Theodor Plievier

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Theodor Plievier (1946)
Memorial plaque on the house, Wiesenstrasse 29, in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen

Theodor Otto Richard Plievier (1933: Plivier ) (* 12 / 17th February 1892 in Berlin , German Empire ; † 12. March 1955 in Avegno , Switzerland ) was a German writer . He was best known for his trilogy of novels about the fighting on the Eastern Front of World War II , consisting of the works of Stalingrad , Moscow and Berlin .

Life

Plievier was the son of the file cutter Theodor R. Plivier and his wife Albertine L. Thing. The family lived in the Gesundbrunnen district of Berlin , where Plievier also grew up and attended elementary school. A memorial plaque commemorates him on the new building on the site of his birthplace at Wiesenstrasse 29. Even as a schoolboy he was very interested in literature and was able to publish his first essays in a workers' newspaper at the age of 17.

Early years until his breakthrough as an author (1908–1928)

After just a few weeks, Plievier gave up an apprenticeship as a plasterer at the age of 16 and left his parents' house after an argument about it. He wandered through Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Netherlands . Back home, he signed up as a sailor for the German merchant fleet . In 1910 he sampled in South America and worked in saltpeter mines in Chile until 1913 .

When he returned to Hamburg in 1914, he was arrested by the police after a fight in a harbor bar. Given the choice of going to jail or to the Imperial Navy , he opted for the Navy, in which he during the First World War served. The majority of the time he did his service on the auxiliary cruiser Wolf , on which he experienced a 451 day long pirate voyage to New Zealand. The bad treatment of the ship's crew by the commander Karl August Nerger and his officers and the fact that this ship did not call at any port for 400 days prompted Plievier to write about his experiences in the autobiographical novel Des Kaiser Kulis , published in 1930 . The novel of the German high seas fleet . By his own admission, these experiences made him “a revolutionary”. In November 1918, Plievier took part in revolutionary unrest in Wilhelmshaven , which soon grew into the well-known Kiel sailors' uprising . He worked as an agitator, wrote leaflets and edited pamphlets of the revolutionaries. On the following November Revolution Plievier was then involved only marginally.

After the end of the war, Plievier founded together with Karl Raichle and Gregor Gog the “Commune on the Green Way” near Urach, which was oriented towards life reform . Influenced by the ideas and theories of Michail Bakunin and Friedrich Nietzsche , Plievier represented anarchist ideas. The anarchist "Verlag der Twelve" was born. In the early 1920s he was a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers' Union of Germany . In the course of a personal crisis, following the example of the poet and nature prophet Gusto Gräser , he transformed himself into a bearded “prophet” and inflation saint , in a robe and sandals. In his writings he proclaimed the “turning of the world” and wooed disciples whom he called “brothers, Ahasern natures, whom you seek in the realm of the soul”. He took part in a grass-inspired "procession of the new crowd" around Friedrich Muck-Lamberty .

In 1920 he married the cooper's daughter Maria Stoz in Berlin . With her he had a daughter and two sons. Plievier was one of Käthe Kollwitz's circle of friends and was drawn by her. She also made the cover sheet (title: Hunger ) for a four-page leaflet that he distributed on his travels through Germany and with which he raised money for starving people in Russia. During the famine in the inflationary period in 1923, his daughter Victoria died.

Plievier earned his living as a casual worker and again as a sailor until 1924; but later also as a journalist , translator and writer. He also lived for some time in South America, where he a. a. worked as a drover and as secretary of the German Vice Consul in Pisagua .

First success, emigration and return (1929–1947)

Back in Germany and after an amicable divorce, Plievier married the actress Hildegard Piscator in 1931 ; this marriage remained childless. In 1929 Plievier made his debut with his first novel Des Kaiser Kulis and became known over the borders of Germany overnight. With the description of the circumstances of the war and his sharp accusation against the war, Plievier spoke to his contemporaries from the soul - an example:

“The goals of conquest are our undoing, without them there would be peace. We could go back to work and have something to eat. And the others are human too. The peoples must come together and come to an understanding. The killing is pointless. (...) The war is huge business. (...) Down with the war! "

The director Erwin Piscator staged this novel as a drama (with Plievier as actor) - premiered on August 30, 1930 in the Lessing Theater in Berlin . The novel and the play were a single charge of the condition of the German Navy and the living conditions of its sailors. After the National Socialists ' seizure of power, its content and awareness led to this title being on the list of burned books .

In 1933, Plievier changed the spelling of his name from "Plivier" to "Plievier". On March 29, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the second expatriation list of the German Reich through which he was expatriated . After an odyssey through Prague , Zurich , Paris and Oslo , he and his wife came to Moscow . In order not to get into trouble with the Stalinist censorship , Plievier relied on pure adventure stories and abstained from any political commentary. Because of the German attack on Moscow in autumn 1941, Plievier was evacuated to Tashkent ( Uzbek SSR ) along with other immigrants and foreigners . The National Committee for Free Germany accepted Plievier as a full member in September 1943. During this time he made the acquaintance of the writer Johannes R. Becher , with whom he later returned to Germany.

In 1945 his documentary novel Stalingrad was published by the Aufbau Verlag in Berlin and simultaneously in Mexico. For this novel, Plievier was allowed to question German soldiers prisoner in camps near Moscow for months and was given access to Soviet files. The first version of Stalingrad was published in 1943/44 in the journal Internationale Literatur in sequels. It was the first book that gave honest information about the details of the sinking of the 6th Army in Stalingrad; it has been translated into 14 languages ​​and was his most successful book. This work was later dramatized as a television film and a play. His trilogy on the course of the Second World War in the East includes the novels Stalingrad (1945), Moscow (1952) and Berlin (1954).

In 1945 he joined the Red Army - in an official capacity - in the Soviet occupation zone and moved into an office in Weimar . Plievier worked there for two years as a member of the state parliament, publishing director and representative of the Kulturbund for the democratic renewal of Germany and also became a partner in Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag .

New beginning in Hamburg, last years (1948–1955)

Since Plievier could not make friends with the changing political conditions and dogmatic communism, he left the Soviet sphere of influence in autumn 1947 and settled in the British zone, i. that is, after a lecture tour through West Germany, he did not return. Plievier summarized his worldview impressively in his speech Some Remarks on the Meaning of Freedom , which he gave at the writers' congress in Frankfurt am Main in 1948. He settled in Hamburg as a freelance writer and in 1950 married Margarete Grote, who was only half his age, as his third wife. Then he moved to Wallhausen near Konstanz . In 1953, Plievier and his wife left Germany forever and settled in Avegno (Ticino). There he died of a heart attack on March 12, 1955 at the age of 63 .

History of impact after his death

After his death, his novels and stories were republished in a number of ways, including by Aufbau-Verlag , Kurt Desch, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Fischer and Parkland-Verlag. A school in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen was temporarily named after him.

Works

  • Departure . Verlag der Twelve, Berlin 1923
  • Turn of the world . Verlag der Twelve, Berlin 1923
  • The emperor's coolies. Novel of the German navy. Malik-Verlag, Berlin 1930 DNB 575398159 ; Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-373-00242-7 .
  • Twelve men and a captain. Novellas. Weller publishing house, Leipzig 1930
  • About his work. Malik-Verlag, Berlin 1932
  • The emperor left, the generals stayed. Malik-Verlag, Berlin 1932; New edition: Fischer-TB, Frankfurt am Main. 1984, ISBN 3-596-25171-0 , new edition: Wachholtz Verlag 2018.
  • November 10, 1918. A chapter from the novel of the same name. Foreign Workers' Publishing House of the USSR, Moscow 1935 (edited by A. Wenediktov)
  • In the Compiegne forest . Iskra revoljucii, Moscow 1939 (German)
  • The gate of the world. Tudapa. Meshdunarodnaja Kniga, Moscow 1940 (German)
  • In the last corner of the earth. Meshdunarodnaja Kniga, Moscow 1941 (German)
  • The Hedgehog. Stories. Foreign Language Literature Publishing House, Moscow 1942
  • Stalingrad. Novel . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1945; Publishing House The Free Book , Mexico 1945; Parkland-Verlag, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-89340-074-5 .
  • Generals among themselves. W. Ehglücksfurtner Verlag, Mainz 1946 (excerpt from the novel Stalingrad )
  • Shark. Novel. Kiepenheuer, Weimar, 1946
  • A German novella. Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1947; Hertz-Verlag, Bremen 1949 (former title: Nothing but an episode ... )
  • The great adventure. (Amsterdam, Allert de Lange, 1936, 1st exile publication) Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-462-01626-1 .
  • The frozen heart. Stories. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-462-01879-5 .
  • Moscow. Novel. 1952; Parkland-Verlag, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-89340-072-9 .
  • Berlin. Novel. 1954; Parkland-Verlag, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-89340-073-7 .

radio play

literature

  • Falk Beyer: On the cultural-political collaboration of the writers Erich Weinert, Theodor Plivier, Johannes R. Becher and Willi Bredel in building the foundations of a socialist publishing system in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany from May 1945 to December 1946. Diss. A. Pädag. Hochsch. Zwickau, 1985.
  • Tom Kindt :  Plievier, Theodor Otto Richardis. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , pp. 544 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Ingrid E. Lotze: Theodor Plievier's war trilogy. Moscow, Stalingrad, Berlin. Univ. Diss. Columbia Univ., New York 1969.
  • Hans-Harald Müller: Party literature or left-wing radicalism? Investigations into the sources and reception of Theodor Plievier's "Des Kaisers Kulis". In: Revue d'Allemagne. Strasbourg. Volume 7, 1975, pp. 351-378.
  • Hans-Harald Müller: Theodor Plievier. A bibliography. (= Hamburg contributions to German studies. 6). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1987, ISBN 3-8204-0188-1 .
  • Hans-Harald Müller: "The Kaiser Kulis". The writer Theodor Plievier and the depiction of the sailors' revolt of 1917. In: Jürgen Elvert , Lutz Adam, Heinrich Walle (ed.): The Imperial Navy in War. A search for clues. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-515-11824-8 , pp. 139-148.
  • Angelika Ruge-Schatz: Theodor Plievier - a search for traces in Berlin. In: Yearbook of the Association for the History of Berlin . 2019, ISSN  0522-0033 , pp. 101-116.
  • Dieter H. Sevin: Individual and State. The image of the soldier in Plievier's novel trilogy. (= Treatises on art, music and literary studies. 121). Bouvier, Bonn 1972, ISBN 3-416-00846-4 .
  • Volker Weidermann : The book of burned books. Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-462-03962-7 , pp. 131-134.
  • Harry Wilde : Theodor Plivier. Zero point of freedom. Biography. Desch, Munich a. a. 1965.
  • Plievier, Theodor . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945. 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  • Harry Schulze-Wilde: Theodor Plievier - From proletarian to citizen. Self-published by the author, Ottobrunn. Commemorative speech for his 75th birthday on February 17, 1967.

Web links

Commons : Theodor Plievier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ The NDB is to most reference works on February 17 as date of birth, in Munzinger this date is listed as "according to other sources."
  2. ↑ This concerns the workers' newspaper: “Der Freie Arbeiter”, according to Thomas F. Schneider, Hans Wagene, Richthofen to Remarque: German-language prose for World War I. P. 360.
  3. ^ Thomas F. Schneider, Hans Wagene: Richthofen to Remarque: German-language prose for World War I. P. 360.
  4. ↑ Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher 1908–1943 , Siedler 1999, p. 552.
  5. ↑ Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher 1908–1943 , Siedler 1999, p. 875.
  6. ↑ It is often incorrectly stated that this work was first published in 1930. A preprint that established his fame appeared in the Rote Fahne - a subsequent discussion took place on November 27, 1929, according to Thomas F. Schneider, Hans Wagene, in Richthofen to Remarque: German-language prose on World War I. ISBN 90-420-0955-1 , p. 371.
  7. ↑ The emperor's coolies. Novel of the German navy. Pp. 290-291.
  8. ^ Thomas F. Schneider, Hans Wagene: Richthofen to Remarque: German-language prose for World War I. P. 362.
  9. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-1945 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order . De Gruyter Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1985, ISBN 3-11-095062-6 , pp. 4 .
  10. ^ Joachim Wieder: Stalingrad and the responsibility of the soldier. FA Herbig, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-7766-1778-0 , pp. 305-306.
  11. ↑ See editorial note in Plievier: Stalingrad. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1983.
  12. ^ Theodor Plievier: Some remarks on the meaning of freedom: Speech to the conference of German writers in Frankfurt am Main on May 20, 1948 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Paulskirchenparlament. Nest-Verlag, Nuremberg 1948, DNB 453801021 [ excerpt ( memento from March 18, 2017 in the Internet Archive )].
personal data
SURNAME Plievier, Theodor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Plivier, Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1892 or February 17, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1955
Place of death Avegno , Switzerland