Rudolf Frank (writer)

Rudolf Frank (born September 16, 1886 in Mainz , † October 25, 1979 in Basel ) was a German theater director, theater critic, writer and translator.

Life

Frank was born into a long-established Jewish family in Mainz. He is the son of Carl Theodor, a timber merchant, and Mathilde, nee. Ebertsheim. After graduating from high school in Mainz in 1904, he studied political science and law in Munich , Zurich , Heidelberg , Berlin and Gießen . He completed his studies in 1908 with a doctorate to become a Dr. jur. utr. from.

Theater career

From 1909 he took professional acting lessons in Berlin and was then engaged by the court theater in Meiningen . At the same time he wrote reviews and directed. In 1914, Frank joined the First World War as a volunteer . He served in Romania from 1916 , where he was able to try his hand at leading two different theaters. In 1918 he married Ottilie H. Mittendorf in Vienna ; the couple's daughter was born in 1919. From 1918 to 1921 Frank worked as a director and dramaturge in Frankfurt and Darmstadt. Between 1925 and 1926 he was touring Italy as the director of the “Compagnia primaria di prose Alda Borelli”. From 1926 Frank turned to radio and film: he dubbed American films. His marriage was divorced in 1927, and two years later he remarried, namely the artist Anna Amelie Klein . Their first son Vincent Karl was born in Berlin in 1930, where the family now lived.

In Berlin, Frank wrote the novel The Skull of the Negro Chief Makaua , which he published in 1931. From 1933, his freedoms were restricted in the course of the National Socialist takeover, which is why he continued to publish under various pseudonyms. In the same year, after a house search, he was taken into so-called protective custody and, thanks to the help of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig von Hessen and his fellow actor Otto Laubinger , released again. The novel The Skull of the Negro Chief Makaua was burned. Frank was excluded from the Reichstheaterkammer , the Reichsrundfunkkammer and the Reichsschrifttumskammer and was forbidden to write. In 1936 his second son René Antonio was born, and in the same year he fled to Vienna separately from his family.

emigration

In Vienna he was able to work at the “Jewish Culture Theater” from April 1937, but the circumstances made it impossible to find further employment. That is why Frank emigrated to Merano a year later and then to Zurich in Switzerland. As a refugee, his work permit was withdrawn there, but he also continued to work as a writer in Switzerland under various pseudonyms. In the first years of the Second World War Frank was stripped of his German citizenship and his doctorate. His wife fled to Palestine in 1940 , but was interned in Mauritius by the British . Frank's father died in Theresienstadt in 1942. In 1943 his journalistic work was exposed in Switzerland. He was arrested and was due to be deported, but the deportation did not take place. Instead, he was interned in various camps. In 1944 he finally settled in the Basel region and unsuccessfully applied to various stages. He remained true to his passion as a theater critic for the " Basler Arbeiter-Zeitung " and continued his work as a translator. His request for permanent asylum, submitted in 1947, was approved in 1948, which subsequently enabled him to participate in various broadcasters.

In 1952 he returned to Germany for the first time. From 1957 he received a restitution pension; his doctorate was returned to him in 1958. In 1960, he published his autobiography, Season Of My Life . His wife Anna Frank-Klein died in Tel Aviv in 1977 . Rudolf Frank lived in Basel until his death on October 25, 1979.

estate

Parts of Rudolf Frank's estate are in the Mainz City Archives and in the Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main (estate of Anna Frank-Klein; files of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom ; correspondence with Hans Rothe ).

Occupation with the theater

Frank's theater career began even before the First World War, when he was on stage for the first time as a drama student under Emanuel Reicher in Berlin. Max Grube took him to Meiningen . There he learned to direct.

After the First World War he took up a position under Otto Falckenberg as chief director, dramaturge and deputy director of the Münchner Kammerspiele and helped establish it as one of the leading theaters in Germany with his commitment. From 1924 to 1926 Frank lived in Italy, where he staged eighteen plays, despite the drastic effects of fascist politics on theater life. After returning to Germany, Frank devoted himself to theater criticism and published, in addition to magazine articles, the monograph The Modern Theater in 1927. He was no longer on stage.

During his exile in Vienna he was also to be found in theater circles, but his work was limited to performances by the workers' theater "Theater of the Forty-nine". In Switzerland he was denied entry into the theater world due to the work ban. The play Thunder Rock by Robert Ardrey , translated by him under a pseudonym, was performed under the title Leuchtfeuer . Even after the war he was unable to get onto a big stage. Once again in 1948 he directed Wolfgang Borchert's Outside Front Door at the Basel Youth Theater. His preoccupation with theater now shifted completely towards theater criticism. For years, he wrote profound reviews for the Arbeiterzeitung, which was later called the Abendzeitung, until he was 90.

Literacy

Frank published his first literary works as early as his academic years. In 1907 he put his thoughts on the writer Richard Dehmel and Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde on paper. With his book Goethe for Boys , published in 1909, he wanted to make his enthusiasm for Goethe accessible to young people. During his time in Meiningen he also began to write for the “ Vossische Zeitung ” and “ Die Schaubühne ”. During the First World War, he sent feature pages to the Frankfurter and Vossische Zeitung as a reporter.

In the period after the First World War, Frank translated the prose poem Johannes von Saaz ' Der Ackermann aus Böhmen from around 1460 into modern German. The production of the piece as well as the accompanying radio play were very successful. His two monographs, The Expressionist Drama (1921) and The Modern Theater (1927) , were committed to the theater genre . When the end of his time in Munich became apparent, Rudolf Frank worked as editor of all works by Heinrich Heine (1923) and ETA Hoffmann (1924) and wrote together with the writer Max Neal and alone on various pieces. In 1928 he translated Molière's The Miser and created a stage version for it. In Berlin, Frank wrote his youth book The Skull of the Negro Chief Makaua , published in 1931 . The deceptive subtitle "War novel for the young generation" tried to disguise the "warning for the young generation" against glorification of war. The novel stands for moral courage and personal responsibility, which occasionally gave the National Socialists an opportunity to ban and burn the novel in 1933. In 1982 the book was re-published under the title The Boy Who Forgot His Birthday and received the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize for books for children and young people in 1983 and the Mildred L. Batchelder Award in 1987 in English translation .

After the Nazis came to power, Frank wrote the novels I tell my big brother , That was a strong play and too many beautiful girls, under various pseudonyms . Serious issues were also taken up, ancestors and grandchildren encouraged the Jews to emigrate.

In Vienna in 1938 Rudolf Frank began to write the novel Fair play as part of a competition of the “ American Guild for German Cultural Freedom ”, then finished it in Zurich despite a work ban and was awarded the second prize. The novel was not published at the time, but in a modified version in 1998. In Switzerland, Rudolf Frank could only write under pseudonyms until 1945. Together with Albert Halpert , however, he wrote the play Kraft durch Feuer - The Night of November 9, 1938 and wrote the script for the emigrant film Thank Switzerland , which was lost, and the detective novel Chicago-Süd . For his livelihood, the self-taught Frank began to translate French and English-language novels. Residing in Basel after the Second World War, translating became Frank's main source of income, resulting in the translation of over fifty novels, including those by John Steinbeck , Richard Wright and others. As already mentioned, he wrote theater reviews for the “Arbeiter Zeitung” well into old age.

Radio and film

From the thirties Rudolf Frank also worked for film and radio. He wrote the screenplay based on Ludwig Wolff's Smarra for the sound film Hans in allen Gassen , which premiered on December 30, 1930 in Berlin. In 1931, a manuscript for an educational film entitled We Work , which Rudolf Frank had written together with his wife Anna, was eligible for the International Film Peace Prize. Excerpts have appeared in newspapers, but the film never seems to have been made and the manuscript is believed to have been lost. In 1932, together with Leopold Lindtberg , he wrote a screenplay for a short fiction film entitled When two argue and dubbed the film Der Raub der Mona Lisa for the Tobis Polyphonic Society ("Topoly").

In 1933 he played a short role in the Nazi film SA Mann Brand .

His radio plays such as The Battle of Petritsch did not take place and we had built a stately home. Paulskirche 1848 , were broadcast by Berlin radio. In exile in Switzerland, Rudolf Frank processed his experiences of emigration and asylum in the script for a film with the working title Thank Switzerland , which was not shown and is also lost.

Honors

• 1966 Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class
• 1966 "Oldest Mainz city seal in silver"
• 1971 Gutenberg badge from the city of Mainz
• 1982 Buxtehuder Bulle for the best book for young people published in German, "The boy who forgot his birthday"
• 2012 An exhibition entitled The Theater Writer Rudolf Frank was shown in 2012 in the German National Library, the University of Gießen, the University of Basel and the Mainz City Archives.

literature

• Thomas Blubacher : Rudolf Frank . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 1, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 623.
• Sabine Neubert, Vincent Frank-Steiner (ed.): Rudolf Frank: Theater man, humanist, magician of language . Centrum Judaicum , Hentrich & Hentrich , Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-942271-66-4 (= Jewish miniatures. Volume 125).
• Madleen Podewski: Media Worker in the Weimar Republic. Rudolf Frank between film, press, radio and theater. In: Winckler, Lutz; Jäcker, Ursula; Cosmol, Cornelia (Ed.): Telling stories as a way of life. Contributions to the literary and artistic work of Rudolf Frank . Berlin 2015, pp. 73–81.
• Erwin Rotermund (Ed.): Playing time of a life. Studies on the Mainz author and theater man Rudolf Frank (1886–1979) . Hase and Koehler, Mainz 2002. ISBN 3-7758-1399-3 .
• Rolf Tauscher: Literary satire of exile against National Socialism and Hitler Germany. Hamburg 1992, pp. 180-183 on "Power through Fire"

Web links

• Literature by and about Rudolf Frank in the catalog of the German National Library
• Rudolf Frank in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Rudolf Frank at filmportal.de
• The theater man and writer Rudolf Frank

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} The theater man and writer Rudolf Frank. ( Memento from May 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) State Capital Mainz www.mainz.de
2. ^ Buxtehuder Bulle, 1982 award winner