Werner Beumelburg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Werner Beumelburg (unknown photographer, 1944)

Werner Beumelburg (born February 19, 1899 in Traben-Trarbach ; died March 9, 1963 in Würzburg ) was a German writer. He was one of the most famous authors of the late phase of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era .

Life

Until 1933

Werner Beumelburg was born as the son of the superintendent Eduard Beumelburg and his wife Marie. Waldeyer was born. He was a brother of Walter Beumelburg (1894–1944), who later became the director of the Reichssender Berlin . Werner Beumelburg attended school in Traben-Trarbach and made 1916 the Notabitur . In the First World War he initially participated as a flagjunker in a pioneer battalion, and in 1917 he became an officer . He was a participant in the Battle of Verdun and received the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st class.

(1929)
(1930)

After the war, Beumelburg studied history and political science in Cologne . From 1921 he worked as editor of the German Soldatenzeitung , which was published by the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin. Later he was the political editor of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and switched to the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten in 1924 .

His first book The Stolen Lie (1921) was a refutation of the German war guilt in the First World War and an expression of the expectation of a strong "Führer" in the guise of a science fiction novel. In the following years he became known for “the idiosyncratic portrayal of German war history”. Between 1923 and 1928 he wrote four war books for the series The Battles of World War , published on behalf of the Reichsarchiv , which were a mixture of documentation and fictional plot. After the positive response, he dared to make the leap to freelance writing in 1926.

Beumelburg was in radical opposition to the Weimar Republic . His next books were Sperrfeuer um Deutschland (1929), a literary-historical treatise of the First World War, and Gruppe Bosemüller (1930), the best-known and now most scientifically researched German-national front novel . He had written both works from a nationalist , deeply anti-democratic point of view. In it he propagated the "trench community" and a future "front-line soldiers" state. The easily legible works, written in a matter-of-fact, sober tone, made Beumelburg a bestselling author. In his propaganda paper Deutschland in Ketten (1931) he finally denounced the republic as a “slave state”.

Career in National Socialism

Beumelburg's real career began with the seizure of power in 1933. If he had previously viewed Adolf Hitler critically, he now accepted him as heir to Bismarck and the unifier of the Reich and celebrated him in his anthem Germany Awakened. German word, German spirit, German deed (1933): “God is visible with him” (p. 56). In October 1933 he was one of 88 writers who signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. After the "cleansing" of the Prussian Academy of the Arts from Jewish members, he and others took their places and became "Secretary" (managing director). After the death of Reich President Hindenburg , in August 1934 he was one of the signatories of the call for cultural workers on the eve of the referendum on the head of state of the German Reich . In 1936 Beumelburg received the Great Literature Prize of the Reich capital Berlin, and one year later the Art Prize of the Westmarkgau.

As a representative author of the new state, he celebrated National Socialism as the resurrection of the masses in the spirit of World War II soldiers , wrote about the Reich Labor Service , the Anschluss of Austria and the use of the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War . What was new was the anti-Semitism that was not to be found in Beumelburg until then .

From 1942 he kept Hermann Göring's war diary as an air force officer . In the course of the Second World War he is said to have distanced himself from the Nazi regime. However, there is only evidence that Beumelburg boycotted a pledge of allegiance to the Führer initiated by the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1944 . At the same time he is said to have recommended young soldiers "to seek a place of action in the west and to seek capture in the event of contact with the enemy". The literary scholar Stefan Busch notes in his study of Beumelburg: "This distance has been reduced to an undetectable minimum due to the often found mixture of ideological affinities, attraction through success and opportunism."

Shortly before the end of the war, Beumelburg became head of a Luftwaffe war school. After the latter finally withdrew from Czechoslovakia to Bavaria, he was taken prisoner by the Americans.

post war period

After the war, Beumelburg had ties to General George S. Patton . After brief imprisonment in the Dachau internment camp , he was released and initially lived in Faistenhaar near Munich, where he worked and also lived for a farmer. He did not have to undergo a denazification process . When his living room was needed, Beumelburg moved, at the invitation of friends, to the “ New World ” in Würzburg, an estate and artist meeting place for the painter Gertraud Rostosky .

In the Soviet zone of occupation and later in the German Democratic Republic , many of his books were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

His first new books, published by renowned publishers, were quite successful again. However, Der Spiegel lamented Beumelburg's "post-war flight into the historical novel." In 1952 , his "Chronicle" of the Second World War was published years without mercy . In the foreword of the book he announced that he would “not avoid any question that needs to be dealt with for the sake of historical truth” and then described in detail the terror and mass murders of the Nazis. Nevertheless, he remained politically discredited, also because he continued to take part in the Lippoldsberger Dichtertage founded by Hans Grimm in 1934 .

In an interview on February 7, 1955, Beumelburg described his current literary work:

“ My last book, Years Without Mercy , was written on the New World , a depiction of the Second World War, published by Stalling , Oldenburg. The peace and seclusion are excellent for my work. I am currently working on a novel The Elbe flows through the middle of Germany . In the style of Simplicissism, a fate on this side of the Iron Curtain is portrayed here; it is an attempt to promote the unity of Germany not in a political but in a moral sense. "

Years Without Mercy was not accepted by the public, and sales of his other works also fell rapidly. His post-war career came to an end in the 1950s. Rejected by the big publishers for reasons of opportunity, he published two more novels in dubious right-wing small publishers, which, as conventional entertainment products, did not get much response. After 1958, no new editions of his books appeared, he had "got into intellectual and literary no man's land." But his books were to be found in the soldiers' libraries of the Bundeswehr for a long time . Beumelburg endured the dwindling success and its increasing sideline position in the New World in Würzburg with poise. His presence there was characterized as unobtrusive, friendly and of distinguished determination.

In 1962, the Stern wrote a " German Narrator Award ", for which Beumelburg applied anonymously. In October 1963 he was awarded one of the 17 advancement awards. But by then Beumelburg had been dead for months; on March 9, 1963, he had committed suicide in the New World . He was buried in his hometown Traben-Trarbach.

Awards and honors

Works

A Whole World Against Us (1934)
  • Douaumont (1923)
  • Ypres 1914 (1925)
  • Loretto (1927)
  • Flanders 1917 (1928)
  • The Years of Steel (1929)
  • Barrage around Germany (1929)
  • The Bosemüller Group (The Great Novel of the Front Soldiers) (1930)
  • The Stream (1930)
  • The cuckoo and the twelve apostles, novel (1931)
  • Germany in Chains, From Versailles to the Young Plan (1931)
  • Bismarck founds the Reich (1932)
  • The youthful realm. Speeches and essays on the turn of the times (1933)
  • Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen (1934)
  • Wilhelm Reetz (ed.), Werner Beumelburg: A whole world against us. A history of the world war in pictures . Berlin: Ullstein, 1934
  • Prussian Novella (1935)
  • Emperor and Duke. The Battle of Two Sexes for Germany (1936)
  • The stallion meadow. Novella (1937)
  • Empire and Rome. Oldenburg (1937)
  • The King and the Empress. Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa . Gerhard Stalling Verlag (1938)
  • Mont Royal. A book from the heavenly and earthly realms (1938)
  • Austria and the German Empire: Brief History of the Greater German Empire (1938)
  • Battle for Spain (1939)
  • Victory in the east. How We Beat the Russians in 1914-17 (1939)
  • From 1914 to 1939. The meaning and fulfillment of the world war (1940)
  • Stories from the Reich (1941)
  • Empire and Rome (1943)
  • A hundred years is like a day. A family novel. Stalling-Verlag, Oldenburg (1950)
  • Only Guest on Dark Earth (1951)
  • Years Without Mercy (1952)
  • The Camel and the Eye of a Needle (1957)
  • ... and one stayed alive (1958)
  • King Nobel's Last Journey (unpublished)

literature

  • Jürgen Hillesheim / Elisabeth Michael (Ed.): Lexicon of National Socialist Poets: Biographies, Analyzes, Bibliographies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-511-2 .
  • Stefan Busch: “And yesterday, Germany heard us”. Nazi authors in the Federal Republic. Continuity and discontinuity with Friedrich Griese, Werner Beumelburg, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Kurt Ziesel. Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann 1998 (= studies on literary and cultural history; 13) ISBN 3-8260-1395-6
  • Markus Pöhlmann : "The great experience out there". The series battles of the world war (1921-30) , in: Thomas F. Schneider and Hans Wagner (eds.), From Richthofen to Remarque. German-speaking prose for World War . Amsterdam: Rodopi 2003, pp. 113-131.
  • Hans Sakowicz / Alf Mentzer: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon . Hamburg / Vienna: Europa Verlag (adult new edition) 2002 ISBN 3-203-82030-7
  • Karl-Heinz Joachim Schoeps: Literature in the Third Reich. Bern u. a .: Lang 1992 (= German literature between the world wars; 3) ISBN 3-261-04589-2
  • Ernst Klee : "Werner Beumelburg" entry in ders .: The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5
  • Florian Brückner: Undefeated in literature: Werner Beumelburg (1899–1963) - war poet in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism (dissertation University of Stuttgart 2016), LIT Verlag Berlin and Münster 2017. ISBN 978-3-643-13546-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 50.
  2. ↑ War History: A Coffin Width Life . In: Der Spiegel v. February 4, 1953, p. 31.
  3. ↑ Douaumont; Ypres; Loretto; Flanders.
  4. ↑ From 1914 to 1939. Meaning and Fulfillment of the World War (1939), quoted in n. Sakowicz / Mentzer, p. 97.
  5. ↑ Olaf Simons: Short biography on Werner Beumelburg 2004.
  6. ↑ Busch, p. 82.
  7. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of the literature to be separated: 1946 1947 1948 1953
  8. ↑ War history: Eine Sargbreite Leben , Der Spiegel, February 4, 1953, p. 33.
  9. ↑ Shortly before and during the Nazi era, he had often published for Stalling, e. B. "Friedrich II. Von Hohenstaufen", "Barrage around Germany" 1929, "Bismarck founds the Reich" 1932, "Mont Royal. A book from the heavenly and earthly realms" 1936, "Prussian Novelle" 1942.
  10. ↑ Main-Post dated February 7, 1955: "The 'New World' - a home of the muses".
  11. ↑ Busch, p. 82; on the following: Troop Libraries: Heroes in the Locker , Der Spiegel, December 4, 1967, pp. 50–54.
  12. ↑ Walter Roßdeutscher in "Würzburg's 'New World' a hoard of the arts", No. 6 of the Dauthendey Society, p. 57, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-935998-01-5 .
  13. ↑ The novel is unpublished in the Stern Archive, another copy of the manuscript is in the Beumelburg estate.
  14. ^ Trierischer Volksfreund, edition of January 29, 2007.
  15. ↑ Also as field output of the OKW ; also in the publishing house El buen libre (in German), a company of the National Socialist emigration, Buenos Aires 1949.
  16. ↑ Review on hsozkult
personal data
SURNAME Beumelburg, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Traben-Trarbach
DATE OF DEATH March 9, 1963
Place of death Wurzburg