Siegfried Einstein

Siegfried Einstein (born November 30, 1919 in Laupheim , † April 25, 1983 in Mannheim ) was a German poet , lyric poet , writer and essayist . Siegfried Einstein also worked as a speaker, documentator and journalist .

Life

Siegfried Einstein was born in 1919 into a Jewish family that had lived in Laupheim in Upper Swabia since the second half of the 18th century . His father Max Einstein, together with his brother Ludwig Einstein, owned the largest department store ( Kaufhaus Einstein ) in the area. His mother Fanny Einstein (née Marx) was a banker's daughter from Munich. Siegfried had an older sister, Clärle, and a younger brother, Rudolf. Siegfried wrote verses and poems as a child and was encouraged by his family.

On April 1, 1933, the National Socialists carried out a Germany-wide boycott of all Jewish shops, department stores, banks, doctors, lawyers and notaries' practices ( Jewish boycott ). The Einstein department store was also one of the Jewish shops in Laupheim that were affected by this measure and in front of which the local SA opened.

During a hiking holiday in the mountains in August 1933, Einstein's sister Clärle, who was six years older than him, was struck by lightning before his eyes. Siegfried Einstein kept the iron tip of her mountain as a souvenir for the rest of his life.

After Siegfried Einstein was chased across the school yard during anti-Semitic riots in 1934 and pelted with stones, he was sent to boarding school on the Rosenberg in Switzerland in the canton of St. Gallen that same year . Two years later, his father also brought his brother to Switzerland, as further education at the Laupheim Latin School was no longer possible for Jewish students.

Former DM Einstein department store in Laupheim

During the November pogroms in 1938 , Einstein's father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp . After his arrest, the DM Einstein department store in Laupheim was forcibly sarized as part of the ordinance to exclude Jews from German economic life of November 12, 1938 . Einstein's father was eventually released from the concentration camp as a mentally and physically broken man. In 1940 Einstein's parents managed to emigrate to Switzerland.

As emigrated Jews, all members of the Einstein family lost their German citizenship after the Eleventh Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Act passed in 1941 . Between 1941 and 1945, Siegfried Einstein was interned as a stateless foreigner by the Swiss government in labor camps and used to build roads and reclaim swamplands. During this time he made contact with the German resistance movement and got to know German exile literature . His first works appeared after his release in 1945.

His only son Daniel was born in 1947. He also dedicated one of his most famous poems Lullaby for Daniel to him .

Since his escape, Siegfried Einstein did not visit Germany again until 1949 and received a German passport in Laupheim so that he was no longer stateless. During this visit to Germany in 1949, Siegfried Einstein also met Erich Kästner .

From 1950 to 1952 he was the director of the Pflug Verlag in Thal near St. Gallen.

1953 Siegfried Einstein returned to Germany and accepted an invitation from the Mannheim authors Egbert Hoehl, Arno Reinfrank and Herbert Ernst Schulz. Since living space was scarce in the bombed Mannheim, he settled in the Hessian city ​​of Lampertheim . For several years there was constant anti-Semitic agitation against him in Lampertheim, in the course of which there were not only nocturnal ringing of the bell, but also statements such as “stinky Jew” and rioting in front of his house, accompanied by shouts “Jud, come down “, happened. In 1959 Einstein moved to Mannheim to live with his partner Ilona Sand, whom he married in 1967.

In 1956 he was awarded the Thomas Mann Prize by the German Thomas Mann Society . In the same year he gave the commemorative speech on the 100th anniversary of Heinrich Heine's death in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris . The commemorative speech was then published in Les Lettres Francaises .

Between 1957 and 1967 he worked for various socialist and satirical newspapers and magazines, including the Andere Zeitung , Deutsches Michels and Simplicissimus . He also wrote regularly for various radio stations.

Under the influence of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 , he published the Eichmann documentation . Chief Accountant of Death , who dealt with the culprits of National Socialism, their role in post-war Germany and renewed anti-Semitic tendencies in German society.

In 1962 he traveled to Moscow and met with Ilya Ehrenburg , Konstantin Fedin , Jean-Paul Sartre , Pablo Neruda , Yevgenia Ginsburg and Lew Kopelew in the Soviet Union . He processed the impressions of this trip into Unforgettable days in Leningrad - Tashkent and Samarkand.

Siegfried Einstein worked as a lecturer for literature at the evening academy in Mannheim from 1954 . He also gave readings at home and abroad. His poems have been published in several anthologies.

In 1975 Siegfried Einstein suffered his first heart attack . This also changed his poetry and the fear of death added to the topics addressed there. After his second heart attack in 1978, he was unable to work, but remained active in literature. Siegfried Einstein died in 1983 of his third heart attack in Mannheim and was buried next to his sister Clärle in the Jewish cemetery in Laupheim .

Awards and honors

• 1954 Bertelsmann scholarship
• 1956 Thomas Mann sponsorship award
• 1964 Tucholsky Prize of the City of Kiel

Since January 2020 there has been a memorial plaque for him at the house at Richard-Wagner-Straße 79 in Mannheim, where he lived from 1959 to 1983. Also since January 2020 there has been a memorial plaque for the former Einstein department store and for him in his place of birth Laupheim at the building at Kapellenstrasse 6.

Works

Siegfried Einstein's grave in Laupheim

• Melodies in major and minor. Zurich 1946 - poems.
• Another man's wife or The man under the bed. 1947 - Translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Cuzaja zena i muz pod krovat'ju .
• Sirda. Zurich 1948 - amendment.
• The reed book. Thal SG 1949.
• Thomas and Angelina , Thal SG 1949 - story.
• The cloud ship. Zurich 1950 - poems.
• Legends. Thal SG 1951.
• Poetry and prose by young Mannheim authors (together with Egbert Hoehl, Arno Reinfrank, Herbert Ernst Schulz), Mannheim (private print of the city), 1956.
• Eichmann: chief accountant of death. Frankfurt am Main 1961 - Documentation.
• The story of the goldfish. 1961 - Translation of Roger Mauge's Histoire d'un poisson rouge .
• My love has gone blind Quadrate bookstore: Mannheim 1984 - poems, published posthumously.
• Who will blow the shofar this year? Essays, poems, essays and speeches . Ed .: Gideon Schüler . Ed. Literarischer Salon im Focus-Verlag, Giessen 1987, ISBN 978-3-88349-353-4 .
• A time of loneliness: works by Siegfried Einstein . Ed .: Esther Graf, Nelly Z. Graf. Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-88423-615-4 .

literature

• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Volume 2,1, Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 249.
• Udo Bayer: Emigration and Emigration. Three people from Laupheim. In: Schwabenspiegel. Volume 2.2 (Articles). OEW, Ulm 2006, ISBN 3-937184-05-8 , pp. 889-899.
• Siegfried Gerth: Siegfried Einstein. In memory of someone homeless. In: Mannheimer Hefte, 1983, pp. 58–59.
• Rolf Emmerich: Siegfried Einstein (1919–1983): poet and essayist. In: Heimat revisited. Encounters with the Laupheim Museum for the History of Christians and Jews after 20 Years, Laupheim: Museum for the History of Christians and Jews [2018], ISBN 9783000595745 , pp. 62–65.
• Beate Kaiser, Barbara Kiesinger-Jehle, Susanne Harnisch: The stone that saved my life: Siegfried Einstein - childhood in Laupheim 1919-1934 . Klemm + Oelschläger, Ulm 2019, ISBN 978-3-86281-145-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Eberhard Thieme: Life - and forget? In: Ilonka Einstein, Gisela Kerntke, Ute Schmitt-Gallasch, Eberhard Thieme (eds.): Siegfried Einstein: My love is blind . Quadrate bookstore, Mannheim 1984, p. 66-73 .
2. ↑ ^{a b} 28 EINSTEIN Max. Accessed May 16, 2020 . 
3. ^ Siegfried Einstein in Laupheim. Retrieved May 16, 2020 . 
4. ↑ Jochen Teuffel: "The dead complain in the wind - and nobody has woken up ..." - Siegfried Einstein's lullaby for Daniel. In: NAME memory. December 15, 2019, accessed March 10, 2020 . 
5. ^ ^{A b c} Short biography of Siegfried Einstein . In: Esther Graf, Nelly Z. Graf (eds.): Time of many loneliness - works by Siegfried Einstein . Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-88423-615-4 , pp. 11-17 .
6. ↑ On the 100th birthday of the Mannheim writer. In: Mannheimer Morgen. January 15, 2020, accessed March 10, 2020 . 
7. ↑ Roland Ray: memorial plaque honors house and person . In: Schwäbische Zeitung . January 7, 2020, p. 15 ( ggg-laupheim.de ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Siegfried Einstein in the catalog of the German National Library