Theodor Heinrich Mayer

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Theodor Heinrich Mayer (born February 27, 1884 in Vienna ; † November 3, 1949 there ) was an Austrian writer and pharmacist.

Life

He was born the son of a pharmacist in Vienna and followed in his footsteps as a young man. He studied pharmacy and chemistry at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1910. As early as 1908, he worked in his father's pharmacy "Zum heiligen Karl" in Vienna-Landstrasse , which he took over in 1914. However, he saw this activity more as a bread-and-butter job, his real interest was literature. He frequented literary circles in what was then the imperial city early on. He had a close friendship with the writer Anton Wildgans since his youth. With this and other artist and literary friends, he not only regularly spent the summer in Steinhaus am Semmering , it was also Mayer who encouraged Wildgans to write and, together with Arthur Trebitsch, published his first volume of poems "Vom Wegen" in 1902/1903 financed.

In addition to literature, Mayer was also enthusiastic about technology. He was one of the first motorists of his time and was an avid photographer at the turn of the century. Technical progress and its impact on people's lives, which he examined critically in his texts and influenced by the ideas of sociology and the still young psychology , became the main topic of his writing at the time. After the outbreak of World War I , in 1915 he published the volume of short stories "Von Menschen und Maschinen". In the novella "Ordonanzfahrt" contained therein, he euphorically describes the war adventures in the Austro-Hungarian Automobile Corps and stylizes the car as the soldier's technical comrade. Later, sobered by the duration of the war and its outcome, Theodor Heinrich Mayer first turned to exotic topics, for example in the novel Rapanui - The Downfall of a World from 1923, an erotic fable about Easter Island . Later he devoted himself to the historical novel, with the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy being a focus. He wrote several novels about great personalities of this bygone era, for example about the railway pioneer Carl von Ghega ( Die Bahn über den Berg , 1928), Minister Karl Ludwig von Bruck ( Minister Bruck , 1929) and General Ludwig von Benedek ( Königgrätz , 1931) . In 1935, in the midst of the global economic crisis, he published the historical novel “Geld ... Geld!”, Which is set in Vienna at the time of the founders' crash in 1873 and depicts a critique of financial capitalism embellished with local flavor .

In 1924 Theodor Heinrich Mayer had sold the pharmacy he had inherited in order to devote himself entirely to literature. From now on he lived as a freelance writer and achieved fame in Austria with his novels. Politically, Mayer was bourgeois-liberal at this time and, like many of his contemporaries, advocated an annexation of Austria to Germany. After the local takeover of the Nazis in 1933, but he approached more and more the position of the Catholic conservative Fatherland Front at. During the time of Chancellor Schuschnigg , Mayer was appointed to the jury of several state literary prizes. After Austria's annexation in 1938, however, he had to end his literary career because he was not accepted into the Reich Chamber of Literature because of his membership in the Freemason Lodge "Mozart" , which amounted to a publication ban. So he returned to the profession he had learned in 1939 and became a pharmacist again, from 1945 as the head of what was once his own pharmacy in the 3rd district of Vienna.

After the war he began to write again and published a few short stories and novels, mostly with the now politically acceptable emphasis on the Austrian homeland as a topic. In 1949 he died in his hometown of Vienna. His estate of manuscripts, film sketches and theater essays was given to the Austrian National Library in 1975 .

Novels

  • Of people and machines (1915)
  • Typhus (1920)
  • We (drama, 1921)
  • Prokop the Tailor (1922)
  • Rapanui - The End of a World (1923)
  • Cyprian the Adventurer (1924)
  • The Power of Things (Stories, 1924)
  • David finds Abissag (1925)
  • The Big Boot (1926)
  • The Last Citizens (1927)
  • The train over the mountain (1928)
  • Minister Bruck: The book about the Anschluss of Austria as it could have been seventy years ago and can still be today (1929)
  • Death Over the World (1930)
  • Königgrätz (1931)
  • The world's clown: a film novel (1931)
  • German in the East (1932)
  • Money ... money! (1935)
  • Doctors (1936)
  • The Prince's Adjutant (1937)
  • Sudetes (1938)
  • From thought to action. Novellas from the History of Labor (1941)
  • Human Land (1947)
  • In the Eternal Ice (1949)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815-1950: Theodor Heinrich Mayer (PDF file; 167 kB)
  2. ↑ Gerhard Ringhofer: "In this great sadness that is called life", The contradiction as a determining moment in the life and work of Anton Wildgans ; Diploma thesis, Vienna, October 2008 ( PDF )
  3. ^ Dorit Müller: Dangerous journeys: the automobile in literature and film around 1900 , Königshausen & Neumann, 2004 ISBN 9783826026720 , p. 147
  4. ^ Austrian publishing history 1918-1938: Ralph A. Höger-Verlag
  5. ↑ Scientific Commission for Research into the Republic of Austria: Spiritual Life in Austria in the First Republic ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1986, ISBN 9783486537314 , p. 339 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / books.google.at
  6. ↑ Marcus G. Patka: Austrian Freemasons in National Socialism: Treue und Verrat , Böhlau Verlag Vienna, 2010 ISBN 9783205785460 , p. 71
  7. ^ Murray G. Hall, Gerhard Renner: Handbook of the estates and collections of Austrian authors , Böhlau Verlag Vienna, 1995, ISBN 9783205983712 , p. 224
personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Theodor Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and pharmacist
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 1949
Place of death Vienna