Wilhelm Klemm (poet)

Wilhelm Klemm (born May 15, 1881 in Leipzig , † January 23, 1968 in Wiesbaden ) was a German publisher and poet .

Life

Wilhelm Klemm was a son of Rudolf Klemm (1853–1908), owner of the commission bookstore Otto Klemm in Leipzig. His siblings were Otto Klemm (1884–1939), a representative of the Leipzig School of Gestalt Psychology , and Annemarie Jacob (1891–1990), an expressionist painter.

He attended the St. Thomas School in Leipzig until 1900 . After studying medicine in Munich, Erlangen, Leipzig and Kiel, he passed the state examination in 1905, and in 1906 he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD. After his father's death in 1908, he took over his bookstore. His marriage to Erna Kröner (1892–1978), daughter of the publisher Alfred Kröner , in 1912 secured him financially. The marriage resulted in four sons, including the future chemist Alfred Klemm (1913–2013) and the future publisher Arno Klemm (* 1914). The marriage ended in divorce in 1947.

During the period of the First World War 1914 to 1918 Wilhelm Klemm was regimental doctor on the Western Front .

publisher

In 1919, Klemm took over the Leipzig commission house Carl Friedrich Fleischer. From 1921 - Kröner died on January 2nd, 1922 - he also worked as a managing partner of the Alfred Kröner Verlag and in 1927 he bought the Dieterich'sche publishing house . A memorable event under his aegis was the publication of Karl Marx's early writings by Alfred Kröner Verlag a year before Hitler came to power.

In 1937 he was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer and had to give up the management of the Alfred Kröner Verlag and the Dieterich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung. In collaboration with Rudolf Marx (1899–1990) , Klemm countered this with the publication of the Dieterich Collection , which during the Nazi era was committed to humanistic tradition with its philosophically, culturally, and literarily valuable volumes . In 1943 all factories were destroyed. Two of his four sons died in the war.

After the end of the Second World War , the Dieterich'schen publishing bookstore and the Dieterich collection continued to exist in a divided form. Rudolf Marx decided to stay in Leipzig and continued the series there, while Wilhelm Klemm accepted an offer from the Americans and moved to Wiesbaden (at Steubenstrasse 3). Here he continued his publishing activities until in 1955, for economic reasons, he sold the volumes of the Dieterich Collection, which he was responsible for, to the Carl Schünemann Verlag in Bremen. In 1948 he married Ilse Brandt (* 1912) from Leipzig for the second time and had a daughter with her.

Wilhelm Klemm died on January 23, 1968 in Wiesbaden.

Lyric poet

Wilhelm Klemm's first poems, which were mostly rhyming, were made during his high school days. In addition to the literary educational canon of the empire, his early work, as numerous drawings in his diaries show, were influenced by art history, especially the Italian Renaissance , French classicism and romanticism.

In 1915 he made his debut with the volume of poetry Gloria . His now mostly rhyming free rhythm poetry is characterized by a minimalist, expressive language that is often not subject to any rules. If he shares the preference for a stanza form with other Expressionist poets , he does not share their patriotic pathos ( Ernst Wilhelm Lotz ) or their pitying thinking ( Franz Werfel ). The first stanza of the poem Position , which was highly praised by critics like Theodor Heuss, reads: “The night works continuously. Chasing Shots / Past. Clap or sigh from it / rumble away like stone rubble. Ferment. A gun roars - / The ghosts of annihilation chatter. Hours seep away. "

Klemms poems appeared - with the exception of the magazine Der Sturm - in the important literary and art magazines: first in Die Jugend and in Simplicissimus , later also in Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion . However, Klemm did not take part in the ideological discussions of his time. Pfemfert published the second and third individual lyrical volumes with verses and images as well as a request . After the end of the war, however, there were aesthetic and content-related differences until finally none of his poems were included in Die Aktion . The poem Sehnsucht already suggests a turning away from expressionism: “O Lord, simplify my words. / Let brevity be my secret. / Give me the wise slowdown. / How much can be resolved in three syllables! ". But this turning away did not mean turning to the aestheticism of Stefan George ; the turmoil of modernity continued to be an important subject: “Oh my time! So nameless torn, / so without star so daseinsarm in knowledge, "and again he sits down with no particular religion associated transcendence apart.

After the volumes, Seissenheit und Entfaltung, published in 1919, Klemm published Traumschutt (1920). The series of poems Enchanted Targets (1921) was probably composed in 1920 or earlier. In Alfred Wolfenstein's yearbook The Survey (1920), Klemm's cycle of days and nights is included, which, however, went completely unnoticed and was not included in later anthologies . The poet and literary scholar Jan Volker Röhnert speaks of Klemm's post-war poems as “unknown masterpieces in our poetry history” and recognizes the influences of silent film in the bizarre metaphors . Klemms renunciation of further lyrical publications from 1921 can be understood as a voluntary " ban on images ": "The proven lyrical image was felt to be outdated and worn out, while the ubiquity of images of reality in poems seemed hardly representable."

As an author, Wilhelm Klemm was forgotten after 1945. He had no contact with the writers of Group 47 and their environment. The reception of his work did not begin until Klemm's eightieth birthday in 1961, when the band was republished by the Limes Verlag with an afterword by Kurt Pinthus . Akzente publisher Hans Bender has also made a name for himself as a sponsor . The reception also received a certain impetus from the increasing popularity of Jorge Luis Borges in Germany from the 1960s , who translated Wilhelm Klemm into Spanish as early as 1920.

Works

• Battle Sky, 1914
• Gloria! War poems from the field . Albert Langen, Munich 1915.
• V ers and images. Verlag Die Aktion, Berlin 1916.
• Request. Collected verses . With four text illustrations by the author. Verlag Die Aktion, Berlin 1917 (Die Aktion Lyrik Vol. 4); New edition in 1961 with an afterword by Kurt Pinthus. Limes, Wiesbaden 1961.
• Unfolding. Poem series . Kleuken Press, Bremen 1919; Reprint 1973 by Kraus Reprint, Nendeln (Library of Expressionism).
• Emotion. Poems . Kurt Wolff, Munich 1919 (this book was printed as the first of the new series of Drugulin prints in December 1919 by W. Drugulin in Leipzig in an edition of 1100 copies); Reprint 1973 by Kraus Reprint, Nendeln (Library of Expressionism).
• Dream rubble. Poems . Cover drawing by Wilhelm Klemm. Paul Steegemann Verlag, Hanover / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich 1920 ( Die Silbergäule collection, 65th – 66th volume); New edition with the subtitle "Selected Poems" ed. by Andrea Czesienski: Aufbau, Berlin / Weimar 1985.
• Enchanted Goals. Poem series . Erich Reiss Verlag, Berlin 1921 (printed by Otto von Holten , Berlin, in autumn 1921); Reprint 1973 by Kraus Reprint, Nendeln (Library of Expressionism).
• Under the pseudonym Felix Brazil : The Satan Doll. Verses. Paul Steegemann Verlag, Hanover 1922; Reprint 1973 by Kraus Reprint Nendeln (Library of Expressionism).
• Flamed edges (= The newest poem [New Series] Volume 4, edited by Horst Heiderhoff and Dieter Hoffmann). JG Bläschke Verlag, Darmstadt 1964.
• I was in a strange room. Collected poems . Published by Hanns-Josef Ortheil . Hanser, Munich 1981.
• Thirteen author portraits. From Guillaume Apollinaire to Kurt Schwitters . Published by Karl Riha . edition fundamental, Cologne 1995.
• Collected verses. With vignettes and ink drawings by the author. Edited by Imma Klemm and Jan Volker Röhnert. Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Mainz 2012. ISBN 978-3-87162-077-5 .
• Art is dead. Letters and verses from the First World War . Edited by Imma Klemm, with an afterword by Hanns-Josef Ortheil. Dieterich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Mainz 2013. ISBN 978-3-87162-079-9 .

literature

• Friedrich Michael: In memoriam Wilhelm Klemm . In: Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel Vol. 24, 1968, pp. 419–421.
• Hanns-Josef Ortheil : Wilhelm Klemm. A lyric poet of "the twilight of mankind" . Kröner, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-520-70401-3 .
• Gerd Schulz:  Klemm, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 33 ( digitized version ).
• Paul Raabe : The authors and books of literary expressionism. A bibliographic manual . Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 978-3-476-00575-5 , pp. 275-277.
• Dieter Hoffmann: "All books in the world torn into shreds". About the poet and publisher Wilhelm Klemm . In: Marginalia. Zeitschrift für Buchkunst und Bibliophilie Vol. 212, 2013, No. 4, pp. 40–50.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Klemm in the catalog of the German National Library
• Holdings by and about Wilhelm Klemm in the German Literature Archive in Marbach

Remarks

1. ^ Grit Stegmann: The Dieterich Collection and its editor Rudolf Marx. In: Siegfried Lokatis, Ingrid Sonntag (ed.): 100 years of Kiepenheuer publishers. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-635-2 , pp. 300-308.
2. ^ Grit Stegmann: The Dieterich Collection and its editor Rudolf Marx.
3. ↑ Kurt Pinthus (Ed.): Short biography. In: Twilight of Man . Revised edition with significantly expanded bio-bibliographical appendix. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995. p. 351.
4. ↑ prompt. 1917.
5. ↑ My time. In: request. 1917.
6. ↑ Jan Volker Röhnert: Magical Escape on the Edge of Expressionism. On Wilhelm Klemm's oeuvre without a trace. In: Accents. Journal of Literature. Issue 2, April 2006, pp. 157–172, here p. 169.
7. ^ Carlos García: Borges, traductor del Expresionismo: Wilhelm Klemm .
8. ↑ The pseudonym Felix Brazil is the name of a cigar brand preferred by Wilhelm Klemm.