Wilhelm von Scholz

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Karl Bauer : Wilhelm von Scholz (before 1916)
Von Scholz (fourth from left, seated) - Prussian Academy of the Arts , 1929

Wilhelm von Scholz (born July 15, 1874 in Berlin , † May 29, 1969 in Konstanz ) was a German writer . Because of his approving stance on National Socialism, he is included in Nazi literature.

Life

Seeheim Castle (Villa Scholz)

Wilhelm von Scholz was born as the son of the future Prussian finance minister Adolf von Scholz , grew up in Berlin and in 1890 moved with his father to the family estate " Schloss Seeheim " (also known as "Villa Scholz") in Constance. After graduating from high school in Constance in 1892, Scholz studied literary history and philosophy in Berlin, Lausanne and Kiel . In 1897 he was at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with a dissertation on the poet Annette von Droste-Hulshoff doctorate . In the same year he married Irmgard Wallmüller, daughter of the Prussian Lieutenant General Oskar Wallmüller . The couple had two children, Irmgard and Wilhelm von Scholz, Jr., who in 1910 were among the first 15 children to be taught at the newly founded Odenwald School. Separated from Wilhelm von Scholz, his wife and children lived on the school premises in their own house until 1914/15, which later became the “Cassirerhaus” or “Bachhaus”. Irmgard von Scholz had acquired the property from Max Cassirer .

During the First World War , Wilhelm von Scholz became the first dramaturge and director at the Hof- and Landes-Theater Stuttgart in 1916 . In November 1926, Scholz became President of the Poetry Section in the Prussian Academy of the Arts . However, he resigned from this office in 1928 and moved back to Constance.

time of the nationalsocialism

Scholz came to terms with the Nazi regime early on. After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , on March 16, 1933, he signed a declaration of loyalty to the German Academy of Poetry , the renamed Poetry section of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. In “Six Confessions to the New Germany”, Scholz replied to the French Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland , who refused to accept the Goethe Medal with reference to the book burnings in May 1933 : “The justification of what 1933 visibly ushered in in Germany will become history alone. ”In October 1933 he was one of the 88 writers who signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler . In 1939 he withdrew his earlier philosemitic remarks. In 1934 he won the competition for a hymn for the Olympic Games in Berlin and designed a dedication poem "for the Baden National Socialists who fell in the struggle for the national uprising of the German people" in the courtyard of the Konstanz town hall. Between 1935 and 1937 he was co-editor of the compilation "The Great Germans". In 1935 and 1936 essays by him appear in the “ Weisse Blätter ”. In 1939 he wrote a poem for Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday ("Eherne Tafel"). In 1941 he joined the NSDAP .

After the outbreak of the Second World War and the occupation of Poland, he published in the National Socialist Krakauer Zeitung, wrote the perseverance war poem “The hard will” in 1943: “It doesn't matter which future brings victory - war is our life. We want war! ”And in October 1944 wrote a perseverance article in the“ Bodensee-Rundschau ”:“ The imperative of the hour: Persevere! ”In 1944, he wrote glorifying verses about Hitler in the anthology Lyrik der Lebenden . In June 1944 he received an honorary doctorate from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , and at the suggestion of Goebbels a donation from Hitler of 30,000 marks. Also in 1944 an article was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday in Die Deutsche Wochenschau number 723. In the final phase of the Second World War , Adolf Hitler included him in the list of the most important writers in August 1944 .

Scholz's works were welcomed as exemplary by the National Socialists. Scholz thanked the regime with texts that corresponded to the official ideology. For example, he wrote in the afterword to the anthology “Das deutsche Gedicht” published by him in 1941: “The book should be the property of the entire German people, who in the Third Reich more than ever before had access to music and the visual arts, also that opens up promisingly for poetry. It is supposed to awaken the joy of poetry in the youth, arouse the pride of belonging to a people who have produced such eternal human values ​​as this poetry. It is supposed to call out the real talents in all layers of the German offspring who, when they read these poems, must feel it in their chests that they are not ugly gray ducklings, but young swans. "

During these years, however, he had to distance himself from his play "Der Jude von Konstanz", which he had written in 1904 and which it was said that since Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" there has not been such an exemplary humane Jew on the German stage. Scholz describes the young author he was as "not yet historically mature". In addition, his political views coincided with the regime, which is also reflected in traditional anti-Semitic statements.

“He did not see his behavior between 1933 and 1945 as behavior for which he had to justify and apologize. He remained stubborn and felt that the public had treated him unfairly ”. After the end of the war, his works The Companions, Renovation (both 1937) and The Eternal Building (1941) were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 .

post war period

After the war, Scholz was exonerated as a “fellow traveler”. In 1949 he became president of the Association of German Playwrights and Composers , as its honorary president from 1951. In 1952, Scholz resigned from the PEN Center to demonstrate against its division.

A Wilhelm von Scholz Prize for the best high school diploma theses in German, donated by the city of Konstanz in 1959 on his 85th birthday, was abolished in 1989. In 1964, due to the discussion about himself in the Third Reich, he decided not to be granted honorary citizenship rights by the city of Konstanz on his 90th birthday.

Scholz's resting place is in the Allmannsdorf cemetery in Constance. The resting place should be leveled in 2008, but was then placed under monument protection.

plant

Doppelkopf (1918)

Scholz first became known as a poet and playwright, then also as a narrator and novelist. His plays have been performed on many German stages. He was therefore an early renowned author, for whom the city of Constance organized a festival week on his 50th birthday in 1924; a year later she named a street after him. Another year later the poetry section of the Prussian Academy elected him president.

Scholz's poetry is shaped by the mystical and occult. In his stage works he turned to the study of the works of Paul Ernst and Christian Friedrich Hebbel the Neoclassicism to. The historical background of many works was formed by the German Middle Ages shortly before the Reformation and pre-revolutionary France.

Scholz's best-known works include the dramas “Der Jude von Konstanz. Tragedy in Five Acts ”(Munich, 1905), which premiered in Dresden in 1905 and resumed in 2013 in the City Theater Konstanz ,“ The Race with the Shadow ”(1921), his inclination to occult topics culminates in the book“ Der Zufall und das Schicksal "(1935)," Claudia Colonna "(1941), arrangements of dramas Pedro Calderón de la Barcas (The German Great World Theater, Love Over All Magic, Life a Dream, The Judge of Zalamea) and" Das Säckinger Trompeterspiel "( 1955), “Perpetua. The novel of the sisters Breitenschnitt ”(Berlin and Leipzig, 1926), the biography“ Friedrich Schiller ”(1956) and the novel“ Theodor Dorn ”(1967).

Today, however, Scholz's artistic work is largely unimportant; as a poet he is now almost forgotten.

Awards and honors

Works (in selection)

  • The vanquished. 1899
  • Swap souls , 1910
  • New poems. 1913
  • Lake Constance. 1913
  • Dangerous Love , 1913
  • The Jew of Constance , 1913
  • Summer days , 1914
  • The German narrator , Ed. Wilhelm von Scholz, 1915
  • Ensign von Braunau , 1915
  • The lake: a millennium of German poetry from Lake Constance . Selection W. v. Scholz, 1915
  • The Unreal , 1916
  • German mystics , 1916
  • The poet , 1917
  • Chance and fate , 1935 (= 3rd, revised edition of the f. Title)
    • first: chance, a forerunner of fate. The attraction of the related. Stuttgart 1924
  • Hikes. Paul List Verlag , Leipzig 1924 (later partial prints: Walks on Lake Constance )
  • Perpetua, the novel of the sisters Breitenschnitt , Berlin-Grunewald 1926
  • The rumor , epilogue: Hanns Martin Elster , German Poet Memorial Foundation in Hamburg, Hädecke Verlag, Stuttgart 1924
  • The colorful ribbon, stories, Berlin 1931
  • Duty , 1932
  • The way to Ilok. Novel. Berlin 1930
  • Die Liebe der Charlotte Donc , With the author's autobiographical afterword, 1941
  • The great German world theater: Love over all magic, Life a dream, The judge of Zalamea. List, Leipzig 1942
  • The poems . Complete edition, Leipzig 1944

literature

  • Doris Beckers: Wilhelm von Scholz 'theater activity in Stuttgart. As a dramaturge, director and actor. Wiesbaden: Hemmen u. Wolf 1956.
  • Manfred Bosch / Siegmund Kopitzki (ed.): The race with the shadow. The case of (of) Wilhelm von Scholz . UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, Konstanz 2013
  • Manfred Bosch: Wilhelm von Scholz: "Separated forever, enemies for all time!". In: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders. Volume 5. Nazi victims from the Lake Constance area , Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2016, pp. 201–218. ISBN 978-3-945893-04-3 .
  • Fritz Droop: Wilhelm von Scholz and his best stage works. The guest, the Jew of Constance, Meroë, the double head, swapped souls, heart wonders, dangerous love, enemies, the race against the shadow. An introduction. Berlin u. a .: Schneider 1922.
  • Rudolf Gramich: Form problems in storytelling. Wilhelm von Scholz. Munich: Univ. Diss. 1958.
  • Josef Halbekann: Structural phenomena of order in poetic text and images. A structural phenomenological and functional analysis study. Heidelberg: Winter 1989. (= contributions to recent literary history; F. 3, 94) ISBN 3-533-04166-2
  • Ernst Klee : Wilhelm von Scholz. In: Ders .: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .
  • Edgar Alfred Regener: Wilhelm von Scholz. 2nd edition Leipzig a. a .: Magazine publ. Hegner (1905).
  • Holger Reile: Attempted rescue of honor for a Nazi poet. Berlin: New Germany January 2nd, 2008
  • Arnold Mathias Reis: Wilhelm von Scholz. Studies on his worldview. Würzburg-Aumühle: Triltsch 1939.
  • Hendrik Riemer: The Konstanzer poet Wilhelm von Scholz (1874-1969). A biographical approach . Hartung Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2013.
  • Andreas Wöhrmann: The new classic program. The conception of a modern tragedy by Paul Ernst, Wilhelm von Scholz and Samuel Lublinski . Frankfurt am Main u. a .: Lang 1979. (= Europäische Hochschulschriften; Series 1; 301) ISBN 3-8204-6542-1
  • Viktor Zmegac: The historical and the typological Jew. Studies of Jewish Figures in Turn-of-the-Century Literature. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1996. (= investigations into the history of German literature; 89) ISBN 3-484-32089-3

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm von Scholz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hendrik Riemer: The Konstanzer poet Wilhelm von Scholz, 1874–1969, a biographical approach. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2013, ISBN 978-3-86628-449-4
  2. ^ Arnulf Moser: Wilhelm von Scholz. The poet's family and the Odenwald school , in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 128th issue 2010, Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, pp. 169–179; Digitized.
  3. ↑ 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. 543.
  4. ↑ Six Confessions to the New Germany. Rudolf G. Binding , E. G. Kolbenheyer , Die " Kölnische Zeitung ", Wilhelm von Scholz, Otto Wirz , Robert Fabre-Luce answer Romain Rolland . Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1933
  5. ^ Foundation Archive of the Academy of the Arts (ed.): "... and the past is always at the table" documents on the history of the Academy of the Arts (West) 1945 / 1954-1993. [Academy of Arts, three hundred years]. Selected and commented by Christine Fischer-Defoy. Henschel, Berlin 1997, p. 567, FN. 59.
  6. ^ A b Ernst Klee: The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 544.
  7. ^ Saul Masson: Die Deutsche Wochenschau (723/30/1944). September 22, 2017. Retrieved November 19, 2017 .
  8. ↑ The esteemed National Socialist. http://www.woz.ch/1321/der-fall-des-wilhelm-von-scholz/der-hochgeschaetzt-nationalsozialist
  9. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-s.html
  10. ↑ "No place of remembrance?"  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Südkurier , January 4, 2008@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.suedkurier.de  
  11. ↑ Program for the 2013/2014 season
  12. ↑ http://www.wanderindex.de/wanderverbaende/hauptverband/eichendorffplakette.html
personal data
SURNAME Scholz, Wilhelm von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steen (pseudonym); Wengler, Josef (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1969
Place of death Constancy