. Klartext, Essen 2002 (= publications by the Essen city archive; 5). ISBN 3-89861-105-1

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Euringer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Richard Euringer in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Short biography of Richard Euringer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Klaus Wisotzky: Richard Euringer. Nazi writer and head of the Essen city library . In: Essen contributions . 112 (2000), pp. 128-151.
2. ^ ^{A b} Richard Euringer in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
3. ↑ As evidenced by the details of the party index in the Federal Archives and also the denazification files, see: Klaus Wisotzky, Richard Euringer. Nazi writer and head of the Essen city library. In: Essener contributions, 112 (2000), pp. 128–151, here: p. 134.
4. ↑ Thorsten Ohm: Ernst Dertmann researches Richard Euringer In: Münsterlandzeitung. October 30, 2009.
5. ↑ National-Zeitung, May 2, 1934, quoted in after: Klaus Wisotzky: Richard Euringer. Nazi writer and head of the Essen city library. In: Essen contributions. 112 (2000), pp. 128-151, here: p. 148.
6. ^ Biographical note, in: Richard Euringer, Ludwigslegende, Hamburg o. J., p. 340f.
7. ↑ Jürgen Hillesheim, “Heil dir Führer! Lead us! ... “The Augsburg poet Richard Euringer, Würzburg 1995, p. 41.
8. ^ Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany, Boston (USA) 2000, p. 17.
9. ^ Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Literature and Film in the Third Reich, Rochester (USA) 2004, p. 47.
10. ↑ ^{a b} Jürgen Hillesheim: “Heil dir Führer! Lead us! ”… The Augsburg poet Richard Euringer. Würzburg 1995, cit. according to Richard Euringer in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
11. ^ 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. 143.
12. ↑ War History: A Coffin Width Life . In: Der Spiegel. February 4, 1953, p. 33.
13. ↑ see [1] , [2] , [3] .