Fractured Biographies
Edited by Ian Wallace
Amsterdam, New York, NY 2003. VIII, 249 pp.
(German Monitor 57)
ISBN: 90-420-0966-7 Bound euro60,-/US$ 67.-
ISBN: 90-420-0956-X Paper euro 30,-/US$ 33.-
A physical chemist (Fritz Haber), a photographer (Josef
Breitenbach), a cabaret artist (Georg Kreisler), two writers (Otto
Alscher and Albin Stuebs), a pioneering scholar in Irish-German
studies (John Hennig) and a Celtic philologist (Julius Pokorny) are
the focus of this volume. What they have in common is a biography
fractured by the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Six were forced into
exile; the life of the seventh, the Romanian-German writer Otto
Alscher, shows that even the biography of a Nazi sympathiser could
be dislocated by the years of dictatorship. As the previously
unpublished letters which are reproduced here show, Fritz Haber, a
Nobel prize winner, spent ‘his last lonely months’ seeking a dignified
way to leave the country to which he had once felt the deepest
attachment. Although a prominent member of Germany’s academic
élite, Julius Pokorny had to retire because of his Jewish ancestry in
December 1935 and yet was allowed to continue publishing on
ethnic themes until his exile in 1943. Albin Stuebs was forced to
seek refuge in Prague and later England when his left-wing political
convictions made him a certain target for the Nazis. Because of his
marriage into a liberal Jewish family, John Hennig had to renounce
all hope of an academic career in Nazi Germany and, after his exile
to Ireland, struggled in straitened circumstances to support his
family while at the same time developing into an unusually prolific
scholar. Proof that exile may stimulate creative energy is provided by
Josef Breitenbach, whose remarkable biography appears to show that
loss and uprootedness may release otherwise undeveloped creative
potential. Similarly, the flight of Georg Kreisler from Vienna in
1938 was the start of ‘a remarkable voyage of discovery’ which saw
him grow into a major, if consistently undervalued figure in the world
of post-war German cabaret.
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