You are bidding on one typewritten, signed letter of Germanists, publicists, journalists, writers, essayists, translators, art and literary critics and diplomatsenBruno E. Werner (1896-1964).
DatedMunich, the 16th February 1950.
On A5 stationery from the “Neue Zeitung”, of which he took over as chairman of the features section from Erich Kästner.
The Neue Zeitung (NZ) was a newspaper published in the American zone of occupation after the Second World War. It was comparable to the daily newspaper Die Welt in the British occupation zone and was considered the most important newspaper in post-war Germany. (Source: wikipedia.)
Aimed at the pianist, composer, writer and music critic Erwin Kroll (1886-1976) in Berlin. Kroll worked for the “Neue Zeitung”, among others.
Regardsthe music critic Bauer, to whom Werner cannot offer a presentation, "since, apart from Dr. Hess, we also have Prof. Nick made an agreement."
Signed "[Your] Werner."
Mentioned are the journalist Hans Wallenberg (1907-1977), editor-in-chief of the “Neue Zeitung”, and the Composer, bandmaster and music writer Edmund Nick (1891-1974).
Without envelope.
Condition:Cover browned and slightly wrinkled. bPlease also note the pictures!
Internal note: Kroll 2021-12-8 Autograph Autograph
About Bruno E. Wener, Erwin Kroll and the Neue Zeitung (source: wikipedia):
Bruno Erich Werner (*5. September 1896 in Leipzig; † 21. January 1964 in Davos, Switzerland) was a German German scholar, publicist, journalist, writer, essayist, translator, art and literary critic and diplomat who entered the service of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1952. His life spans from the German Empire through the Weimar Republic and the “Third Reich” to the Adenauer era and his biography reflects the diverse ruptures of this era.
Werner came from a liberal-conservative background and is now largely considered a typical representative of the so-called “Inner emigration”. His initial attitude towards Nazi cultural policy was characterized by internal contradictions and was not always assessed unanimously. Politically rather conservative, he made concessions to the prevailing artistic taste of the National Socialists during the first years of the Nazi dictatorship, which, according to his own statements, he always internally rejected. When evaluating Werner's art policy statements during the Nazi era, however, it should be borne in mind that, according to the Nazi racial ideology, Werner was of “non-Aryan” descent and therefore had to constantly expect persecution from the authorities. The extent to which his statements on contemporary art were influenced by this initial situation still requires further clarification through cultural studies research.
Aesthetically, the versatile Werner was influenced by the Bauhaus movement in art and architecture, which is also reflected in his preference for New Objectivity art. Werner, who was generally open when it came to art, was also interested in other art movements, in particular Expressionism and, more generally, in the avant-garde of classical modernism.
Life
Childhood and youth in the Empire: Bruno Erich Werner came from the privileged class of the upper, Lutheran, educated middle class. His father, who had a doctorate in chemistry, worked as a senior director at a gas works. His mother Jenny, née Salinger came from a Jewish family, which is why Werner was classified as a so-called “Jewish half-breed of the first degree” according to the Nuremberg racial laws, i.e. in National Socialist terms he was considered a “half-Jew”.
Werner first attended elementary school in Nuremberg. He then moved to a high school in Dresden, where he also took his Abitur exam. In 1914 he joined the Dresden Life Regiment as a volunteer, whose company commander was the later writer and Spanish fighter Ludwig Renn.[3] From 1915 to 1918 Werner took part in the First World War and was decorated for his bravery.
Study time, professional and private life during the Weimar Republic: After the end of the war, he successfully studied literature, art history and philosophy, initially in the Bavarian capital Munich, where Werner became a contemporary witness to the Munich Soviet Republic and its violent suppression by Freikorps units. Werner later continued his studies in the imperial capital Berlin. His most important academic teachers were the art historians Heinrich Wölfflin and Fritz Strich.
In 1922 Werner married Katharina Kluge, with whom he remained together until his death. The marriage in 1927 produced the sculptress Imogen Stuart, who had lived in Ireland since 1951, and later another daughter, Sibylle.
Between 1926 and 1938, Werner was a member of the features editorial team of the liberal-conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung ( Daz ) in Berlin and in 1934 rose to head of the features, theater and art sections. As part of these activities, he primarily wrote art and theater reviews and also made a name for himself with travel reports and articles about architecture.
In 1929 Werner received his doctorate with the work The German Transmissions by Paul Verlaine. phil. received his doctorate and initially worked in the art department of the Bibliographic Institute in Leipzig as an art historical consultant. He also edited several volumes of Shakespeare's works in individual editions for the Leipziger Insel Verlag and, in this context, provided revisions of some Shakespeare translations by Dorothea Tieck. He later moved to the Wertheim Group, an up-and-coming department store chain whose Jewish owners were expropriated by the National Socialist state in 1937. Werner headed the antiques department there for some time.
Also in 1929, he began editing the new line, a cultural magazine that was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus in terms of typography and graphics and aimed at an educated readership was praised. Werner managed to win over authors who are still recognized today such as Hermann Hesse, Werner Bergengruen and Kasimir Edschmid for the new line, but also works by authors close to National Socialism such as Will Vesper or active National Socialist cultural functionaries such as Hanns Johst or Hans Friedrich Blunck were published in the Magazine that was directed against the art scene of the Weimar Republic, which was largely dominated by the left. In 1932, Werner demanded in an editorial that “art” must function “as a creative expression of the nation,” which he said even before the so-called The “seizure of power” by the NSDAP was linked to the nationalistic semantics of the right-wing radicals. However, Werner named painters as diverse as the Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, the Verist Otto Dix and the Impressionist Lovis Corinth as praiseworthy role models, who were more or less strongly rejected by the National Socialists or even viewed as “degenerate”.
Professional and private life during the Nazi dictatorship: In October 1933, Werner was one of the 88 writers who signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. In a letter dated 9 In December 1933, Werner confirmed to the Reich Cultural Administrator, State Commissioner Hans Hinkel, that the new line supported “the new Germany” in terms of cultural policy. In 1934 he published a book entitled On the Enduring Face of German Art, which was part of the series Obligation and Awakening edited by Gerhard Bahlsen. Writings on the present appeared and in which Werner also praised a ethnic artist like Emil Nolde. Above all, the work honored works by Ernst Barlach, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, August Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel that were ostracized by the National Socialists.
Due to its classification as a so-called After 1935, Werner was only allowed to publish “Half-Jew” with a special permit, which could be revoked at any time. The extent to which this threatening situation contributed to his officially announced, positive assessment of Nazi cultural policy is controversial. Apparently, Werner's ambivalent cultural-political stance and his participation in the First World War meant that he and his family were able to live and work relatively unmolested by the National Socialists for a long time, despite his partly Jewish origins.
Nevertheless, in the years that followed, he increasingly came into conflict with the authorities and Nazi censorship. In July 1937, Werner delivered a “Munich Special Report” for the Daz , in which he strictly adhered to the requirements set by the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda regarding reporting on the “Great German Art Exhibition 1937” and the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition. held.[9] Nevertheless, Werner had to leave the Daz From then on he concentrated primarily on his work for the new line. The volume The German Sculpture of the Present, completed in 1940 and intended to be published by the Berlin Rembrandt Publishing House, was banned and canceled because, in addition to works officially recognized by the National Socialists, such as the bronze sculpture The Leader by Fritz Klimsch, it also included sculptures by the so-called Adolf von Hildebrand, who was considered a “half-Jew” and again treated and positively evaluated by Ernst Barlach.
When the air raids on Berlin began in 1941, the Werners' two daughters were evacuated first to Bavaria and later to Vienna, where they found shelter with a family friend. In 1943, the two monthly magazines mentioned above, which were characterized by their elaborate presentation, were discontinued in the wake of the war, which made rationing of raw materials necessary. Around the same time, Werner began work on his autobiographical novel The Galley, which lasted until 1947. This work describes the fate of a German intellectual who is married to a German Jew between 1932 and 1945.
In 1944 the family home in Berlin-Schmargendorf was confiscated by the National Socialists. Werner narrowly escaped persecution by the Gestapo and spent some time underground, including in Dießen am Ammersee in Bavaria and in Dresden, where he witnessed the devastating Allied air raids on the Saxon capital in February 1945.[10] When Werner learned in Bavaria towards the end of the war that his daughter Imogen had been drafted to build anti-tank ditches against the Red Army advancing on Vienna, he went to Vienna to bring his firstborn to Bavaria, where father and daughter fought for the liberation together experienced by advancing American troops. Some time later, Werner managed to bring his wife and younger daughter Sibylle to American-occupied Bavaria, where they were protected from attacks by Soviet soldiers.
Professional life in the Federal Republic of Germany: From 1945 to 1946, Werner headed the word department at Radio Hamburg (later NWDR Hamburg). In 1947 he moved back to Munich. There, Werner initially mainly wrote theater reviews. He then took over from Erich Kästner as head of the features section of the Neue Zeitung, a daily newspaper supported by the American military government and published as part of the so-called Re-education was intended to contribute to the re-education and democratization of the German population and was one of the few German newspapers of international importance at that time. His articles showed a move away from pure aestheticism towards greater cultural-political commitment in the sense of a democratization of German post-war society promoted through art.
At the end of his time as features editor of the Neue Zeitung, Werner undertook a three-month trip through the USA to get to know the American cultural scene and the American way of life. The volume Can You Forget Europe? was based on the memories of his stay in the USA. Notes from a trip to America, which was published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in 1952. In the same year, Werner also published a volume on contemporary architecture in Germany with Bruckmann-Verlag.
From 1952 he worked as an embassy councilor and cultural attaché in Washington, DC. During his work, which lasted until 1961, he managed, among other things, to set up a large exhibition of German expressionist art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1957 his second novel was published by S. Fischer, which is entitled The Goddess and takes up Werner's experiences in the area of tension between personal experience, the art trade and political intrigue. Meanwhile, the attempt to create another cultural or Lifestyle magazine, which had the title glossy and was linked to the new line, to help achieve a breakthrough.
In 1962 Werner returned to Germany and settled again in Munich, which would become his last residence. He wrote articles for Die Welt and gave many lectures on art historical topics. In the same year, Werner once again succeeded Erich Kästner, this time as President of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany.
In his final years, Werner suffered from progressive heart disease, which he finally died of on the 22nd. He died in the Swiss climatic health resort of Davos in January 1964 at the age of 67. He found his final resting place in the St. Anne's Cemetery in Berlin-Dahlem. The grave has been preserved.
Impact: His various journalistic and feature-writing works earned Werner a high reputation over the years, which also played a major role in his appointment as cultural attaché to the former war enemy USA in 1952.
Nevertheless, he was not without controversy during his lifetime as a writer, not least because of his ambivalent relationship to the Nazi regime. Herbert Hupka, for example, accused him on Bayerischer Rundfunk of taking a “barstool perspective” in his novel The Galley that was inappropriate to the gravity of the events and of viewing the time of the Nazi dictatorship “as a snobbish dandy.” Thilo Koch from NWDR complained that The Galley was “neither true nor entertaining”.
The successful dramatist Carl Zuckmayer, on the other hand, praised Werner's novel in the Neue Zeitung as a future "bestseller".
In 1953 Werner's work Between the Wars. Occidental Travels (1940) was placed on the list of literature to be discarded in the German Democratic Republic because of tendencies that were considered fascist.
An article by Werner in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on January 20th. July 1937, which not least documents his complicated and multi-layered involvement in Nazi cultural policy, was used in research to reconstruct the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.
factories
About the lasting face of German art. Publishing house Die Runde, Berlin 1934.
Between the wars. Western travels. 1940.
Contemporary German sculpture. Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1940.
The galley. (autobiographical novel) Suhrkamp (formerly S. Fischer), Frankfurt am Main 1949.
Can you forget Europe? German publishing company, Stuttgart 1951.
New building in Germany. Bruckmann, Munich 1952.
The goddess. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1957.
The twenties. From morning to midnight. Bruckmann, Munich 1962.
Rendezvous with the world. Travel photos from four decades. Bruckmann, Munich 1963.
Lunapark and Alexanderplatz. Berlin in poetry and prose. Editor with Ortrud Reichel. Piper, Munich 1964.
Erwin Kroll (*3. February 1886 in Deutsch Eylau, East Prussia; † 7. March 1976 in West Berlin) was a German pianist, composer, writer and music critic. Like his friend Otto Besch, Kroll was an East Prussian composer.
Life:Around 1900 Kroll came to Königsberg i. Pr. and attended the Royal Hufengymnasium with Otto Besch. At the Albertus UniversityHe studied philology and music. With a doctoral thesis on ETA Hoffmann, who has always been revered in Königsberg, he received his Dr. phil. received his doctorate, he went into teaching. In 1919 he turned entirely to music and continued his studies in Munich, which he had begun with Otto Fiebach and Paul Scheinpflug. There he found an important teacher, especially in Hans Pfitzner. He later dedicated a highly acclaimed book to him. In addition to his studies, Kroll was an accompanist at the Munich State Opera and secretary of the Hans Pfitzner Association for German Music, which Thomas Mann had called for to be founded. In 1925 Kroll returned to East Prussia and became music critic for the Hartungsche Zeitung, and from 1930 onwards it was its features editor.Since 1934 he worked in Berlin as a critic and music writer. After the Second World War he headed the music department of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Berlin until 1953. With his book, Kroll has created a monument to the (forgotten) importance of Königsberg as a music city.
factories
East Prussian homeland - orchestral work
Violin Sonata in B major
Sonatina in F major
East Prussian dances
The Adebar - fantasy about East Prussian folk tunes for large orchestra
Vocal works and song arrangements
Songs for solo voices and choir songs
Fonts
Music city Koenigsberg
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1923.
Hans Pfitzner. Three Masks Verlag, Munich 1924 .
The theater. Festschrift for the 25th anniversary of the Dortmund Municipal Theater. The theater, Berlin 1930.
Carl Maria Weber. Athenaion, Potsdam 1934 .
Music city Königsberg. Atlantis, Freiburg i. Br. 1966.
Honors
Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Cross of Merit on ribbon (27. January 1956)
Cultural Prize of the East Prussian State Team (1960)
The New Newspaper (NZ) was a newspaper published in the American occupied zone after the Second World War. It was comparable to the daily newspaper Die Welt in the British occupation zone and was considered the most important newspaper in post-war Germany.
History: The Neue Zeitung was founded on the 17th. First published in Munich in October 1945 and published until October 30th. January 1955, initially twice, later six times a week. The Information Control Division of the American occupation authority acted as publisher. She let German editors and journalists write, but never gave up the rights to the newspaper. This was made clear in the title:
“The new newspaper – an American newspaper for the German population”.
The Neue Zeitung was also intended by its American editors as a means for the political re-education and in particular the denazification of the Germans. It was a high-quality paper, but it could not survive under the conditions of the rapidly growing variety of newspapers again after 1949. The writer and former newspaper employee Walter Kolbenhoff describes the first years in Munich under editor-in-chief Hans Wallenberg in his 1984 memoir Schellingstrasse 48. At that time, the Neue Zeitung had a circulation of 2.5 million and around 600 letters to the editor per day demonstrated the great interest with which the paper was read. With the onset of the Cold War, Kolbenhoff writes, the “cosmopolitan, tolerant paper” no longer fit the new politics, which led to the resignation of Hans Wallenberg and, some time later, seven other editors.
Since the beginning of 1947 there was a separate edition of the NZ in the American sector of Berlin. This Berlin edition seemed to make sense because the Allied Control Council had great influence in the former capital and the interests of the Soviet Union and the USA already differed greatly (keyword: “front city Berlin”). The aim was to prevent the Sovietization of the Germans. That's why the NZ also worked independently in Berlin with its own editor-in-chief named Fodor. The feature section worked under the direction of Friedrich Luft, long known for his theater reviews in the RIAS. Hans Schwab-Felisch (after 1955 at the FAZ, later editor of Merkur) also worked in the features section. Freelancers for culture included Will Grohmann (fine arts) and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (music).
From June 1949 there was also an edition in Frankfurt am Main. In 1951 the Munich and Frankfurt editions were merged in Frankfurt. From September 1953 onwards, Die Neue Zeitung was only published in Berlin. In March 1955 it was completely discontinued.
Authors: The following authors, among others, wrote in the Neue Zeitung:
The writer Erich Kästner was the senior editor of the features section, the journalist and later television presenter Robert Lembke headed the domestic policy department.
Other important authors were:
Theodor W. Adorno
Ilse Aichinger
Alfred Andersch
Heinrich Boell
Bertolt Brecht
Alfred Doblin
Günter Eich
Ludwig Erhard
Max Frisch
Will Grohmann
Romano Guardini
Hildegard Hamm-Brücher
Hans Habe
Hermann Hesse
Stefan Heym
Wolfgang Hildesheimer
Karl Jaspers
Alfred Kerr
Hermann Kesten
Walter Kolbenhoff
Elisabeth Langgässer
Eugene Kogon
Heinrich Mann
Thomas Mann
Siegfried Maruhn
Alexander Mitscherlich
Martin Niemöller
Heinz Ohff
Sigismund von Radecki
Marianne Regensburger
Luise Rinser
Oda Schaefer
Franz Joseph Schneider
Wolf Schneider
Kurt Schumacher
Anna Seghers
Wolf Jobst Settlers
Hans Wallenberg
Günther Weisenborn
Franz Werfel
Ernst Wiechert
Carl Zuckmayer
Paul Flora worked as a cartoonist.