Wilhelm Herzog

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Memorial plaque for the German and Austrian refugees in Sanary-sur-Mer , including Wilhelm Herzog

Wilhelm Herzog (born January 12, 1884 in Berlin , † April 18, 1960 in Munich ) was a German literary and cultural historian, playwright, encyclopedist and pacifist .

Live and act

Herzog studied economics , art history and German at the Humboldt University in Berlin . After early works on Lichtenberg (1905) and Kleist (1907) he was the author of the March magazine and 1910/1911 editor of the PAN magazine . In 1914/1915 he initially published the journalistic magazine Das Forum, which was fighting for world peace, until the forced, "World War-related" suspension . He was only able to continue the magazine in 1918. It appeared in nine volumes up to 1929. In 1918/1919, Herzog was the editor of the daily newspaper Die Republik and joined the USPD , with whose left wing he joined the KPD at the end of 1920 , which he belonged to until he was expelled from the party in 1928 (he had called Willi Munzenberg the “red Hugenberg ”). On May 22, 1920, Herzog traveled to the USSR on the occasion of the Second Congress of the Comintern , which took place from July 19 to August 7, 1920 in Petrograd and Moscow . He thus accepted an invitation from Karl Radek and Grigory Yevsejewitsch Zinoviev . During his three-month stay - Herzog left Russia on August 18, 1920 - he had the opportunity to take part in the Comintern Congress, to get to know Soviet politicians and the city of Moscow. In addition, Herzog traveled down the Volga as part of a delegation trip. Immediately after his return his “Russian Notebook” appeared.

On December 23, 1928, there was a violent argument between Herzog and Erwin Piscator in Berlin . This attacked Herzog after the premiere of the cabaret "Larifari" by Rosa Valetti with the words "Do you want to keep writing against me or ...". The background was - so it is assumed - the criticism of Piscator published several times in the "Forum".

Together with Hans José Rehfisch , he was the author of the play Die Affäre Dreyfus , which premiered in 1929 under the pseudonym René Kestner at the Volksbühne in Berlin and was to be performed in Paris in 1931. However, the Action Française organized riots, so that the play was canceled after a performance. Between 1929 and 1933 he wrote The Dreyfus Affair (together with Rehfisch), The Struggle of a Republic , Panama . After the NSDAP came to power in 1933, Herzog first emigrated to Switzerland, where he had mainly been since the increase in anti-Semitic attacks at the end of the 1920s, and shortly afterwards to France. He was also persecuted by the authorities abroad; so his emigration could not save him from multiple internment (1939-1941 in France and after his escape to the USA from 1941 to 1945 in Trinidad). Only shortly after the end of the war was he finally allowed to enter the USA.

In 1947, Herzog returned to Switzerland. In 1952 he tried Hermann Schneider, editor of the Swiss “Observer” and the director of the Gutenberg Book Guild, Dr. Hans Oprecht . The complaint was an article in the "Observer", by which Herzog felt offended in his honor. In the defendant contribution, Herzog was charged with delaying the publication of Romain Rolland's works by around 10 years and using the publishing rights to unlawfully enrich himself. The court found the defendants guilty and sentenced them to pay a fine. In the same year Herzog left Switzerland and lived in Munich, where he died in 1960.

From 1915 to 1921 Wilhelm Herzog was married to the film actress Erna Morena , with whom he had a daughter. In 1939 he married the second daughter of the President of the Swiss Bankers Association Alice La Roche, with whom he had a son and a daughter. His main work, the intellectual legacy of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie, consists of four inconspicuous volumes, Great Figures of History . Only a few of the personalities described are still on everyone's lips today; most of them were largely forgotten when the work was written.

Works (selection)

  • All about the prosecutor (world premiere: Theater des Westens , Berlin, May 6, 1928, director: Heinz Goldberg )
  • The Dreyfus Affair: Play in 5 acts (6 images) (1929; with Hans J. Rehfisch )
  • The Struggle of a Republic: The Dreyfus Affair. Documents and Facts (1933)
  • Panama (1931, amended version 1950)
  • Barthou (1938)
  • Hymns and Pamphlets (1939)
  • Critical Encyclopedia (1949)
  • People I Met (autobiography, 1959)
  • To the "Spiritual International". Appeal to Romain Rolland. Das Forum , vol. 3, no. 1, October 1018, pp. 1 - 5 (document 82 in google books ). This was the first issue after the previous ban.

Secondary literature

  • Manfred Dehn:  Duke, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , pp. 742 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Carla Müller-Feyen: Committed journalism: Wilhelm Herzog and "Das Forum" 1914-1929: Current affairs and contemporaries in the mirror of a non-conformist magazine . Series: Europäische Hochschulschriften - European University Studies - Publications Universitaires Européennes. Peter Lang, Bern 1996
  • Claudia Müller-Stratmann: Wilhelm Herzog and "Das Forum": Literary Politics between 1910 and 1915. A contribution to the journalism of Expressionism . Peter Lang, Bern 1997
  • Duke, Wilhelm . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  • Duke, Wilhelm. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 11: Hein – Hirs. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-22691-8 , pp. 235-252.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eva Oberloskamp: Stranger New Worlds. Travel of German and French left-wing intellectuals to the Soviet Union 1917–1939. Munich: Oldenburg, 2011, p. 78, ISBN 978-3-486-70403-7
  2. ↑ Das Forum IV, 11 (1919/1920), pp. 481–484, 791–865, 871–911, Das Forum V, 7 (1920/1921), 1–38, 154–185, 251–283, 399 -413
  3. ↑ http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/index.php?id=dfg-viewer&set%5Bimage%5D=3&set%5Bzoom%5D=default&set%5Bdebug%5D=0&set%5Bdouble%5D=0&set%5Bmets%5D = http% 3A% 2F% 2Fcontent.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de% 2Fzefys% 2FSNP27112366-19281224-0-0-0-0.xml The "hit" finished Piscator. Vossische Zeitung, December 24, 1928, p. 3
  4. ↑ https://www.e-newspaperarchives.ch/?a=d&d=OTB19520620-01.2.26.2&srpos=1&e=-------de-20--1--img-txIN-wilhelm+herzog+ process ------- 0 ----- Trial of the literary estate of Romain Rolland, Oberländer Tagblatt, Volume 76, Number 142, June 20, 1952, p. 5
  5. ↑ Contents: Expressionist avant-garde, pacifism in World War I, handling of censorship, revolution in Munich and Berlin 1918, revolutionary socialism in Germany and Russia, political murder and justice in the Weimar Republic, the "golden" twenties, beginnings of fascism, Communism versus fascism
personal data
SURNAME Duke, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sorel, Julian (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary and cultural historian, playwright and encyclopaedist
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1960
Place of death Munich