Thor Goote

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Signature of Thor Goote

Thor Goote , actually Werner von Langsdorff or Werner Schultze von Langsdorff (born May 27, 1899 in Forbach (Lorraine); † July 3, 1940 over the North Sea ) was a German writer and aeronautical engineer .

Life

Novel (1930)

Langsdorff was the son of an officer from the Hessian nobility. During the First World War he volunteered before his graduation as a volunteer to escape the threat of expulsion. He was wounded as an artilleryman, then joined the air force as a lieutenant and later received the Iron Cross 1st class. According to another representation, Langsdorff was only trained as a pilot in the 1920s. After the end of the war he first had to catch up on his Abitur, an experience that he also processed literarily: “'Children, imagine that, now warming up Homer again, where I can hardly speak the Greek alphabet!' ... Seebach rocks his chair. He already has some white hair. "

In 1919 he began to study engineering ( mechanical engineering , specializing in flight technology ) at the Technical University of Darmstadt , which he obtained in 1923 as a graduate engineer and with a doctorate in engineering. completed. He then worked as a freelance engineer and test pilot and published numerous specialist books and articles. He also gave the Yearbook of aviation as well as the manual of aviation out. Langsdorff suffered permanent serious injuries in a crash in 1928. It was not until 1936 that he was given the opportunity to fly again with a special permit. After his habilitation in 1936 he became an adjunct professor for flight technology and aviation at the TH Karlsruhe .

Langsdorff joined the SA in the 1920s . “I wore the swastika since the end of the war. Now I joined the ranks of the unknown brown soldiers and grew together with them all the more the more we were persecuted and laughed at. ”He was a party member and worked as an agitator and imperial speaker for the NSDAP , as well as an official in the National Socialist Air Corps .

In 1939 Langsdorff was drafted as a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht's air force . After that, meanwhile promoted to captain , he was in the research department of the Technical Office of the Reich Aviation Ministry . In 1940 he was transferred to Kampfgeschwader 30 at his own request . On July 3, he flew a Junkers Ju 88A-1 , which was shot down by a Spitfire of the 603 Squadron over the North Sea off Stonehaven . He died there.

Literary work

From 1930 Langsdorff published short stories and novels under the pseudonym Thor Goote . The best known was his autobiographical trilogy of novels We drive death (1930), We carry life (1932) and The flag high! (1933), in which he deals with one of the standard topics of Nazi literature : “Becoming a National Socialist”. The books describe the path of a young volunteer from the "trench community" to the free corps fight to active involvement in the NSDAP. Goote extensively glorifies the “front spirit” of the First World War (“that we belong together and will always belong together because we crawled through the funnels of Flanders together, because we walked through the corpse stench of the Somme”). The last volume Raise the flag! , the title of which was taken from the Horst Wessel song , ends with a rally appearance by Adolf Hitler in 1932: The " seizure of power " is imminent.

Even if Goote succeeds in describing the horrors of war in the first volume of his trilogy with “modern-looking stylistic devices such as onomatopoeia and staccato word sequences”, his oeuvre mainly consists of rough agitation with anti-Semitic insertions. The frequent use of prefigurations and images of the Christian tradition , such as the portrayal of Hitler as the “savior”, is striking . The language is "uncomplicated and haunting, which is often brought about by paratactic sentence structure":

“And something comes from which there is no escape, - feels its way up, - surrounds me with overwhelming dullness, - is incomprehensible, - indescribable. - But it's there! Paralyzing fear attacks me - I want to flee - some heaviness clings to me - inhibits me. In impotent devotion I try to look at it - but it cannot be seen - cannot be grasped! "

- Thor Goote : We carry life

In 1939 Goote was awarded the Hesse-Nassau Gau culture prize. After the end of the Second World War, Gootes books and some publications by Langsdorff in the Soviet occupation zone and the German Democratic Republic were on the list of literature to be sorted out . Goote's books have not been published in the Federal Republic either.

Doubts about identity

In 2002, the Bertelsmann Historians' Committee raised doubts about Langsdorff's identity with Goote; Olaf Simons, who had evaluated the company's business files, published signatures from fee contracts from the 1930s on a private website. Contracts were found for two Goote novels, which were signed with the pseudonym Thor Goote and obliged the publisher to identify Dr. JM Berg from Frankfurt / M. to protect. For publications by Werner von Langsdorff, however, there were separate contracts signed with his name. Information provided in 2007 in the Neue Deutsche Biographie provides an approach to clarification : According to this, Langsdorff in 1922 in Frankfurt / M. the daughter of a Dr. Johann Berg married. From this one can deduce that Langsdorff used the name or the person of his father-in-law for some contracts. This also explains the alleged Langsdorff pseudonym Johannes M. Berg , which is listed in several catalogs and encyclopedias, but under which no independent publications can be proven.

Publications (selection)

  • The glider. Munich 1923. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • The light aircraft for sport and travel. Frankfurt / M. 1924. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • The flight book. Stuttgart 1925. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin", the airship of the German people . Frankfurt / M. 1928. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • We drive death. Berlin 1930.
  • You will be resurrected! Berlin 1931.
  • We carry life. Berlin 1932.
  • Raise the flag! Berlin 1933.
  • Kam'raden, the Red Front and reaction shot ... Berlin 1934.
  • Comrade Berthold, the incomparable Franconian. Braunschweig, Berlin, Hamburg 1935.
  • LZ 129 "Hindenburg", the airship of the German people . Bechhold. Frankfurt / M. 1936 (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • Airmen and what they experience , election volume of the Bonn am Rhein book community, 1936, Bertelsmann 1935. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • Peter Strasser. The FdL, leader of the airships. Frankfurt / Main 1938.
  • German flag over sand and palm trees. 53 Colonial Warriors tell , Gütersloh 1936. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • "... everything is up to you!" A novel about historical events. Berlin 1938.
  • U-Boats on the Enemy - 45 German U-boat drivers tell. Gütersloh 1937. (as W. v. Langsdorff)
  • Fahnenjunker Lingen flees. Gütersloh 1942.

literature

  • Jürgen Hillesheim , Elisabeth Michael (Ed.): Lexicon of National Socialist Poets: Biographies, Analyzes, Bibliographies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-511-2 .
  • Günther A. Höfler: The new paradigm of war and its literary representations. Presented to Detlev v. Liliencron, Ernst Jünger and Thor Goote. In: Franz Karl Stanzel, Martin Löschnigg (Ed.): Intimate Enemies. English and German Literary Reactions to the Great War 1914–1918. Universitätsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg 1993, ISBN 978-3-8253-0107-1 , pp. 277-291.
  • Ernst Klee : 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 .
  • Wilhelm Kosch / Heinz Rupp / Carl Ludwig Lang: German Literature Lexicon: biographical-bibliographical manual. Vol. 6. Francke Verlag, Bern / Munich 1978, ISBN 3-7720-1283-3 .
  • Gero von Langsdorff:  Langsdorff, Werner von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 612 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Frank Lennartz: The poets of our time. Kröner, 3rd edition, Stuttgart 1940.
  • Hans Sarkowicz , Alf Mentzer: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon . Europa Verlag, ext. New edition Hamburg / Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-203-82030-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gero von Langsdorff: Langsdorff, Werner von . In: NDB 13 (1982), p. 612.
  2. Jürgen Hillesheim / Elisabeth Michael (ed.): Lexicon of National Socialist Poets. Würzburg 1993, p. 203 and following them Hans Sarkowicz / Alf Mentzer: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon . Hamburg / Vienna 2002, p. 190.
  3. Thor Goote: Comrade Berthold, the incomparable Franconian. Hamburg undated, p. 244
  4. Technical and economic considerations on commercial air traffic . 1923.
  5. Quoted from Hillesheim / Michael, p. 203.
  6. Hillesheim / Michael, p. 203; List of Reich speakers as of September 15, 1938 with an addition to the list of November 30, 1938 , Federal Archives NS 15/28; See also National Socialist Monthly Issues , Vol. 15, Issue 161 (1944), p. 81: "Thor Goote, an old fighter of the movement".
  7. Michael L. Hadley: Count Not the Dead . Montreal 1995, p. 72.
  8. Henry L. deZeng IV, Douglas G. Stankey: Air Force Officer Career Summaries, Section L-R. (PDF) 2017, p. 35 , accessed on August 3, 2020 (English).
  9. We drive death , quote. n. Sarkowicz / Mentzer, p. 190.
  10. Sarkowicz / Mentzer, p. 191.
  11. "Design in advance, model for later, anticipation"
  12. Hillesheim / Michael, p. 206.
  13. Thor Goote: We carry life. Berlin 1932, p. 128.
  14. See http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-f.html
    http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-g.html
    http://www.polunbi.de/ library / 1946-nslit-l.html
    http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-s.html
    http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-k.html
    http: / /www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-l.html
  15. Olaf Simons: Berg, John M. . In: Polunbi database writing and image 1900–1960. ; Ders .: Langsdorff, Werner von . In: ibid. O. J.
  16. ^ Gero von Langsdorff: Langsdorff, Werner von . In: NDB 13 (1982), p. 612.
  17. See data record in the catalog of the German National Library; University of Giessen  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; ULB Tyrol ; Hillesheim / Michael, p. 203; Sarkowicz / Mentzer, p. 191; see also Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007; Frank Lennartz: The poets of our time. Stuttgart 1940.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / retro.hebis.de