Rudolf Herzog

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Rudolf Herzog on a photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf .
Signature Rudolf Herzog.PNG

Rudolf Herzog (born December 6, 1869 in Barmen (today a district of Wuppertal ); † February 3, 1943 in Rheinbreitbach ) was a German writer , journalist , poet and storyteller . Duke was at the beginning of the 20th century, a bestseller - author , most of his books reached editions of several hundred thousand. These were initially mostly published by Cotta , later by his son's Vier-Falken-Verlag.

Life

Childhood and youth

Rudolf Herzog was the son of the book printer owner and manufacturer Albert Anton Herzog and his wife Maria Lisette Bellwitt. His mother died at the age of 33 in January 1875 when Herzog was 5 years old. According to the description in Herzog's autobiography Wilde Jugend (1929), he came into contact with various writers early in his childhood through his father's professional contacts. After attending preschool and secondary school, Herzog cherished the desire to become a painter or lieutenant in the military. However, Duke's grandmother, who, according to Duke's biography, was the unaffected head of the family, contradicted these career aspirations. Only under pressure from his father did he begin training as a paint technician in 1883, so that he could later take over the family business. He probably completed this training as an assistant in Friedrich Talpke's pharmacy in Düsseldorf, where he also wrote his first poems in the Baldur Culture Club and, according to his biography, met one of his best friends, the later painter Ludwig Neuhoff.

Rise in the Empire

At the age of 17, in 1886, together with his brother Albert Herzog, Arthur Strauss and Walter Bloem, he published the book of poems Jungwuppertal , which was a declaration of love for his hometown. After completing his training in 1887, he began commercial training in the chemical industry. Herzog later said that this job had never completely filled him and that he had given notice a little later, even against his father's will. Herzog's literary activity increased from this point in time, so that he could soon afford to work as a freelance writer and journalist. Herzog published his first novel in 1892 with Frau Kunst , which, according to Herzog, initially did not want to print a newspaper. During this time he founded, according to his own statement, with a former acquaintance, Walter Bloem , the newspaper literary entertainment papers for West Germany . In 1893 he published his first drama Protection and the novel Only One Actress , through which he was first known. The template for the second book is said to have been the brief love affair with actress Luise Willig . In spring 1894, at the age of 25, he met his future wife, the singing student Minna Seiler, who later made a career as an opera singer. Herzog married her in Friedberg in 1895. After the wedding, he and his wife went on a trip to Italy and visited Venice, Bologna, Pisa and Tyrol, among others.

A year later he became the features editor of the Darmstadt monthly Schwarz-Rot , in 1897 editor-in-chief of the Hamburger Neuesten Nachrichten and in 1899 head of the features of the " Berliner Neuesten Nachrichten ". During his changing activities as an editor and correspondent, among others with the "Interest Group" (IG) of the German tar paint industry , he wrote several homeland poems, dramas and novels such as Die vom Niederrhein (1903) or Die Wiskottens (1905), Hanseaten (1909 ) or Die Burgkinder (1911), which in the years before the First World War reached millions of copies and made him a favorite with the bourgeois nationalist reading public.

The First World War

Due to his high number of copies and his writing style, Kaiser Wilhelm II became aware of him, whose personal friendship would shape the rest of Herzog's life. In 1913, in the book Prussian History, he placed the merits of Wilhelm II among the outstanding achievements in Prussian-German history. In 1907 he bought a castle-like residence in Rheinbreitbach with the income from the book , in which he set up a “family nest” for himself and his wife.

Upper castle in Rheinbreitbach

In September 1911 he made a trip to America to the Germanistic Society of America, on which he was awarded the ribbon of honor from Columbia University of New York. He processed the impressions of this trip in his book Das große Heimweh , published in 1915 , in which, using the example of German-born Americans, he called on people to be aware of the pioneering role of Germanness all over the world.

After his return to the "Upper Castle" of Rheinbreitbach, Herzog experienced the outbreak of the First World War there, which he welcomed with enthusiasm. In August 1914 he donated 1,000 Reichsmarks to the local Red Cross and offered his house as a hospital with full catering. Herzog experienced the first acts of war on the western theater of war in the headquarters of the III. Army. There he was wounded in the leg near Rethel an der Aisne in October 1914 . In November 1914 he was awarded the Iron Cross (presumably 2nd class) for this. The wound could not have been severe, however, since in December 1914 he was giving another "patriotic evening" in the captured city theater of Sedan .

After the positional war had already started in the west after a few months in 1914, Herzog took part on the eastern front as a press correspondent in the storming of the Kovno and Wilna fortresses under General Karl Litzmann . Herzog had Litzmann, who had been given command of a guard unit in the eastern campaign against Russia, as stage inspector of the III. Got to know the army at the beginning of the First World War. Inspired by his experiences with Litzmann, Herzog published two volumes of poetry, Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1915) and Vom Stürmen , Die, in addition to his novels Das große Heimweh (1915), Die Stoltenkamps and their women (1917) and Jungbrunnen (1918) Resurrection (1916). In addition, several calls were made to the women and children on the home front, bravely and proudly “to pull the fields” and “to create bread” for Germany. After the collapse of the empire through the November revolution in 1918 and the armistice of Compiègne , Herzog took over the management of the workers 'and soldiers' council in Rheinbreitbach and supported it financially. He even made his residence, the Upper Castle, available as a guard house and stored weapons and ammunition there.

Weimar period

After the dissolution of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in the summer of 1919, he made a pathetic appeal in the Honnef Volkszeitung for the erection of a war memorial for the fallen in Rheinbreitbach. In the same year he celebrated his 50th birthday, in whose honor Felix Leo Göckeritz dedicated an 80-page portrait of his life. In literary terms, he tried to market his life's work with his autobiographies such as Wilde Jugend (1929) and Mann im Sattel (1935). According to Walter Schmähling , he was politically active in the Rheinisches Heimatbund, a forerunner organization of the "Rhenish Association for Monument Preservation and Landscape Protection". He was also involved in the 1921 literary defense of Upper Silesia in the Polish uprising of 1921 , for which he received the Silesian Eagle Order .

In 1923, Duke's wife Minna Seiler, the mother of his three sons and daughter Tui, died. Three years later he married his nanny Emma Elisabeth Lux, with whom he remained married until his death. During the Weimar period, he maintained contacts with musicians, writers and personalities such as the pianist Elly Ney and the exiled German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

National Socialism and End of Life

During the Weimar Republic, Herzog began to sympathize with the National Socialists, which was also reflected in an increasingly anti-democratic tendency in his books. In 1932 he signed an appeal for elections in the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper . After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler and published a book on The History of the German People and its Leaders , in which, like Kaiser Wilhelm II in Prussia's history in 1913, he now placed Hitler in the rank of great men of Prussian-German history. According to a newspaper report, he gave a lecture at the University of Athens in 1933 on the development of the National Socialist movement, in which he "refuted" "atrocity reports on the Jewish question" in Germany according to his own statement.

His son Rolfbaldur Herzog (1907–1949) founded the “Vier Falken Verlag” in Berlin in 1936, where most of Rudolf Herzog's works (until then mostly published by Cotta ) were reissued, as well as his memoirs and works by authors who were friends, such as Johannes von Guenther and Will Vesper appeared.

From 1936 he traveled to the former German colonies. He described his travel experiences in his book I see the world , published in 1937 , in which he repeatedly complains that the “savages” (allegedly) are not as noble, clean, hardworking and orderly as his own people. His literary commitment to the National Socialist movement culminated in 1938 in the book Elisabeth Welser's companions . In his honor, a personal radio interview was recorded by the Cologne broadcaster under the direction of the völkisch journalist Friedrich Castelle . Adolf Hitler also awarded him the Goethe Medal for Art and Science by the NSDAP district leader Detlef Dern on his special day .

In February 1943, one day after the Battle of Stalingrad , Herzog died in Rheinbreitbach. It is unclear whether the cause of death was hemorrhage or pneumonia. According to his daughter Tui, the surrender of the 6th Army near Stalingrad had affected him so emotionally that he collapsed dead in the arms of a friend. Herzog was buried on February 7, 1943 in the New Cemetery in Bad Honnef .

Several of his works were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out after the end of the war in the Soviet occupation zone and in the German Democratic Republic .

Works (selection)

  • 1901 The Count of Gleichen
  • 1903 The one from the Lower Rhine
  • 1904 The song of life
  • 1905 The Wiskottens
  • 1907 The adventurer
  • 1908 The Golden Age
  • 1909 Hanseatic League
  • 1911 The castle children
  • 1911 The world in gold
  • 1913 Prussia's history. Quelle & Meyer publishing house, Leipzig
  • 1914 The great homesickness
  • 1915 The old longing song - stories
  • 1916 On storming, dying, resurrecting - war poems
  • 1916 Ritter, Tod und Teufel - war poems
  • 1916 The adjutant
  • 1916 Electricity crossing - dramatic poem, Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta
  • 1917 The Stoltenkamps and their wives
  • 1919 Germanic gods. Quelle & Meyer publishing house, Leipzig
  • 1920 Frau Opterberg's boys
  • 1922 The world in gold
  • 1922 comrades
  • 1924 Wieland the blacksmith (first in the magazine Die Woche , in 1924 by Cotta as a book)
  • 1926 The flag of the scattered
  • 1928 Kornelius Vandervelt's companion
  • 1929 Wild youth. A life novel. Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta Verlag
  • 1931 The baron and the old town
  • 1932 Horridoh Lützow!
  • 1933 The dancer and her sisters
  • 1934 history of the German people and their leaders
  • 1938 Elisabeth Welser's companions

literature

  • Sascha Grosser: Newly published hero poetry - From storming, dying, rising, text collection Rudolf Herzog, Olfen 2018
  • Felix Leo Göckeritz: Rudolf Herzog: A picture of the life of the Lower Rhine poet on his 50th birthday on December 6, 1919 . Leipzig 1919.
  • Thomas Napp: From storming, dying, rising. Myth and heroism in popular war poetry based on the poem "Brudertreue" by Rudolf Herzog in 1916 . Rheinbreitbach 2015.
  • Heinrich Neu : The art monuments of the district of Neuwied (= The art monuments of the Rhine Province , Volume 16). Düsseldorf 1940, pp. 345-356.
  • Pascal Jardin: L'oeuvre de Rudolf Herzog. Littérature populaire et idéologie allemandes (1900-1938). CNRS Éd., Paris 1997. ISBN 2-271-05504-0
  • Walter Schmähling:  Herzog, Rudolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 741 ( digitized version ).
  • Gerhart Werner: Rudolf Herzog (= contributions to the recent history of the Rhineland and Westphalia , Volume 1). Berlin 1967, pp. 117-123.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Schmähling (1969, p. 741)
  2. ↑ See Werner (1967, p. 118); Herzog (1929, pp. 65ff.); Göckeritz (1919, p. 3ff)
  3. ↑ See Werner (1967, p. 121); Schmähling (1969, p. 741)
  4. ↑ See Werner (1967, p. 123); Neu (1940, pp. 353ff.); Unknown (January 23, 1915)
  5. ↑ See Werner (1967, p. 119); Napp (2014, pp. 16, 17, 22); Unknown (August 14, 1914); Unknown (October 3, 1914); Unknown (November 19, 1914); Unknown (January 3, 1915)
  6. ↑ See Werner (1967, p. 119), Kraft (1985, p. 715), Göckeritz (1919, p. 17), Unknown (April 13, 1917)
  7. ↑ See Napp (2014, p. 124 ff.)
  8. ↑ See Schmähling (1969, p. 741); Unknown (November 29, 1920)
  9. ↑ See Telegram (June 20, 1929); Guest book Obere Burg (1920–1930)
  10. ^ 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. 239.
  11. ↑ Honnefer Volkszeitung, September 22, 1933.
  12. ↑ Reinhard Wittmann: chap. Publishing book trade. In: Ernst Fischer, Reinhard Wittmann with Jan-Pieter Barbian (ed.): History of the German book trade in the 19th and 20th centuries. Third Reich. Part 1. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2015, pp. 295–315 (here: p. 301).
  13. ↑ See for example the chapter South American Intermezzo, pp. 321–334.
  14. ↑ See Honnefer Volkszeitung (December 5, 1939)
  15. ↑ See Walter (1967, p. 120); Schmähling (1969, p. 741)
  16. ↑ Short biography on Rudolf Herzog
  17. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-h.html
  18. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1947-nslit-h.html
  19. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-h.html
  20. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-h.html
personal data
SURNAME Duke, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Barmen
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 1943
Place of death Rheinbreitbach