Walter Schönstedt

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Walter Schönstedt (born February 14, 1909 in Bernburg (Saale) ; † November 29, 1961 in Norwalk, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA ) (pseudonym: Walter) was a German-American writer.

Live and act

After attending school, Schönstedt completed an apprenticeship as a sculptor. He then worked as a farm and construction worker. Around the mid-1920s he joined the Communist Youth Association and the Young Red Front .

Schönstedt's earliest literary contributions are articles for the feuilleton section of the Rote Fahne in 1929. In the late phase of the Weimar Republic, Schönstedt published the novels Kämpfende Jugend (1931) and Motiv unbekannt (1933), which are located in the milieu of Berlin's young workers. Both books were shaped to a large extent by communist views and their tendency had an agitational-advertising character that more or less implicitly called on readers to join the communist movement.

After the National Socialists came to power , Schönstedt went into exile in France . There he was active in the international writers' association. He also took part in the founding of the Association of German Writers in Exile . In 1934 he published the book Auf der Flucht shot in Willi Munzenberg's Editions du Carrefour in Paris . An SA novel that he dedicated to Heinz Bässler, who was shot by members of the SA in Düsseldorf in April 1933 immediately after his apostasy from the SA. The novel describes the career of an SA man who, in the course of a process of political disillusionment, increasingly sees through the anti-capitalist -revolutionary program of the NSDAP as social demagogy and finally turns away from the party.

On November 3, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the third expatriation list of the German Reich , through which Schönstedt was expatriated . In 1935 he moved to the United States , where he largely turned away from his communist views. In June 1940 he married the actress Christiane Grautoff there . In 1941 he joined the US Army . During the Second World War and in the first post-war period, Schönstedt worked as a political officer, most recently with the rank of captain, in American prisoner-of-war camps , where he was primarily concerned with looking after prisoners of war . Among other things, he was jointly responsible for a series of books on the re-education of prisoners of war and was involved in the founding of the magazine Der Ruf , published by Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch . In 1944 Schoenstedt put together a group of eighty-five selected prisoners of war - all authors who had expressed an anti-Nazi stance after their capture - who were transferred to the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Van Etten, New York and were later brought to Fort Philip Kearney in Rhode Island to work there on the creation of writings, films, newspapers, etc., to convince German prisoners of war of the validity of American ideals and values.

In 1947 he can be verified as an employee of the US military administration in Germany. In particular, he was the CAD Field Representative for the administrative region of Lower Bavaria / Upper Palatinate .

After moving to the United States, Schönfeldt more and more gave up his writing activities. In the socialist research in the German Democratic Republic , the accusation was later repeatedly expressed that Schönstedt had " encouraged an identification with the declassed and anarchist loneliness " in his works , whereby he ultimately switched to positions of the bourgeoisie .

Little is known about Schönstedt's fate since around 1950. In literature it is sometimes said that he was "missing since 1951" and sometimes that he died "around 1965". In 1954, he is a journalist in Norwalk, Fairfield, Connecticut, United States lists

Fonts

  • Youth frees itself . Berlin 1931.
  • Fighting youth (= The Red One Mark novel, Volume 8). Berlin 1932; New edition by Oberbaumverlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 978-3-87628-116-2
  • Motif unknown . Berlin 1933.
  • Shot while trying to escape. An SA novel . Paris 1934.
  • The praise of life . New York 1938.
  • The Cradle Builder . New York 1940.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 5 (reprinted 2010).
  2. ^ Rolf Harder (Ed.): Letters to Johannes R. Becher, 1910–1958 . 1993, p. 722.
  3. ↑ James McGrath Morris: Jailhouse Journalism. The Fourth Estate Behind Bars . 1998, p. 128.
  4. ^ Matthias Harder: Schönstedt, Walter . In: Wilhelm Kühlmann: Ros Se . 2011, p. 534.
  5. ^ Heinz Lorenz: Die Universum-Bücherei, 1926-1939. History and bibliography of a proletarian book club . 1996, p. 159.
  6. ^ Rolf Harder (Ed.): Letters to Johannes R. Becher . 1993, p. 661.
  7. ^ Norwalk Directory 1954, p. 709.
personal data
SURNAME Schönstedt, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Walter (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 20th century