Werner Ackermann

Emil Hermann Werner Ackermann , also known under the pseudonyms Rico Gala , Robert Landmann , WA Fieldmann or WA Kermann (born December 28, 1892 in Antwerp , Belgium ; † May 10, 1982 in Mbabane , Swaziland ) was a German-speaking writer, publisher and at times Co-owner of the Monte Verità artists' colony in Ascona / Switzerland.

Life

Werner Ackermann was born in Antwerp in 1892 as the son of the German bookseller Rudolf Ackermann and his wife Elli, b. Koeving was born. His parents ran an international bookshop on Place Verte in Antwerp, not far from the cathedral.

The father Rudolf Ackermann came from Könnern in the Prussian province of Saxony , where the family owned a brickworks and a mine, and had emigrated to Antwerp in the second half of the 19th century; the mother was the daughter of German emigrants in the USA. Antwerp had developed into a European trading metropolis again at the turn of the 19th century; Above all, Dutch and German merchants (sea trade, shipping company, sea insurance, fur and wool trade) had immigrated. German tradesmen, domestic workers, shopkeepers and restaurateurs had followed the German merchants. Around 1910, over 8,000 Germans lived in Antwerp.

Werner Ackermann had great sympathy for the philosopher Max Stirner all his life and propagated uncompromising cosmopolitan thinking among individuals, which rejects the selfish and aggressive nation state. He described himself as a great man of happiness, which he did not mean "good room happiness" with money and a secure position, but his constant belief in himself and his constant purpose.

Childhood and youth

Werner Ackermann spent his childhood with his two siblings, the older Eduard and the younger Hilde, in their parents' apartment above the bookstore on Place Verte in Antwerp.

From 1898 Werner Ackermann attended the German School founded in Antwerp in 1882. The school was bilingual (German and French) and enjoyed a very good reputation. The Ackermann siblings were considered naughty. Werner Ackermann had to change schools and was temporarily at a boarding school in the German Reich. Ackermann grew up in an educated middle class milieu with a German national, Lutheran character. The father was the well-read bookseller, the mother the businesswoman. The relationship with the parents was good. In a later letter to his parents, Werner Ackermann wrote:

“As far as we are concerned, I do not take the standpoint that old and young cannot understand each other, because precisely through your upbringing and your will to our, your children, happiness you have shown that you are modern in the best sense of the word. "

Ackermann wrote his first plays during school, which he sent to Max Reinhardt . This should have encouraged him to continue writing.

In 1909 Werner Ackermann opted for German citizenship, which he later regretted.

First professional experience

After briefly studying at Richard Wrede's private journalist college in Berlin (1912/1913), his parents found him a job at the Touring Club Suisse in Geneva. During this time he wrote the two plays Greatness and The Big Boy .

First World War

After the outbreak of the First World War, Werner Ackermann volunteered on the German side and was deployed as a non-commissioned officer in the field artillery on the Belgian and French fronts. After just a few months, his initial enthusiasm for the war turned into a disenchantment with war in a pacifism that would shape his further political development. In September 1916 he was injured and ended up in Reserve Hospital VII in Hanover-Herrenhausen, where he tried to delay his recovery as long as possible.

Study and marriage

On November 16, 1917, before the end of the war, he took office as Lieutenant d. R. started studying literature at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin , which he broke off in the spring of 1919. In early 1920 he married Hedwig Emma Ota Boehme (1894–1986), daughter of a railway engineer from Hanover, in Berlin. Both rejected the institution of marriage, but needed a marriage certificate to get an apartment. In November 1921 the daughter Sonja was born.

Publisher and co-owner of Monte Verità

After finishing his studies early, Werner Ackermann became a partner in the publishing houses Ackermann & Pungs and Morawe & Scheffelt in Berlin. He has published works by Hans Bethge , Eugen Georg and Jeremias Gotthelf , among others . Two color lithographs by Lou Albert Lasard that Albert Einstein represent were issued. The economic circumstances of the publishing industry in the initial phase of the Weimar Republic, however, turned out to be more and more difficult.

The collapse of the German financial system and hyperinflation finally caused Werner Ackermann to sell the publishers in August 1923 and look elsewhere for a better future. With his Berlin friends, the painter Hugo Wilkens and the reciter and craftsman Max Bethke , he decided to acquire the artists' colony Monte Verità in Ascona from Henri Oedenkoven . Part of the missing capital was contributed by relatives of his brother-in-law William Werner, who came from a wealthy Antwerp industrial family.

On February 1, 1924, the Monte Verità was officially opened as an artist hotel after major renovation and conversion work. The artist hotel Monte Verità was not granted any economic success. Under pressure from the Belgian financiers, Wilkens and Ackermann had to leave the community of owners in autumn 1924, and a little later the artists' colony was sold to the former banker of the German emperor, Baron Eduard von der Heydt . However, Ackermann and Wilkens both stayed with their families in Ascona. Werner Ackermann became friends with the Russian Baron Eduard von Erdberg , the biologist and naturalist Karl Soffel , the writer Max Picard and the later puppet theater director Jakob Flach .

Werner Ackermann was now a freelance writer. In addition to articles for Swiss newspapers, articles for Die Weltbühne , the satirical magazine Das Stachelschwein by Hans Reimann and Die Annalen by Walter Muschg have been made since 1925 . The focus of his work, however, was on his plays. During this time he wrote the plays Die Brücke , Five Acts Lottery and Flucht nach Shanghai, among others . Occasionally he appeared with the German national poet Werner von der Schulenburg and the Dadaist and surrealist Hans Arp at poetry readings in the house of his brother-in-law William Werner. He saw himself as a brain worker and demanded in a polemical reply to an article in the KPD magazine Die Front that the man of letters who is free from bourgeois conceit can demand that the manual worker confront him without conceit.

"The small and medium-sized bourgeoisie (is) a mass of misguided, deceived, poor, exploited proletarians". "Hand or head - we are all cooked in one pot."

Ackermann always interesting topic was the colonialism . In an essay in 1927 he took André Gides' critical travelogue about the Congo as an opportunity to grapple with the revived colonial interests in the Weimar Republic, an interest that reached into the socialist milieu. For Ackermann, in contrast to Gide, colonialism was inevitably characterized by unlimited tyranny and thus criminal. From his point of view as a citizen, one should not be complicit in this. Early on he criticized the racism of the white settlers in South Africa and saw the black liberation struggle looming on the horizon, albeit with the hope that the class struggle would join the racial struggle.

Werner Ackermann also took part in the debate on the Paneuropean idea of ​​Count Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1926 and 1930. Franz Werfel , Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein were among the members of the Paneuropean Union . Coudenhove and others, including the editor of the Weltbühne Carl von Ossietzky , saw in a united Europe a way out of the looming danger of war. Ackermann saw a danger in the Paneuropean idea, because "without the constant outlook on the world state, proletarian international or domineering society, it would have to remain a plaything between incompatible interests - that is, a bomb". For Ossietzky, this was a misunderstanding of the stage in European development at that time.

The idea of statelessness was partially reflected in the principles of the Cosmopolitan Union , which he founded in 1928 with Kurt Zube and Ulrich von Beckerath and whose provisional secretariat was set up in Ascona. The Cosmopolitan Union was dissolved again when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many of its members emigrated internally or externally. Nevertheless, Ackermann remained true to the idea of ​​the world state and became a member of Joe Heydecker's World State League after World War II .

First successes

After his return to Berlin at the end of 1928, Werner Ackermann made greater efforts to get his plays to be performed. In February 1930 his play was flight to Shanghai from Fritz Jessner premiered at the Schauspielhaus Konigsberg. A performance at the Staatliche Schauspiel zu Berlin under the direction of Leopold Jessner , planned as early as 1929 , did not take place after Jessner had to give up general management due to political pressure. Herbert Ihering, one of the leading theater critics of the Weimar period, saw this as a missed opportunity for the Berlin theater and wrote:

“Ackermann is writing a piece with strong potential for impact. It has a fable (based on a suggestion by Holitscher) from which everything develops. It's art, design. "

On October 26, 1930 there was a one-time performance of the play in a night performance at the Lessing Theater in Berlin, directed by the young Max Ophüls .

In 1930 the play Kleist's Death , which Werner Ackermann had written together with the Jewish and communist Siegfried Lönnerstädter, was premiered as a radio play on Swiss radio. With Lönnerstädter he also wrote the radio grotesque Dr. Iron beard . This was followed in January 1931 by the world premiere of Five Acts Lottery at the Frankfurt Künstler-Theater.

Werner Ackermann also carried out commissioned work. The buyer of the Monte Verità, Baron Eduard von der Heydt , commissioned him to write a book about the history of the artist colony, which was published in 1930 by Adalbert Schultz Verlag, Berlin and has been reissued to this day. The pacifist print shop owner and publisher Paul Riechert financed Ackermann a six-month stay in St. Tropez in 1931 to research the struggle of the Italian socialist Matteotti against Mussolini. The German Future , an anti-war paper , was published by Riechert in 1927 , and in 1929 the independent supplement, The Peace Front, under the direction of Arnold Kalisch, was the official organ of the “ Association of War Service Opponents ”. Marcel van Diest, whom Ackermann was to meet again in Brussels, was one of its authors. On the basis of the research, Ackermann wrote the novel Woe to the winner and the play of the same name. The first edition of the novel was almost completely destroyed shortly before delivery in 1932 by the SA, which stormed and demolished the Riechert-Verlag.

European exile

Werner Ackermann had no illusions about the approaching National Socialism. In the autumn of 1932 he left Berlin and moved with his family to his parents' home in the art house in Ahrenshoop , which the parents had bought in 1919. In 1933 he finally left Germany for reasons of conviction, as he later said. Twelve restless years followed. In 1933 he desperately tried to establish a new existence, first in Zurich with his sister, then in Istanbul and Ibiza . All projects failed. Finally, he returned with his wife and child to his birthplace, Antwerp, where, as a German refugee, he led a precarious existence in terms of residence rights and economically.

Werner Ackermann kept himself afloat with translations of individual works by Stijn Streuvels , Elisabeth Zanke and Antoon Coolen . For a short time he worked on Klaus Mann's exile magazine Die Sammlung . The pieces lobster for the people , The Minnesinger , Dolores and Juan and The Girl from Prague were created . Individual pieces were broadcast as radio plays on Radio Suisse and Radio Paris.

In the Wehrmacht

At the beginning of the German invasion of Belgium, Werner Ackermann was interned as an enemy alien by the Belgian authorities on the edge of the Pyrenees in southern France. During the internment, he applied to the Foreign Legion for membership, but it was rejected. After the occupation of Belgium, the internees, including Ackermann, were repatriated by the German military administration. Werner Ackermann then began working in Brussels as a translator for the Abwehrstelle (Ast) Brussels under Karl Krazer. He was a monarchist and opponent of Hitler and held a protective hand over Ackermann when he was told by the NSDAP local group Antwerp a. a. was accused of political unreliability because of his application for a Belgian carte d'identité made in 1934 . Subsequent interrogations by the Reichsführer SS (SD) security service had no consequences. In August 1942 Werner Ackermann was called up for active military service in the Wehrmacht and used in naval espionage in Antwerp. After the Brussels branch was dissolved in autumn 1943, he was transferred to the Abwehrstelle Cologne and was taken prisoner by the Americans in Bad Wildungen in April 1945.

Post-war years in the Federal Republic

After his release from captivity in August 1946, Werner Ackermann settled in Weinheim on Bergstrasse. He hoped to be able to build on the successful late 1920s and early 1930s in a Germany liberated from National Socialism. The start seemed promising. Several of his radio plays were performed in the following years on the radio stations Saarbrücken, Stuttgart, Vienna and Halle. The plays Children from Spain and Lobsters for the People premiered, and his Matteotti novel was published in West Germany in 1947 and in the GDR in 1950.

Ackermann became friends with the actor and director Herbert G. Doberauer , the painter Willi Baumeister and the gallery owner Egon Günther. Günther was one of the first to exhibit Beckmann , Kirchner , Feininger , Dix , Klee and other painters ostracized by the National Socialists after the Second World War . He was already showing African art, which at that time was still called "negro sculpture". However, the approaching Cold War soon led to difficulties. In the Federal Republic of Germany, in the course of the Restoration, interest in the author of the Weimar Republic who was critical of capitalism waned, and for the GDR, Ackermann had become ideologically questionable in the course of Stalinization. For example, his novel Ein Toter defeated Mussolini about the socialist leader Matteotti was confiscated by the GDR authorities shortly after it went to press after the founding of the SED and then not reissued.

Second exile in South Africa and death

Werner Ackermann was more and more disappointed professionally and politically in Germany and decided to emigrate to South Africa in 1951 at the invitation of his old friend Hugo Wilkens . Wilkens had emigrated to South Africa with his future Jewish wife in 1936. Cut off from the German theaters and the German publishing industry on the one hand and primarily in contact with other German emigrants in South Africa (especially with the journalist Alfred Futran and the gallery owner Egon Günther), Werner Ackermann remained isolated and largely thrown back on himself. In a letter to Wilhelm Fraenger in 1955 he wrote:

"I've been living abroad for over 4 years, completely detached from the 'business', have no contact with theater people, don't belong to a clique and work without feedback."

There were short stories and a few plays, but with the exception of the detective murder without a trace , the latter was never performed. Werner Ackermann lived mainly from smaller and larger newspaper articles, most of which dealt with Africa. Politically, he no longer wanted to be active under the apartheid regime in South Africa, which he detested, because:

“I learned a lot in life to weigh up (……) I don't believe in courage at any price. Forgive me if you see guilt in it. I am not guilty in front of me. "

Werner Ackermann died in May 1982 with his daughter in Mbabane / Swaziland.

To the work

Publisher's cover of the first edition of the novel Woe to the winner

Werner Ackermann wrote over 20 plays, 2 novels , several short stories, numerous essays and, under the pseudonym Robert Landmann, a non-fiction book on the history of Monte Verità that has been published to this day. Ackermann was considered a talented young playwright in the early 30s.

The critically acclaimed piece Escape to Shanghai revolves around the fate of escaped, Tsarist emigrants in the hold of a ship that is on its way to China. In five acts lottery (world premiere at the Frankfurt Art Theater 1931) is about a young, aristocratic bon vivant who is in debt to his ears and around the compliance or non-compliance with social rules in resolving this debt problem. Kleist sucht den Tod , performed as a radio play in 1930, deals with the financial hardship and the precarious existence of an artist. A dramatic version of the novel Woe to the Victor in the Battle of Matteotti against Mussolini (1930) found little approval from the critic Herbert Ihering in its original form. He found it too parodic and at the same time not sarcastic enough. It is not known whether Werner Ackermann rewrote it afterwards. In lobsters for the people (1935/1936, premiered in 1950) is about the predatory capitalism of the director of a lobster company who is looking for ways out of the economic crisis and leaves the workers go basis and attracts shareholders over the table.

Ackermann's criticism of capitalism was never one-sided ideological and accompanied by heroic workers. In a criticism of the performance of lobster for the people in the newspaper Neues Deutschland , he was directly accused of:

"The capitalist profit system is confronted either with corrupted workers or those who stick to the foggy world of religious or individualistic ideas."

Children from Spain (1938; first performance in 1947 or 1948) deals with the fate of two children from Spain during the Spanish Civil War and their lives as adolescents in exile in France.

His novel Woe dem Sieger under the pseudonym Rico Gala was criticized for its reportage and his second novel The Black Fink remained unpublished, as did his poetry collections.

An assessment of his literary oeuvre is still pending.

Works

Plays

• Size. (Drama), Antwerp 1913.
• The big boy. (Comedy in 3 acts), Antwerp 1914.
• The bridge. (Play in 3 acts), Ascona 1925.
• Escape to Shanghai. (French: La cargaison fantôme. ) (play in 5 pictures), Berlin 1927/1928; First performed in 1930.
• Kleist seeks death. (Romantic tragedy in 5 scenes), Berlin 1929; First performed in 1931 as a radio play.
• The Apostle of Steisserbach. (Comedy in 3 acts), Berlin 1930.
• Five acts of lottery. (French: Le duel américain / Jeux de Hasard ) (comedy in 5 acts); First performed in 1931.
• The miserable. Also: the fall from the rope. (Tragic comedy in 5 acts), Ascona / Berlin 1928/1931.
• State without people. Or: woe to the winner. (Drama in 5 acts), St. Tropez 1931; First performed in 1950 as a radio play.
• Dr. Iron beard. (Comedy), Antwerp 1934.
• Lobsters for the people. (Drama in 5 acts), Antwerp 1934/1935; First performed in 1949.
• Children from Spain. Also: Dolores and Juan. (Play in 5 acts), Brussels 1938; First performed in 1947.
• The girl from Prague. Brussels / Paris 1939.
• The hole in the wall. (Drama), Weinheim 1949; First performed in 1950 as a radio play.
• Star on the hills. Weinheim 1950.
• The gold of the Bolleboers. (South African comedy in 3 acts), Johannesburg 1952.
• The fat man from Lille. (Comedy in 3 acts), Johannesburg 1953.
• Murder without a trace. (Detective piece in 5 acts), Johannesburg 1954; First performed in 1968.

Novels, short stories

• The black finch. Ascona 1924.
• Woe to the victor. Paul Riechert-Verlag, Heide / Holsten 1932.
• Primeval forest in the big city. Pohl-Verlag, Munich 1956.

Poems

• Visions and final games. Johannesburg undated

Non-fiction

• Ascona - Monte Verità. Adalbert Schultz Verlag, Berlin 1930; New edition Huber Verlag, Frauenfeld 2009.

literature

• Hans Mayer: The lucky child from Monte Verità, The life of the writer Werner Ackermann. Trafo, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86465-066-6 .

Web links

• Werner Ackermann Collection in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
• Short biography of Werner Ackermann on life reform in Switzerland
• The Cosmopolitan Union (1930)

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Letter from Werner Ackermann to his parents on February 18, 1925.
2. ↑ Interview with the daughter Sonja Reissmann, b. Ackermann on September 15, 1991.
3. ↑ Interview with the daughter Sonja.
4. ↑ See Robert Landmann: Ascona - Monte Verità. Frauenfeld 2000.
5. ↑ Quotation from Weltbühne of February 26, 1930.
6. ↑ See Weltbühne from January 26, 1930.
7. ↑ Quoted from Berliner Börsencourier of October 27, 1930.
8. ↑ See letter to Carl Seelig from September 15, 1966.
9. ^ Result for 'Elisabeth Zernike ackermann' [WorldCat.org]. Retrieved October 24, 2019 . 
10. ↑ US National Archives XE018106
11. ↑ Quoting from a letter to Wilhelm Fraenger from September 29, 1955, in which he asks for his support.
12. ↑ Quotation from a letter to John Zube dated September 15, 1965.
13. ↑ Quoted from Small Chronicle of German Premieres, in: Theater der Zeit, 1949, no. 3, p. 34.