Wolfgang Hellmert

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Wolfgang Hellmert (actually Adolf Kohn ; born August 15, 1906 in Berlin ; died May 24, 1934 in Paris ) was a German poet and prose writer .

Life

Hellmert was the son of a Jewish merchant. He left high school early, then worked as a bank apprentice and film statistic, and finally became a drama student. From 1926/1927 he belonged to Klaus Mann's circle of friends , together with Herbert Schlüter , Willi Fehse , Annemarie Schwarzenbach and René König . From 1928 he was one of the authors of the Hamburg radio station NORAG . At the end of March 1933 he had to emigrate from Germany and went to Paris.

There he died in 1934 by suicide with a morphine overdose at the age of 27. Hellmert's relationship with Mann was very close, but was temporarily strained in exile in Paris by a relationship between Hellmert and Teddy (= Théo de Villeneuve), another friend of Mann. Nevertheless, Klaus Mann took Hellmert's drug death with him. The day before his death, he noted: “About Wolfgang's poor health. It seems mortal. Lost and lost. "And a few days later in Amsterdam :" WOLFGANG'S DEATH is in a way more difficult to bear than anything else. "Hellmert's death seems to have marked a turning point for Klaus Mann; his sister Erika Mann writes:" [As] Wolfgang Hellmert deliberately and fatally destroyed himself while emigrating to Paris [Klaus] did not want to go on living. ”In the character of Martin Korella in the novel Der Vulkan , which can be traced back to Hellmert as well as to Mann himself, Mann sat on the dead Friend a literary monument.

During Hellmert's lifetime, only the novel Fall Vehme Holzdorf (1927) appeared and scattered prose sketches and poems, some of which were printed in the exile magazine Die Sammlung, published by Klaus Mann . In his novel, which can be attributed to the New Objectivity in terms of style , he deals with the fictitious femicide of a 17-year-old boy on a political informant friend. Due to the politically explosive subject, the novel gained some publicity. Even Thomas Mann praised him in 1938 in a survey.

Works

  • Case Vehme Holzdorf. Leipzig 1927.
  • Poetry and prose 1924–34. With an afterword by Klaus Täubert. Gerbrunn near Würzburg 1980.

literature

  • Richard Drews, Alfred Kantorowicz (ed.): Verboten and burned, German literature suppressed for 12 years. 1947, p. 62 .
  • Wilhelm Haefs: Hellmert, Wolfgang. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann (Ed.): Killy Literature Lexicon . Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. 2., completely revised Ed. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009, vol. 5, p. 247 f.
  • Klaus Mann: Diaries. Edited by Joachim Heimannsberg. 6 vols. Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1995.
  • Klaus Täubert: An eager adept. The short life of Wolfgang Hellmert (1906–1934). In: Exil 21 (2001), H. 1, pp. 14-23.
  • Rong Yang: I just can't take life anymore. Studies on the diaries of Klaus Mann (1931-1949). Tectum, 1996, ISBN 389608934X , p. 84 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Diaries Klaus Mann, Vol. 1, p. 144 (June 8, 1933).
  2. ^ Diaries Klaus Mann, Vol. 2, p. 35 (May 23, 1934).
  3. ^ Diaries Klaus Mann, Vol. 2, p. 36 (May 28, 1934).
  4. ↑ Erika Mann: Letters and Answers. 1951-1969. Vol. 2. Munich 1988, p. 138. Quoted from: Rong Yang: I just can't stand life anymore. 1996, p. 85.
  5. ↑ Rong Yang: I just can't stand life anymore. 1996, p. 85.
personal data
SURNAME Hellmert, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kohn, Adolf (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 1934
Place of death Paris