Siegfried Sassoon

Photo Sassoons by George Charles Beresford , 1915

Siegfried Sassoon, portrait by Glyn Warren Philpot

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE , MC (born September 8, 1886 in Matfield , Kent , † September 1, 1967 in Heytesbury , Wiltshire ) was a British poet and storyteller .

life and work

Siegfried Sassoon grew up in a rural neo-Gothic villa that had previously belonged to the artist Harrison Weir and was named "Weirleigh" after him. On his father's side, he came from the respected Jewish merchant family Sassoon . His mother, Theresa Thornycroft (1853–1947), daughter of Mary Thornycroft , came from an Anglo-Catholic family of artists. Sassoon left Clare College , Cambridge , where he studied law and history between 1905 and 1907, without a degree, and lived on an income from property with his mother in Kent. He spent his days hunting in winter and cricket in summer ; he also wrote poems that were distributed under pseudonyms and only in small, privately printed editions. In the first days of August 1914 he volunteered for the war. In May 1915 he came to France as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers , where he made friends with Robert Graves , who had also volunteered. Both men shared a love of poetry , which they both wrote while serving at the front, and an acquaintance with Edward Marsh . Sassoon had met Marsh in London before the war broke out in 1914 and was encouraged by him, as a future poet talent, to continue writing. In the Georgian Poetry Collection 1916–17 (1917) Marsh published Sassoon's poems alongside those of Graves and helped both of them to gain public attention as great young poets.

According to contemporary reports, Sassoon was a brave soldier, but he often exposed himself to unnecessary danger and, in the opinion of his superiors, neglected his duties as an officer . Despite this, on July 27, 1916, he was awarded the Military Cross (MC), one of the British Army's highest honors . Sassoon was wounded several times and returned to England for treatment. After such a period of convalescence in England, he refused to return to the front with a public avowal against the war and threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey . Instead of punishing the well-known warrior, the war ministry decided to transfer him to a hospital for traumatized officers, the victims of the so-called shell shock , as “no longer fit for use in the war” . In the hospital in Edinburgh , Sassoon met not only the very sympathetic doctor William Halse Rivers , but also Wilfred Owen . Sassoon had already made a name for himself as a war poet by then, and the still unknown Owen found a patron in him. Sassoon returned to the front without fundamentally changing his attitude towards the war.

Although Sassoon had resigned himself to his homosexuality around the time he left Cambridge, he married Hester Gatty in December 1933; the couple had a son, George († 2006), in 1936 and divorced in 1945.

Sassoon processed his war experiences during World War I in his early works such as The Old Huntsman (1917), Counter-Attack (1918) and Satirical Poems (1926). His semi-fictional autobiography The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1937) was divided into three parts: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1929 , Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936 ).

This was followed by other autobiographical works such as The Old Century (1938), The Wealth of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey 1916–20 (1945). He also wrote a biography of the British narrator George Meredith in 1948 .

His late poems such as Vigils (1935) and Sequences (1956) are predominantly spiritual. In 1957 he converted to the Roman Catholic faith .

Sassoon was one of the main characters in a trilogy of novels by Pat Barker ( No Man's Land , The Eye in the Door and The Street of Spirits ). This deals with Sassoon's time in the hospital for traumatized officers and lets him meet Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen .

literature

• Harry Ricketts: Strange Meetings - The Poets of the Great War. Chatto & Windus, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-701-17271-8 .
• John Keegan : Biography of Siegfried Sassoon . 1987.
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 696.
• Jean Moorcroft Wilson: Siegfried Sassoon: soldier, poet, lover, friend , London [u. a.]: Duckworth Overlook, 2013-1998, ISBN 978-0-7156-3389-2

Web links

• Literature by and about Siegfried Sassoon in the catalog of the German National Library
• Rainer Rother: "In an act of deliberate disregard for military authority"