Soma Morgenstern

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Text: Soma Morgenstern (born on May 3, 1890 in Budzanów , East Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; died on April 17, 1976 in New York City ), actually Salomo Morgenstern , was a predominantly German-writing Jewish writer and journalist of Austrian origin who had been working since 1946 Citizen of the USA .

Childhood in Galicia

Salomo Morgenstern was born as the youngest child of Abraham Morgenstern (born March 4, probably 1858; died 1910) and Sara “Sali”, née Schwarz (born December 4, 1859; died December 22, 1942). His siblings were Klara (1880–1953), Helena (1882–1942), Moses (1885–1939) and Samuel, known as "Schmelkele" (1888–1915). The father was a devout Hasid and possessed the rabbis - authorization . He initially worked as a trader, later as an estate manager and tenant in the Tarnopol area . The family language was Yiddish , the Jewish rites were also observed in everyday life.

Solomon was born on May 3, 1890 in his mother's house in Budzanów near Trembowla . All of Solomon's siblings were born in the home of his mother's wealthy family. It is not known exactly in which village he spent the first years of his life. In 1895/1896 the family lived in Loszniów , around 25 km from Budzanów, where Solomon attended Cheder and the Ukrainian elementary school. In 1898 the company moved to Dobropolje and later to Burkanów. From 1904 Solomon attended the Polish grammar school in Tarnopol, where he initially lived for two years with the carpenter Grinberg and only visited the family during the holidays.

In Tarnopol his interest in literature was aroused. He obtained a subscription to a lending library in Lviv in order to get reading. With Reclam books he discovered his love for the German language, which was initially just one of many. In addition to his native Yiddish, he also spoke Ukrainian and Polish, and at school he also learned English and French. Like his siblings, he learned German at his father's request: “You can learn whatever - if you can't speak German, you're not an educated person. “A visit to the dentist in Lviv in 1908 brought him his first visit to the theater, where he saw the play Sedziowie (The Judges) by Stanisław Wyspiański . He then decided, according to his own statements, to become a theater critic. But his reading also brought him into an inner dichotomy between Western European and Jewish cultures. Ludwig Büchner's Kraft und Stoff (1855), Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism (1866) and Wilhelm Wundt's Introduction to Philosophy (1907) were of greater influence . For a short time he moved to a butcher's family in Tarnopol, whose son he gave tuition for board and lodging, much to his father's displeasure. A short time later he moved to distant relatives with the same arrangement. In addition to high school, he also attended a Hebrew school, under whose influence he turned away from Yiddish. In 1909 he met Joseph Roth at a conference of Zionist middle school students , but he only became his friend years later. A friend from this time, however, was the later composer Karol Rathaus , with whom he remained on friendly terms until his death.

The death of his father in 1910, who died of the long-term consequences of a riding accident, ended Solomon's critical phase of religion. As a result, he should always strive to be a good Jewish son : “My father was much kinder than mother [...]. But he didn't have to be strict. His dignity was enough. He had the most human kind of dignity I have ever met. It was an innate as well as a “handed down” dignity, personally humanized by humor and grace. ”(American Diary, entry April 15, 1949.)

Studies and military service

In September 1912, Morgenstern went to Vienna, as he had promised his father, to study law. However, he also attended many humanities lectures. In Heinrich Gomperz 's lecture Introduction to Philosophy , he met Joseph Roth again, with whom he remained in constant contact from 1916. In the autumn of 1913 he went to the University of Lemberg for a year , then returned to Vienna. During the summer vacation of 1914, when he was visiting his family in Galicia, the First World War broke out. He and his mother and sister had to flee unprepared from the advancing Russian front, and the family lost all their belongings. On September 17, the family arrived in Vienna after six weeks of fleeing.

On February 15, 1915, Morgenstern joined Infantry Regiment No. 15, the Tarnopol House Regiment, which was now stationed in Wildon in Styria. For most of the war he was stationed as a horse buyer in Serbia and Hungary. From mid-1918 he was back in Vienna and ended the war as a lieutenant in the reserve. Due to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Morgenstern became a Polish citizen. It would take until 1929 before he would get the desired Austrian citizenship . He continued his studies at the University of Vienna and was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD. In the same year he visited his Galician homeland with his childhood friend Karol Rathaus. It was to be the last visit.

Literary beginnings

Morgenstern, who now called himself Soma, initially aspired to a career as a playwright. In 1920 he translated Wyspianski's verse drama Die Richter into German, in 1921/22 he wrote the drama Er und Er , 1922/23 Im Dunstkreis . However, he could not find a publisher for the pieces, nor did they have a chance of being performed. It was during this time that he began his friendship with Alban Berg , whom he met by chance on September 24, 1920, and with whom he shared a love of music and literature and a shared enthusiasm for football. Only he could not share Berg's enthusiasm for Karl Kraus . But he admitted to Kraus, the editor of the “most ingenious, always honest and, not least, extremely amusing magazine. [...] What he wrote about the evils of the judiciary, about the scandals in the courtrooms, about the plague of judicial murders in the "torch" is one of the masterpieces of cultural criticism. "

The friendship with Joseph Roth only really developed after the end of the war. Despite the friendship, however, he always maintained a thoroughly differentiated attitude towards Roth's work. He considered him a "great portrayal" but an "average narrator". He clearly preferred Roth's reports and feature articles over his novels and also rejected his late monarchist-Catholic work. He also saw through his self-portrayal as a “holy drinker”. A dispute over alleged plagiarism by Roth against Morgenstern was supposed to lead to a break in contact from 1934 to 1937, until a reconciliation was finally achieved through the mediation of Stefan Zweig .

In 1924 in Vienna he met Ingeborg von Klenau, the daughter of the Danish conductor Paul von Klenau , and became friends with her. She was also the niece of the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung , Heinrich Simon . Morgenstern published his first journalistic works from 1924, because he needed a livelihood. His first work was Franz Kafka in memory , which appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt on August 1, 1924 . He also published in Die Literatur and in the Vossische Zeitung . In 1926 he went to Berlin because the earning potential there was much better. He also switched to the Frankfurter Zeitung through the mediation of his girlfriend . In 1927 he went to Frankfurt for a year in the editorial office of the Frankfurter , before returning to Vienna in 1928 as the newspaper's cultural correspondent. Here he married Ingeborg von Klenau on July 4, 1928.

Morgenstern's articles were not very journalistic. He wrote from the perspective of the personal observer. His travelogues focused on individual scenes and observations. Only in his music reviews did he slip into the classic role of journalist.

From the late 1920s, Morgenstern's circle of friends included the violinist Rudolf Kolisch , the pianist Eduard Steuermann , Hanns Eisler , Anton Webern , Otto Klemperer , Jascha Horenstein , Robert Musil , the architect Josef Frank and Karl Tschuppik . Alma Mahler-Werfel was a good friend, for Ernst Bloch he was even the best man. He mainly frequented the Café Museum .

His son Dan Michael was born on October 24, 1929.

The son of the prodigal son

In 1930 Morgenstern began the first volume of his trilogy of novels, Sparks in the Abyss , which would keep him busy until 1943. He was inspired to do this by a visit to the Vienna Conference of Agudas Jisroel in 1929, a Jewish organization that spoke out strictly against assimilation. He finished the first volume in 1934 in Paris, where he stayed for a few months. The volume was published in 1935 under the title The Son of the Prodigal Son by Erich Reiss Verlag in Berlin and 4000 copies were sold in the first year, although in Germany it was only allowed to be sold to Jews. Praise came from Stefan Zweig and Hermann Hesse, who also reviewed the novel in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Praise also came from Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Krenek, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The printed reviews were also positive, but the German and Austrian newspapers ignored the novel.

In August 1933 Morgenstern was dismissed from the Frankfurter Zeitung as a result of the discrimination and persecution of Jews practiced by the Nazis . After that, his financial situation was precarious and he tried to keep himself afloat with occasional journalistic work for other newspapers. The flight abroad caused difficulties because the royalties could not be transferred abroad.

Escape and exile in Paris

Memorial plaque in Belvederegasse 10 in Vienna-Wieden

In March 1938 he fled Austria just in time on the day of the Anschluss and went to Paris. The wife and child stayed behind in Vienna because Dan had scarlet fever. As the non-denominational daughter of a non-Jewish Dane, she was also in relatively little danger. In August 1938 she went to Copenhagen with the child, and to Sweden in 1943. Morgenstern had practically lost all of his manuscripts during his escape and tried to reconstruct volumes two and three of the trilogy, which had already come a long way. For the second part he received a work grant of 30 US dollars per month from the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom , apart from occasional support from Joseph Roth, his only income during this time.

Like Joseph Roth, he lived in Paris in the Hôtel de la Poste, 18 rue de Tournon. In May 1939, his wife and son came to visit, their last meeting until 1947. With the outbreak of World War II, Morgenstern became an enemy as an Austrian citizen Foreigners. On September 22, 1939 he was interned in the Camp de Etrangers au Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir in Colombes and in October transferred to a camp in Montargis , Loiret department . Here he received the news that his brother Moses had died in a concentration camp. On December 14th, he received a permit to stay in Paris, where he immediately applied for a visa for the United States.

After the start of the German French campaign , Morgenstern was interned again. On May 22, 1940, he was brought to the Stade Buffalo , and on June 3, he was brought to Audierne in Brittany by freight train and bus , along with around 600 other Austrians and Germans. There are also reports from Leo Lania , Leonhard Frank , Balder Olden and Artur Rosenberg about this camp . After the French defeat, but before the arrival of the German troops, many internees were able to flee on June 20, but Morgenstern stayed behind because he had taken tranquilizers at that time. However, he was able to escape the day after the camp was taken over by the German Wehrmacht , on June 21. After four weeks of flight, he reached Toulouse on July 27th , where he received a passport at the Polish consulate. The next day he drove to Marseille , where he tried for the next seven months to obtain the necessary papers for his departure. With the help of Varian Fry , he got a US visa in mid-October, but not an exit visa. He only got this Visa de sortie in January 1941. He was in Casablanca on February 18 and in Lisbon at the end of March . With the SS Guiné he finally landed in New York on April 15 .

new York

He settled in New York at the Park Plaza Hotel on Central Park (50 West 77th Street), where he was to stay until 1967. In the same year he took his friend Conrad Lester on a road trip to California to get to know the country. Lester settled in Beverly Hills, where Morgenstern stayed from fall 1941 to May 1943. Despite being close to friends like Alma Mahler-Werfel, he didn't like being in California and went back to New York. During the years 1941 to 1943 he wrote the strongly autobiographical report Flight in France , in which he had a non-Jewish writer describe his own experiences on the flight, which, however, remained unpublished. In 1946 the first volume of Der Funken im Abgrund was published in English, in 1947 and 1950 the other two parts as well.

From 1946, Morgenstern considered himself a citizen of the United States. In 1947 his wife and son moved to New York. His wife took an apartment while Morgenstern stayed at the hotel. Morgenstern was portrayed as a "womanizer", he had long-time friends like Nora Koster and Lotte Andor, to whom he also dictated most of his autobiography.

The column of blood

In 1948 he began with the book Die Blutsäule , an attempt to cope with the news about the Shoah that had come from Europe. In addition to his brother Moses, his mother died in Theresienstadt in 1942 and his sister Helena also died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942. Of his family, only his sister Klara had survived in Palestine. This experience was to shape Morgenstern's further life: “How often in recent years have I thought of suicide. Hardly a day has passed since 1945 without such thoughts. There is no intention behind it, no decision, no plan. I just can't see any other end for myself. (...) Basically it was like that in Paris. It's been that long! ”(American diary, entry from May 18, 1949, p. 34 (estate).)

In Die Blutsäule he describes an East Galician village at the end of the Second World War. In a synagogue, German soldiers, SS men, two Christian priests and some surviving Jews come together for a kind of trial. The question, however, is not about guilt, but about the religious meaning of the crimes, a meaning that cannot exist. With a great deal of effort, he decided to write the book in German, the language of the “Nazi murderers”. He finished the book only after five years, it appeared in 1955 in English under the title The Third Pillar by the Jewish Publication Society of America. The text is in blocked paragraphs, even isolated sections gain their own statement, similar to Bible passages. Morgenstern also mixes facts of war with Bible-like legends.

A German edition was only published in 1964, and there was a German radio play in 1963 and 1965. In 1976 an edition in atavistic Hebrew appeared in Tel Aviv, at Morgenstern's request not in Iwrit . Passages from the book were included in a Jewish prayer book and are part of a special liturgy for Yom Kippur . For Morgenstern this meant a great honor: “ A passage of 'The Third Pillar' was adapted for part of the Yom Kippur Mahzor (liturgy) in the prayer book of the Conservative Judaism. Mr. Morgenstern used to say that the adaption meant more to him than winning a Nobel Prize would have. ”

Morgenstern visited Europe three more times: in 1950, when he also visited his sister in Palestine, as well as in 1957 and 1968. However, he never saw his home in East Galicia again.

The blood column was to remain Morgenstern's last publication. In the following years he worked on his autobiography, which, however, remained unfinished. In the early 1970s he put together two volumes from the material about his friends Alban Berg and Joseph Roth. At the same time, from the 1960s onwards, he worked on the novel Death is a Flop that should remain a fragment. Morgenstern's religious and philosophical reflections on death are embedded in a framework plot.

Morgenstern had built up a circle of friends in New York, similar to the one in Vienna. They included Al Hirschfeld , the cartoonist for the New York Times , and Brooks Atkinson , the newspaper's theater critic. His childhood friend Karol Rathaus also lived in New York, and he had breakfast with Alma Mahler-Werfel every Sunday. He also gave an eulogy on her in 1964. His talent as a storyteller made him a popular party guest, even if he was quite argumentative. Phases in which he was brilliant as an entertainer, however, alternated with deep depression.

He turned down opportunities to work as a journalist because he saw himself as a writer. Since his books hardly sold or had no new editions, he was dependent on a small retirement pension and support from friends. From 1959 he received a "reparation pension" from the Federal Republic.

After a heart attack in 1967, he moved in with his wife. Soma Morgenstern died on April 17, 1976, and the New York Times wrote an obituary three days later.

Soma Morgenstern had meanwhile become an “author” who had remained without a work for twenty years. He had devoted his entire oeuvre to a single idea, Eastern Judaism, a world that fell in the Shoah.

It was not until the 1990s that Ingolf Schulte's Soma Morgenstern's work was published by Dietrich zu Klampen Verlag . Most of the works were published in German for the first time.

His son Dan Morgenstern is an eminent jazz expert and director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

Other works

Escape in France

Escape in France is strongly autobiographical. The non-Jewish writer Petrykowsky tells in first person his experiences in France in 1939/40. In addition to Petrykowsky, the figure of S. Morgenroth also bears Morgenstern's features. The real events and people are only slightly alienated. Leonhard Frank appears as a silver-haired poet , the journalist Jakob Altmaier appears as radio announcer Paul Alter. The description of camp life in Audierne is particularly haunting. The work was written in the USA from 1941 to 1943, but was not published for the first time until 1998 when the work was published.

List of the works
Edition:
The Dietrich zu Klampen-Verlag in Lüneburg has published an eleven-volume edition, which for the most part represents the first publication of Morgenstern's works:

  • Romantic trilogy Sparks in the Abyss
    • Volume I The Son of the Prodigal Son. zu Klampen, Lüneburg 1996 ISBN 3-924245-38-X (first edition 1935 by Verlag Erich Reiss, Berlin).
    • Volume II Idyll in Exile Lüneburg 1996 ISBN 3-924245-39-8 .
    • Volume III The Legacy of the Prodigal Son, ibid. 1996 ISBN 3-924245-40-1 . (In English: Testament of the lost son. Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia PA 1950).
  • Escape in France. A novel report. Lüneburg 1998, ISBN 3-924245-42-8 (including editions).
  • Death is a flop. Novel. Lüneburg 1999, ISBN 3-924245-43-6 (as a paperback structure 2001).
  • The column of blood. Signs and wonders on Sereth. Novel. Lüneburg 1997, ISBN 3-924245-41-X (including editions).
  • Joseph Roth's Escape and End. Memories. 1994, ISBN 3-924245-35-5 , (paperback published by Aufbauverlag 1998, Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2008).
  • Alban Berg and his idols. Memories and letters. ibid. 1995, ISBN 3-924245-36-3 (including editions).
  • In another time. Youth in East Galicia. Lüneburg 1995, ISBN 3-924245-37-1 .
  • Dramas. Feature sections. Fragments. Lüneburg 2000, ISBN 3-924245-44-4 .
  • Reviews. Reports. Diaries. Lüneburg 2001, ISBN 3-924245-45-2 .

Works in single editions:

  • The column of blood. Signs and wonders on Sereth . Novel. Publisher Hans Deutsch , Vienna, Stuttgart, Zurich 1964.
English translation as The Third Pillar. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, New York 1955.

literature

  • Ernst Fischer:  Morgenstern, Soma. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 114 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Morgenstern, Soma. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 17: Meid – Phil. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-22697-7 , pp. 134 ff. ( Limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. Soma Morgenstern. Biography. Czernin-Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-7076-0057-2 .
  • Ulrike Siebauer: Morgenstern, Soma. In: Gertrud Maria Rösch (ed.): Facts and fictions. Lexicon of German-language key literature 1900–2010. Second half volume Heinrich Mann bis Zwerenz. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-7772-1214-2 , pp. 461-465.
  • Cornelia Weidner: A life with friends. About Soma Morgenstern's autobiographical writings. To Klampen, Lüneburg 2004, ISBN 3-934920-38-1 .
  • Jacques Lajarrige (Ed.): Soma Morgenstern - From Galicia to American Exile / Soma Morgenstern - De la Galicie à l'exil américain. Frank and Timme, Berlin 2014 (= Forum: Austria Vol. 1), ISBN 978-3-7329-0120-3 . (Report of a meeting of the same name in Toulouse, 2013)
  • Hans Otto Horch : Book of the Dead. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 141–146.
  • Anna Dąbrowska: Interculturality in Soma Morgenstern's work , Krakow studies on German literature and cultural studies, Wyd. Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2011, ISBN 978-83-233-3110-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sara Morgenstern: Obituary report, Ghetto Theresienstadt. ( holocaust.cz ).
  2. ↑ Soma Morgenstern: Adolescent years. P. 86.
  3. ↑ Soma Morgenstern: Adolescent years. P. 338.
  4. ↑ Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. P. 45.
  5. ↑ Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. P. 48.
  6. ↑ Interview Dan Morgenstern, in: Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. P. 173.
  7. ↑ Soma Morgenstern: Alban Berg. P. 75.
  8. ↑ Hermann Hesse: "The son of the prodigal son" by Soma Morgenstern. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. March 24, 1936.
  9. ↑ Morgenstern assumed that he had died in Dachau, but Moses Morgenstern died in Buchenwald. - Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. P. 146.
  10. ^ Georg B. German: Soma Morgenstern and Austria. Thoughts on the identity and language of the writer. In: Jacques Lajarrige (ed.): Soma Morgenstern - From Galizien into American Exile / Soma Morgenstern - De la Galicie à l'exil américain. Frank and Timme, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-7329-0120-3 . P. 376 f.
  11. ↑ Interview Myra Frankfurt, in: Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. P. 189.
  12. ↑ Raphaela Kitzmantel: An overabundance of the present. P. 146.
  13. ↑ Soma Morgenstern: Blood column. P. 13.
  14. ^ The New York Times. April 19, 1976, p. 30.
personal data
SURNAME Morgenstern, Soma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morning star, Solomon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Budzanów, Eastern Galicia
DATE OF DEATH April 17, 1976
Place of death New York City