Walter Tausk

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walter Tausk (born April 16, 1890 in Trebnitz , Lower Silesia ; † presumably in 1941 in the Kovno ghetto , Lithuania ) came from a family of Jewish faith. He worked as a sales representative in Wroclaw and was a writer in his spare time.

Life

Walter Tausk had finished high school in Hirschberg (Lower Silesia) as the best in his class , then completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and studied for a semester at the Royal Art Academy in Breslau . Tausk, like sometimes his father, was artistically gifted in many ways. Rudolph Tausk, however, had become over-indebted after several years of commercial success. After his untimely death, his wife and children had to pay for the debt. That was one of the reasons why Walter Tausk had to earn his living as a sales representative for furniture and furnishings, but felt called to be a writer. The novels he wrote rarely found a publisher. A novella was printed in 1924: Olaf Höri's death, sketch of a full moon fantasy .

The Jewish religion was of little interest to Tausk in the 1920s. To do this, he found access to Buddhist circles that had already developed a lively life in Germany as early as the 1920s. Here he made various contributions to relevant magazines.

Tausk felt a real need to write. He wrote a diary from 1918 to 1940. If the contents were initially private statements, the contents changed with the National Socialist seizure of power and the onset of “furious terror”. Tausk saw it as his duty to "deliver the crimes of the National Socialists to history." The diary was first published in East Berlin in 1975 during the GDR era. Editor R. Kincel writes about Tausk's notes: “They make one believe that the average German citizen was adequately informed about the inhumane machinations of the German fascists. It was enough to keep your eyes and ears open ”.

Recorded as a Jew by the National Socialist state administration, Tausk and his family were subject to all persecution measures against Jews from 1933 onwards. Tausk and his siblings lost, among other things, their jobs and the power of disposal over their assets. At first Tausk did not want to emigrate. He later refrained from planning to emigrate because he did not want to leave his 80-year-old mother alone in the hands of the persecutors. In addition, at some point he lacked the financial means to leave Germany. Tausk was deported on November 25, 1941, presumably with the first batch of Jews from Breslau. A little later, Tausk was murdered with thousands of other fellow sufferers near Kovno.

The fact that a good part of his diaries was preserved is apparently due to the fact that they were handed over to the Wroclaw Gestapo when the apartment was liquidated for the purpose of "checking for inflammatory writing". The volumes that still exist are now in the manuscript cabinet of the Wroclaw University Library .

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ryszard Kincel: Breslauer Tagebuch 1933-1940 , edited by Kincel, Rütten & Loenig, Berlin 1975, pp. 5–10.
  2. ↑ Ryszard Kincel Tausk citing in: Preface in Walter Tausk, Breslauer Diary 1933-1940 . Published after his death by Ryszard Kincel, Rütten and Loenig, Berlin (East) 1975, p. 11f.
  3. ↑ Ryszard Kincel: Preface in Walter Tausk, Breslauer Diary 1933-1940 ... S. 19th
  4. ↑ Ryszard Kincel: Preface in Walter Tausk, Breslauer Diary 1933-1940 ... S. 16f.
  5. ↑ Archive for Social History 1998, pp. 794f. [1] , online here [2]


personal data
SURNAME Tausk, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sales representative and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Trebnitz
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: 1941
Place of death Kovno