Wolfgang Cordan

Wolfgang Cordan ( pseudonym of Heinrich Wolfgang Horn; born June 3, 1909 in Berlin , † January 29, 1966 in Chichicastenango , Guatemala ) was a German writer, translator, ethnologist and resistance fighter, who was involved in the Dutch resistance against the Germans in his Dutch exile Occupiers involved. His essential joy in discovery was expressed both in his literary and in his ethnographic activities. After the war Cordan lived in various countries in Central and Southern Europe, later in Mexico , where he studied the Mayan language and script, which had been largely destroyed by European conquerors . His research results in this regard have been questioned on various occasions. The degree of Cordan's homosexual inclination is similarly controversial ; In any case, around 1950 he was one of the authors of the internationally popular gay magazine Der Kreis .

Life

The son from a middle-class family, the father Ewald Horn was a senior civil servant, attended the traditional boarding school Schulpforta , was active in the Bündische Jugend , then studied classical philology, philosophy and musicology in Berlin. He was enthusiastic about the poet Stefan George . He was also impressed by Erich Mühsam , Bauhaus , Piscator , for whom he claims to have worked as an assistant director and assistant, and by Brecht, and was drawn to the political ideals of communism . In 1931 his first volume of poetry, Landscapes and Entrückungen, was published . After the seizure of power by the Nazis emigrated Horn in February in 1933 to Paris , to modernism closed his intellekuellen left accordance surrealist circles, whose influence the imagery of his between surrealism and magic realism coined settled poems to the forties, and lay down the stage name Wolfgang Cordan too. He especially tried his hand at poetry. He dedicated his volume of poems, The Year of Shadows , published in 1940 to Yvan Goll . At the end of 1933 he traveled to the Netherlands , edited the literary magazine Het Fundament, an independent magazine for politics, economics, culture and literature from 1934–1937 , directed the quadrilingual magazine Centaur and became friends with Max Beckmann and Klaus Mann ; he dedicated his first story to the latter. A programmatic essay Essai over het Surrealisme. Met een beschouwing over het werk van Willem van Leusden , which dealt with the combination of psychoanalysis and Marxism sought by the surrealists and condemned as counterrevolutionary by Marxist orthodoxy , he published in 1935 in the Amsterdam publishing house Contact .

During the war and the German occupation, Cordan was active in the Dutch resistance movement from November 1944. He was in close contact with Wolfgang Frommel and its itself as guardian of tradition Stefan George gerierendem pederastic circle whose center is the home of the painter Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht in Amsterdam , Herengracht 401 was. Through the teachers Friedrich W. Buri and William Hilsley , who belonged to the circle , Frommel had gained access to the students of the Quaker School Eerde and sexually abused quite a few of them under the pretext of their upbringing and education in the sense of Stefan George. In 1943 he got to know Percy Gothein personally: “So the first person I met from the master's hand,” (sic) he noted in his diary on September 16, 1943. The Centaur Chiron , "the epitome of the wise man and heroes educator, also of the medical helper," with whose name he even signed letters, became a figure of identification for his work as a mentor for younger members of the circle. During these years he wrote the volumes of poetry Das Muschelhorn (1941), Orion Lieder (1941, recte 1943), Day and Night Equals (1946) and Metamorphoses (1946), which, under the influence of Frommel and the intensified discussion with Stefan George, he “under the both guiding stars 'Eros' and 'Myth' [...] as two reliable directions and interpretations, especially in times of need and confusion ”. Together with Frommel and his friend Johannes Piron , Cordan brought some of the Jewish students at the school mentioned above to safety when they were in acute danger of being deported and murdered after the German troops marched into the Netherlands. As Hendrik van Hoorn, Cordan then lived on a polder farm where Jewish pupils, including Johannes Piron, from the boarding school of the Eerde Quaker School had found refuge. Poems by Cordan and Piron and another member of this community, Thomas Maretzki , contains songs from the Polderhof. Amsterdam. In memory of an autumn (anonymous in 21 copies 1943). In Israel, a Wolfgang Cordan grove commemorates this rescue and the savior. One summer evening in the company of a Dutch communist in Amsterdam, Cordan shot while riding a bicycle a Gestapo spy who the resistance had been looking for for a long time; the two illegals managed to escape.

After the war, Cordan, disappointed by the social and political developments in the Netherlands and Germany, settled in Italy in 1947, did archaeological studies, traveled to the Mediterranean region and took photos for the illustrated books The Mediterranean (1953) and The Nile (1956). From 1948 to 1952 Cordan lived in Ascona in Ticino, next to the mythologist Karl Kerényi , where he wrote the historical novel Julian the Enlightened (Zurich 1950). The last volume of poetry published in 1951 was Harvest at Noon . Around 1950 he was briefly the sole editor of the Tübingen magazine story , mediated by Ernst Jünger . Here he heard lectures on Greek tragedy by the classical philologist Walter F. Otto and got to know the classical philologist, linguist and script specialist Ernst Sittig , whose work later became important for his efforts to decipher Mayan script. After finishing his editorial work, he retired to the artists' colony Positano on the Amalfi Coast. In addition to Julian , the mythological novel Medea or the Limitless (1951) and the story Days with Antonio were written during these years . Diary of Adriaan ten Holt (1954). In 1953 Cordan went to Mexico for a book project for Diederichs Verlag and the Gutenberg Book Guild , where he finally settled. He carried out numerous expeditions to archaeological sites of the Maya culture and learned languages ​​of the Indians . On September 24, 1955, he flew from Havana via Bermuda to Madrid . The machine had to make a belly landing due to a technical defect on the landing gear. Der Spiegel reported on this dramatic incident , with Cordan being quoted in detail.

From 1955 to 1959 Cordan lived in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas , Mexico. Here he quarreled with the anthropologist and photographer Gertrude Duby-Blom , who does not do very well in his books. In 1962 he presented a thesis on the interpretation of Mayan signs , the Sistema de Mérida , and took a chair in ethnology at the University of Mérida in the Mexican state of Yucatán . He gave 1962 a very loose interpretation of the original in Quiché drafted Popol Vuh out.

Wolfgang Cordan died at the age of 56 on a research trip. His friend and fellow expedition, Lampo, of the Kuna ethnic group , was slain half a year after Cordan's death. The index cards for Cordan's main work, a comparative dictionary of Mayan scripts, have not yet been found. He left a member of a Mayan tribe with whom he had a son.

Works

A catalog raisonné by Werner Siebert, Gertrud Siebert, in: Castrum Peregrini CLIII – CLIV, 1982, pp. 141–162.

• De wijzen van Zion. Contact, Amsterdam 1934 (exile edition, translated by Theo J. van der Wal).
• The year of shadows (poems). AAM Stols, Rijswijk 1940.
• The conch shell (poems). Private print 1941 (60 copies)
• Orion songs (poems). Private print 1941 (60 copies).
• Mirror of the Netherlands. Dutch poetry since the eighties movement (introduction and translation). Tiefland Verlag, Amsterdam 1941
• The Flemish Mirror. The Flemish poetry from Guido Gezelle to the present (introduction and translation). Tiefland Verlag, Amsterdam 1943
• De Bart (story). Het Kompas, Antwerp 1943
• with Thomas Maretzki and Hans Piron: Songs from the Polderhof. Amsterdam In memory of an autumn (poems). 1943 (21 copies)
• Reflection on Mallarmé. Argonaut pressure, Amsterdam 1944
• Transformations. Amsterdam 1946 (200 copies)
• Same day and night. Amsterdam 1946 (60 copies)
• Herwig Hensen : Praise for willingness. A selection from the work of the poet by Wolfgang Cordan and Johannes Piron (translation from Dutch). Speer Verlag, Zurich, 1949
• Julian the Enlightened. Historical novel. Origo-Verlag, Zurich 1950
• Harvest at noon (poems). Heliopolis-Verlag, Tübingen 1951
• Medea or The Limitless (novel). Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1952
• The Mediterranean (illustrated travelogue). Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1953
• Days with Antonio. Diary of Adriaan ten Holt (story). Eremiten-Presse, Frankfurt 1954
• Israel and the Arabs. Attempt at an intuition. Publishing house for politics and economy, Cologne 1954
• Mexico. Trying beyond the indestructible. Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1955; revised version: Mexico. Land of 100 faces. ibid. 1967
• The nil. The story of a river in pictures. Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1956
• Secret in the jungle. Discovery trips in the footsteps of the Mayans. Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1959
• Mayan cross and red earth. Among Indians in Mexico. Classen, Zurich / Stuttgart 1960
• Death in Haiti. Narrative. Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1961
• The book of the council. Creation myth and Quiché-Maya migration. Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1962; New edition: Popol vuh. The book of the council. Mayan Myth and History. ibid. 1973, ISBN 3-424-00016-7
• Mayan gods and god animals. Results d. Merida Systems. Francke, Bern / Munich 1963
• Tiger trail. Myth and present in the land of the Maya. Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1964
• Years of friendship. Poems from exile (selection from the complete works). In: Castrum Peregrini CLIII-CLIV, ed. by Karlhans Kluncker, pp. 39–140. Castrum-Peregrini-Presse, Amsterdam 1982, ISBN 90-6034-048-5
• The mat. Autobiographical records. Edited and with an afterword by Manfred Herzer . MännerschwarmSkript-Verlag, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-935596-33-2
  • Review by Herbert Potthoff, Invertito , 6, 2004

literature

• Heiner Widdig among others: Wolfgang Cordan . In: Killy Literature Lexicon. Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin et al., Vol. 2, 2008, p. 481. ISBN 9783110209341
• Karlhans Kluncker, Claus Victor Bock: Wolfgang Cordan 3. VI.1909–29.I.1966 . In: Castrum Peregrini CLIII-CLIV, 1982, pp. 5-37.
• Hartmut Jäckel : Wolfgang Cordan . In: The time . No. 9, February 25, 1966 (obituary)
• Marita Keilson-Lauritz : Wolfgang Cordan and his German-Dutch magazine "Centaur", in Zs. "Exile. Research, findings, results". H. 1, Frankfurt 2012 ISSN  0721-6742 pp. 24-33
• Wolfgang Bittner : B. Traven, Secrets and Riddles , Chap. Accusations . In: Lettre International No. 106/2014, pp. 137f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolfgang Cordan in the catalog of the German National Library

Footnotes

1. ↑ See Heiner Widdig et al.: Wolfgang Cordan ( see literature below) p. 481.
2. ↑ On the journals edited by Cordan and the publication conditions under the German occupation, cf. Kluncker, Bock, Wolfgang Cordan (see literature below) pp. 9–14; P. 17f.
3. ↑ Cf. Heiner Widdig et al.: Wolfgang Cordan ( see below literature) p. 481: “From 1940 onwards, the intensive preoccupation with the work of Stefan Georges, which was stimulated by his acquaintance with Wolfgang Frommel and the Castrum-Peregrini group, influenced his Poetry ".
4. ↑ Kluncker Bock, Wolfgang Cordan (see literature below) p. 24.
5. ↑ Kluncker Bock, Wolfgang Cordan (see literature below) p. 12.
6. ↑ Kluncker, Bock, Wolfgang Cordan (see literature below) p. 26.
7. ↑ Landing on your stomach . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1955, pp. 59-62 ( online ). Spiegel 1955 , accessed May 2, 2011
8. ↑ Roman Fillinger: Duby-Blom, mother of the Lacandons: The changeable life of the photographer Gertrude Duby-Blom ( Memento from February 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). In: Wiener Zeitung . December 19, 2003
9. ↑ Karl Kröhnke: "... Sin echar de menos las reglas de urbanidad." Wolfgang Cordan en México. In: Renata von Hanffstengel & Cecilia Tercero (eds.): México, el Exilio Bien Temperado. UNAM, 1995, ISBN 9683644481 , p. 55
10. ↑ In the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs, the researcher Dr. Wolfgang Cordan has advanced the furthest so far, according to Der Spiegel on February 14, 1966 , accessed on May 2, 2011. Probably Cordan's death was not yet known at that time.
11. ↑ See Dr. Terwal (di Dr. Walter Boesch): Obituary for Wolfgang Cordan. In the circle. A monthly publication 34, 1966, No. 3, p. 15 , for deciphering the pseudonym cf. German authors note 3