Hermann Ungar: a Life and Works

Hermann Ungar a Life and Works

By Dieter Südhoff

Translation Copyright 2011 Angela Ladd

Published by Vicky Unwin at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and translator, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage others to download their own copy at Smashwords.com. Thank you for your support.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

1 The gradual recollection of a forgotten reception after 1945

2 Stages: Life – Work - Influence

I Background, Family, Childhood: Boskowitz (1898 – 1903)

II Grammar School in Brno (1903 –1911)

III University Studies Berlin-Munich-Prague: (1911-1914)

IV WAR (1914 – 1918)

V Transitional Times – Prague – Eger – Prague (1918 – 1920)

Excursus 1 Boys and Murderers - Reception

VI Diplomat and Author, Berlin (1921 – 1928)

Excursus 2: The Maimed - Reception

Diplomat and Author - continued (1924 -1927)

Excursus 3: The Class – Reception

Diplomat and Author – continued (1927-1928)

VII The End: Prague (1928 – 1929)

Excursus 4: The Red General – Reception

The End – Continued (1928-1929)

VIII The Final Act – Posthumous Reception until 1945

1 Obituaries

2 The Arbour

3 Colbert’s Journey

4 Forgotten

Foreword

In May 2009 my father called me into his study. He was dying from Parkinson’s Disease and felt it was time to reveal some family secrets. He showed me a suitcase which, he said, contained books and files relating to my grandfather, Hermann Ungar, the little-known Czech writer.

When I returned home from that visit to my father I decided to try and find out as much as possible about my father’s history. The family mythology was simple: my father had come to England in 1938, sent by his mother from Prague to join his older half-brother John Weiss/West, who had fled Prague with Rudi, her first husband. She and her younger son, Alex (Sasha) had joined them in 1939; they lived in Fairfax Road, then moved to Wells in Somerset as part of the evacuation. The young Tomy found work in a factory in Wells, his mother cooked for the night shift and Sasha managed to get a scholarship to Bembridge in the Isle of Wight.

There had never been any mention of any Jewish link to their flight from Europe just before the war; in fact it was vehemently denied: the family were intellectuals who had fled on principle and out of fear of persecution under the suppression of freedom of speech that accompanied the rise of Hitler. My grandfather Hermann Ungar had been a well-known and controversial Czech writer, who died of peritonitis as a result of his hypochondria, at the age of 36 in 1929. But strangely his life and work were uncelebrated in our family, so that when I, as a young publisher and German-speaker, grew curious about him and started asking questions, this drew blanks.

Staring at the famous photograph of my grandfather in my father’s study, it dawned on me how Jewish-looking he was and, spurred on by the surprise arrival on my doorstep in Belsize Park in the 1990s - ironically just around the corner from Fairfax road - of his cousin Helen Stransky on her way to a Kindertransport reunion, I felt I had to confront him with the truth.

With my father’s deterioration from Parkinson’s it became critical to find out as much as possible about this past before he died. I had taken the family to Prague for his 79th birthday; we had walked the streets, my father full of schoolboy memories - ‘Look this is the statue [on Charles Bridge of three snooty looking men looking as if they are experiencing a bad smell] we called it somebody’s farted’ and so on - and even found the apartment he grew up in after his father’s death, still occupied by the collaborators who had taken it over from them; we found his maternal grandfather’s factory where they made buttons and zips: according to his cousin Helen [Stransky] their grand-parents were one of the richest families in Prague. We visited the Jewish quarter but he never told us that his father was buried in the Malvazinka. What a missed opportunity!

In the meantime I had been googling grandfather Ungar and had tracked down three of his books in translation into English – two novels, The Class and The Maimed and a collection of short stories, Boys and Murderers. I had also been using a fantastic resource called JewishGen, which helps researchers with family trees, traces holocaust victims and survivors and puts people in touch with each other globally. I began to build a family tree of Ungars, Stranskys and Kohns and discover relations I did not know existed.

I went down to Somerset to open the suitcase and to record my father’s memories of his early childhood, his time in England, and his wartime experiences in the Navy.

The suitcase revealed some wonderful secrets – a 700 page PhD thesis by German scholar Dieter Sudhoff on my grandfather, with over 200 pages of Leben, with intricate details of his family in Boskovice, Moravia, traced through the earliest recorded Ungar in the early 1800s; his marriage to Margarete Stransky and information about her side of the family, as well as diaries, letters and notebooks not only written by Ungar but also by his close friends and fellow literary circle members, for instance Thomas Mann, Camill Hoffman (who had been his best man) Max Brod and so on. And another two volumes of literary criticism by a Czech Professor from Boskovice, Jaroslav Bransky, as well as yet another tome by Jurgen Serke on the vanished Jewish towns of Bohemia and their heroes. All of these volumes contained interviews with my father and photographs supplied by him; yet he had never said a word. Sadly as my German is no way near good enough to understand what are very complex grammatical records, the first thing to do was to try and find a translator to unlock the missing world of the genius that was Hermann Ungar, forgotten almost entirely since his death, apart from a few German and French translations, but unnoticed in the great literary cannon of the interwar years. Unnoticed largely due to his untimely death, his proscription by the Nazis, but most of all because, apart from Dieter Sudhoff, who also died young, he had no champion. Kafka had Max Brod, who admired Ungar hugely while he lived, but turned against him after his death.

I decided then and there to make it my mission to recover and record my grandfather’s reputation, to trace the lost relatives even if only to re-confirm that most had died in Auschwitz, but above all to celebrate one of the great lost talents of the 20th century.

Sadly my father died on 29 May 2012, before the work was complete. With him dies the last living memory of Hermann Ungar.

This publication is the first step on the journey to bring Ungar back to life. The second stage is the website http://www.hermannungar.com, which contains photographs, the notes to this work (in German I am afraid), and more recent posthumous reviews.

The aim is to encourage others to read his work, to revel in his modernity of style and content and to celebrate his great talent. And also to pay tribute to some of the other great artists, as well as my family, lost to the Holocaust.

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Angela Ladd who laboured through the rather dense prose of the PhD thesis; to the estate of Dieter Sudhoff for supplying the raw material; to Professor Jaroslav Bránský; to my late daughter Louise, to whom this work is dedicated – she was thrilled about her ‘secret history’; to Bonnie Fogel and to my husband Ross, who provided encouragement and support in keeping me going through the tough times.

Vicky Unwin, September 2012

Preface

I thus found myself, having mapped out and commenced the draft for my work in my youthful blind enthusiasm, in the part enviable, part disastrous position of a pioneer.

Arno Schmidt, Fouqué and some of his contemporaries, Darmstadt 1960

By undertaking a full-scale monograph on the life, work and influence of a virtually unknown, to all outward appearances remote and dispassionate writer, one exposes oneself to considerable challenges and reservations – the challenges in tracking the author after centuries of obscurity, the reservations as shown by the public, who initially doubt whether it is all really worth the effort. Hermann Ungar is truly deserving of attention and effort and I hope my work will prove this. Ongoing efforts will underline this. My most pressing duty at present is to clear the path forwards, by providing an all-compassing image of the preserved material, by researching as far as possible any mislaid or endangered items and, finally, by analysing Ungar’s major literary works. Without, however, wide-spread help from numerous people and institutions I would never have been able to complete this voluntary task satisfactorily. As a sign of my gratitude and in thanks, I list them in the following as a reminder to me and to everyone.

Dr. Manon Andreas-Grisebach, Aarbergen-Kettenbach; Jean-Paul Archie, Toulouse; Mirjam Becher, Kfar Schmarjahu; Joachim Bechtle-Bechtinger, Berlin; Prof. Dr. Hartmut Binder, Ditzingen; Prof. Dr. Jürgen Born, Wuppertal; PhDr. Jaroslav Bransky, Boskovice; Dr. Hugo Brauner, Haifa; Elias Canetti, Zürich; Elisheva Kohen, Jerusalem; Dr. Jean-Pierre Danäs, Les Essarts le Roi; Dr. Peter Engel, Hamburg; Dr. Herta Haas, Hamburg; Jarmila Haasovä-Necasovä, Prague; Hansotto Hatzig, Oftersheim; Ilse Ester Hoffe, Tel Aviv; Prof. Dr. Wilma Iggers, Buffalo/N.Y.; Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kasack, Much; Michael Kehlmann, Vienna; Dr. Edith Krojanker, Jerusalem; Shulamith Irene Krojanker, Givatajim; Dr. Manfred Linke, Berlin; Cordula Marx, Hanover; Harry Matter, Berlin; Erik Mossel, Amsterdam; Anita Naef, Munich; Hedwig Neumann, Tel Aviv; Friedl Niedermoser, Vienna; Dr. Eva Patkovä, Prague; Prof. Dr. Margarita Pazi, Tel Aviv; PhDr. Josef Poläcek, Prague; Prof. Dr. Ulrich Profitlich, Berlin; Peter Richter, Dresden; Gisela Riff-Eimermacher, Bochum; Prof. Dr. Karl Riha, Siegen; Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Claus Roxin, Stockdorf; Chaim Sharon, Gan-Shmuel; Dr. Nanette Souche, Marly; DrHelmut Schmiedt, Cologne; Dr. Peter-Paul Schneider, Marbach a.N.; Brigitte Schwaiger, Vienna; Prof. Dr. Hans-Hugo Steinhoff, Paderborn-Wewer; Hans-Dieter Steinmetz, Dresden; Jana Stepanek, Würzburg; Prof. Dr. Eduard Studer, Fribourg; Dr Reinhard Tgahrt, Marbach a.N.; Tom Unwin, Milverton; Dr. Hartmut Vollmer, Paderborn; Alena Wagnerovä, Saarbrücken; Dr. Fritz Wahrenburg, Paderborn-Schloß Neuhaus; Franz-Josef Weber, Siegen; Joern H. Werner, Cheyenne/Wyo.; Ernest Wichnar, Berlin; Marianne Winder, London; Dr. Edith Yapou, Jerusalem; Dr. AleS Zach, Prague.

Academy of Arts, Berlin; Academy of Arts of the GDR, Berlin; Academy of Sciences of the GDR, Berlin; America Memorial Library, Berlin; Berliner Ensemble, Berlin; Felix Bloch Hieritage, Berlin; German State Library, Berlin; Freee University, Berlin; Humboldt University, Berlin; State Archives, Berlin; Paulinenkrankenhaus, Berlin; Senator for Cultural Matters, Berlin; Sender Freies Berlin; State Theatre Stage,. Berlin; Prussian State Library of Cukture, Berlin; Ullstein Photo Services, Berlin; Foreign Office, Bonn; Embassy of the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic, Bonn; Archiv mesta Brna, Brno; City Library, Dortmund; German Library, Frankfurt a.M.; City and University Library, Frankfurt a.M.; University, Hamburg; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem; Germania Judaica, Cologne; German Library, Leipzig; Linz Cellar Theatre, Linz; Germany Literary Archives, Narbach a.N.; National Literary Agency, Milan; Bavarian State Library, Munich; Collegium Carolinum, Munich; Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich; States Archive, Munich; Yale University Library, New Haven/Conn.; Leo Baeck Institute, Paderborn, Arches of the Media Centre, Paderborn; University Library, Paderborn; Archives of Karlovy University, Prague; Archivni spräva, Prague; Embassy of the Republic of Germany, Prague; Pamätnik närodniho pisemnictvi, Prague; Rada zidovskych nabozenskych obci v CSR, Prague; Statni knihovna ÖSR, Prague; Vojensky historicky ustav, Praha; Statni knihovna CSR, Praha; Statni Sidovske muzeum v Praze, Prague; Statni ustredni archive v Praze, Praha; Stadni zidovske museum v Praze, Praha; Princeton University Library, Princeton/N.J. /Saarland Radio, Saarbrücken; Institute for Foreign Relations, Stuttgart , Austrian National Library, Vienna; Austrian State Archives, Vienna; Theatre in Josefstadt, Vienna; University Library, Vienna; Viennese City and State Archives, Vienna; Eidg. Technical College, Zürich; City Archives, Zurich.

I owe a particular debt of thanks to my dissertation tutor, Professor Dr. Hartmut Steinecke of Paderborn-Wewer, who offered support, unabating interest, encouragement and stimulation right from the start, as well as to Professor Dr. Manfred Durzak, Grebin, who was the co-referent during the end phase. My gratitude also goes to the Minister for Science and Research in North Rhine Westfalia and to the Chancellor of the University and Colleges Paderbon for granting a stipendium under the graduate support laws.

Last but by no means least, I thank my wife, Ursula, whose patience and forbearance allowed me to devote myself entirely to this work and who was also responsible for proof-reading. To my chilidren, Fabian, Elisabeth und Johanna, I owe many irretrievable hours.

The monographic text was complete in May 1988; lacking only a few bibliographic details.

I dedicate this work to my parents.

Paderborn-Elsen, October 1988

1 The gradual recollection of a forgotten reception after 1945

For a while I received frequent enquiries about Hermann Ungar, all in search of dissertation material. My response to these requests was that I could not remember Ungar at all. His activities, relating to the Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily News), made such an insignificant impression on me that I had no recollections at all. ¹

Max Brod’s surprising memory lapse became even more contentious with successive quotations in his memoires about the Prague Circle (1966). (He described Ungar’s first work Boys and Murderers as ‘bearing the mark of non-entity, with clumsy and ordinary illustrations of inferiority complexes, etc.’) ² Presented with little credibility, but highly orchestrated and laden with personal animosity and antipathy with resulting intentional repression, this forms a core example of the lack of justice and knowledge, with which the works of Hermann Ungar, a Moravian Jew who wrote in German, were greeted right up to the present day. There are a few significant exceptions to this, which will be discussed in detail later. Willy Haas, the other highly-acclaimed source of information on Prague literature in the German language dispensed a moral verbal flaying, possibly because Haas never forgave Ungar for calling him a ‘repulsive literate ’ in his diary.³

These two facts are the main causes for the continued ignorance about Ungar amongst the wider public and for the hitherto grotesque misjudgements within the circles of literary science, which surround Franz Kafka and the Prague Circle. In the hugely abundant literature about Kafka, Ungar is encountered mainly in marginal roles, within the works on Prague Literature he all too often only appears on lists, occasionally even totally ignored. In most of the new literary volumes one can search in vain for a mention of Ungar and the same is valid for treatises concerning the literary trends in the period between the wars or relating to the role played by Jews in German literature. The silent or disparaging treatment from contemporaries and – at times – peers Brod and Haas, whose secret influence on the post-war reception of German-language Prague literature may not be overestimated, determined the position early on and rendered the rediscovery of Hermann Ungar very difficult. Whilst Kafka and also to a certain degree Werfel were more or less rightfully elevated to singularly phenomenal positions, other authors such as Ungar, Ludwig Winder or Paul Kornfeld faded into oblivion, overshadowed by the posthumous fame of a few supposed illustrious experts. In addition, Ungar’s works, written mainly in the 1920s, appeared in a period in which only gradual recognition of groups, rather than just single authors such as Brecht or Döblin, was recorded.

The waves of acceptance greeting the Expressionists and ‘Exile’ literature led to a relegation of Ungar’s work. Despite such seemingly external reasons for the continuing obscurity of Ungar and other similar writers, glib, smug journalistic literature critics find it hard to get to grips with writing which fails to conform to contemporary tone and the fashion of the day. ⁴ This, however, should not hide the fact that the real causes lie much deeper with a repeat of the miserable reception of his Ungar’s work during his lifetime. His novels The Maimed (1922) and The Class (1927) achieved no greater recognition from the contemporary public than during the republishing in 1973 and 1981, although they were actually highly praised by respected fellow-authors and critics. The thematic radicalism of the prose, the depressing feeling of gloom, the intolerant pursuit of extreme suffering – such characteristics can hardly expect wider appeal. It is to be hoped that Hermann Ungar will finally and conclusively rise out of obscurity. The signs are there, they multiply with each attempt to trace the reaction to his work since 1945. We wish to make our contribution. For the general public, however, Rudolf Kayser’s wording of the poet’s obituary in 1929 will remain valid:

Ungar won over very few readers. He made no concessions concerning the modern use of clichés. He created figures from his innermost secret depths, gruesome and turgid. This was unwanted and no-one forgave him. He was a writer. ⁵

* * *

Without recognition from the public during his lifetime – with the relative exception of two plays, both scandalous in other ways, The Red General (1928) and The Arbour (1929), Ungar’s narrow works fell into obscurity after his death (1929) in the confusion of national socialism and the world war, remaining solely in the memories of a few writers and readers, friends, acquaintances and enemies.

In 1948 when Ernst Wodak wrote his melancholy obituary to Prague of Yesterday and the Day Before, in his new homeland Israel, he included Ungar - besides Kafka, Werfel, Brod, Katz, Kisch, Salus, Baum, Perutz and Weiß – in the circle of ‘famous, yes, even world famous German-Jewish writers, who lived in Prague’, and in a short silhouette pointed out the ‘unique atmosphere’, a ‘symphony of three old cultures – German, Czech and Jewish’, this ‘singular blend’, which all gave rise to ‘important, even exceptional, literary achievements’. ⁶ And he recalled time spent at the ‘famous Cafe Continental with its special table reserved for regulars’, ‘around which the Prague Literary collected’:

A few of these writers decamped to foreign parts, many, such as Werferl, Katz, Ungar, Weiss, etc to Berlin, some died and so the group around the celebrated table gradually dispersed. ⁷

Similar anecdotally-tinged memories, most only of biographical interest, are to be found in later writings, describing the former Prague or Berlin times, such as in a paper given in November 1965 by Hans Demetz, previously the Literary Artistic Director at the New German Theatre in Prague, founder of the intimate drama chamber and only fleetingly acquainted with Ungar. This treatise, presented at the Global Friends’ Conference at Liblice Castle, focussed on ‘personal relationships and reminiscences of the German Writers Circle in Prague’.

An interesting case is that of Hermann Ungar, born in Boskowitz in Moravia, whom I used to meet almost daily in the cafe of the Blue Star Hotel in Prague, a meeting place which has long since disappeared from the scene. We held lengthy literary conversations in the cafe, during which he never once disclosed that he himself was a writer. Only after his death in 1929 in Prague did I come across some of his work. His debut piece was a volume entitled Boys and Murderers on the subject of sexual awakenings in the young. Even today a sense of horror overcomes me when I think about his Prague novel, The Maimed, with its unrelenting, unsavoury, terrible and frightening portrayal of repulsive activities against a perverse-erotic background. ⁹

These comments from Hans Demetz - who, in his position as Director of the Brünner German Theatre wanted to produce Ungar’s The Arbour during the 1930/31 season ¹⁰ – are symptomatic. Although in Liblice the Czech scholars of German literature and their guests were striving to present an all-encompassing overview of the most important Prague authors of German literature besides Kafka, Demetz’s comments remained the sole reference to Ungar ¹¹ (which was almost certainly not only due to the dominance of Czech speakers, whose interest naturally centred mainly on socialist writers and German-Czech mediators such as Rudolf Fuchs, Egon Erwin Kisch or F.C. Weiskopf). In addition, Demetz’s contribution served to illustrate the levels of incomprehension and misunderstanding, almost fatuity, with which Ungar’s works were greeted. Catchwords such as ‘unsavoury’, ‘repulsive activities’ and ‘perverse-erotic environment’ are nothing more than signals of fearful helplessness in the face of a piece of work which plumbs the depth of extreme situations encountered by humanity whilst unrelentingly breaking all taboos and rejecting puerile classic traditions.

* * *

A similar approach was taken by Ernst Josef Aufricht who, as Director of the Berlin Schiffbauerdamm Theatre, put on the premiere performance of Ungar’s The Arbour on 12 December 1929. However in later decades he denounced this play as being ‘a blend of literature and obscenity.’ ¹² The box office success achieved by this ‘blend’ at the Viennese Renaissance Theatre with a production directed by Josef Jarno which premiered on 11 June 1930 some months after the Berlin initial performance, might well have been uppermost in the minds of the literary and dramatic management of the Viennese Little Theatre when they surprisingly included The Arbour in the season’s programme at the beginning of March 1954, thereby – and certainly not within the interests of literary innovation – making Ungar’s work accessible to the general public again

The Arbour: Comedy in three acts by Hermann Ungar

Little Theatre in the Concert Hall, Vienna. Season 1953/5

Director: Trude Pöschl

Producer: Harry Fuß

Stage Manager: Robert Hofer-Ach

Colbert: Karl Schellenberg

Melanie: Augusta Ripper

Amalie: Luzi Neudecker

Modlizki: Bruno Dallansky

Kudernak: Fritz Widhalm-Windegg

Ferdinand: Wolf Neuber

Josefine: Friedl Hofmann

What might have been the start of an early rediscovery apparently turned into a farce. The actor Harry Fuß, who was celebrating his new role as a producer, attempted to recapture the scandalous successes of 1929 and 1930 by placing singular emphasis on the ‘sensuousness of spring awakenings’, and seldom added the warning of a ‘flash of approaching storms’ for a ‘world unwittingly standing on the brink of catastrophe’. ¹³ He thus reduced Ungar’s angry attacks on the petite bourgeoisie and the human falsehoods in life, the ‘traditional and grotesque society comedies, bloody and soaked in biting irony’,¹⁴ down to the level of a voyeuristic chamber play with advertising placards bearing the enticing wording ‘Only for Adults’. A ‘box office hit – nothing more’, repeated the Viennese ‘Union’.¹⁵

Critics were, in the main, united in their antipathy. The communist österreichische Volksstimme (Austrian Voice of the People) wrote:

Harry Fuß as producer applied the make-up of eroticism so thickly, that it turned into a risible caricature.

And:

The scenes are studded with caricatures, with exaggerated jokes about eroticism, which, as sense and objective were missing, led only to feelings of emptiness. ¹⁶

The Weltpresse (World Press), which prior to the premiere wrote of a ‘frivolous storyline’¹⁷ summarised:

This play is not suitable for mature country ladies, who would justifiably consider it indecent. Despite this, the ladies would enjoy it as much as the audience enjoyed the premiere.¹⁸

The critic for the Abend (Evening) rose to the assumption that ‘the storyline with its alleged ‘‘deeper meaning’’ was only an excuse to use words, which otherwise would be deemed unacceptable for use on the stage.’ ¹⁹

Perhaps a little helplessly, without any knowledge of the production in 1930, Ungar, the ‘Austrian dramatist, whose true, great talent was not damaged in any way by the lack of recognition here,’ was compared to Ödön von Horväth, a comparison drawn to Tales from the Vienna Woods:

If the grotesque in Horvath’s work sometimes became a Dance of Death, the dance in and around the Colbert family in The Arbour actually was more of a ring dance in the Schnitzler meaning... ²⁰

Others bore witness to a ‘coarse version of Sternheim, drastically entwined in sex… with a real void becoming visible behind the comic frontage’ and accused the author of failing to see ‘what was missing from the society he conjured up, i.e, the inner ties which for thousands of years had been provided by religion’.²¹

One critic stooped low enough to use play on words, a double meaning in which the comedy was described as being ‘the most ‘non-Ungar’ to ‘half-baked’ (gar being ‘cooked’) at the point in the final scene where all the events came ‘thick and fast’. This same critic also wrote that ‘the spiced-up humour of the author in a drastic albeit entertaining way burnt and eroded peepholes in the facade of narrow-minded indifference instead of tearing it down which was the intention both today and 25 years ago when the play was written.’ ²²

The name of Hermann Ungar meant nothing to the people and, no matter how great the artistic performances were, this monotonous production will do nothing to increase his fame. And so the literary journalists once again wallowed in superficiality or in feigned indignation. The first chance was wasted, the dynamics were lost, more so as the comedy was mistakenly understood by the Viennese to be a Moravian ethnic farce.

Some 23 years later The Arbour was once again performed on stage in an open-air theatre in Berlin. Ungar’s works, however, appeared on the theatre boards some years before this. In 1966 the Prague actor and former friend of Ungar, Ernst Deutsch, read from the ‘once very daring satire entitled Tulip’ ²³ as part of his programme in Berlin and Duesseldorf called My Prague Friends which included text from Anton Kuh, Willy Haas, Max Brod, Jaroslav Hasek, Egon Erwin Kisch or Kafka.

* * *

The real post-war awareness of Ungar began in 1963 when Heinz Schöffler in his afterword to the anthology Ego and Eros ranked the Moravian equal to Alfred Lemm, Robert Müller and Bohuslav Kokoschka as one of the ‘most forgotten of the forgotten’ and stated his fear that the inclusion in this collection of expressionism Master Tales could be condemned as a ‘whim of the publisher’, ²⁴ Karl Otten: a not unrealistic fear. The ‘expert’ Richard Brinkmann declared himself ‘not really familiar’ with their names in 1980 and he contemplated their obscurity:

Whether it was really only a coincidence and whether it would have been regarded as a catastrophe if no-one had ever read their stories again? With all due respect? And all duties to historic preservation? One dares to cast doubt.²⁵

After worthy and innovative collections such as Premonitions and Awakening, Scream and Confession, The Empty House or Expressionism Grotesque, Karl Otten’s last anthology of forgotten Expressionistic or Jewish literature Ego and Eros was finally put together and completed but without the publisher’s comments. After decades of silence, Ungar’s prose finally made a re-appearance in the form of the novel Colbert’s Journey written in 1922 (the source text of The Arbour) as well as in the surrealistic sketch entitled The Explanation written in 1929. ²⁶ The classification of these as expressionist prose seems somewhat arbitrary but based perhaps on thematic grounds, the definition as expressionist ‘masterly tale’ certainly appears inappropriate - Schöffler describes the relative terms of defining and classifying, speaks of the contradiction between ‘masterly’ and the ‘evolving, explosive, eruptive’ of expressionist programmatic, ²⁷ and classifies Ungar, in whom he also discovers ‘threads of Storm and Stress’, somewhere between neo-romantic/symbolism and expressionism. Despite such misnomers, the two texts from Ungar were successfully slotted into the content, which included prose from other Prague literary figures: (Oskar Baum: The Beloved; Franz Kafka: In the Penal Colony; Paul Adler: Elohim; Ernst Weiß: Nahar) - complying thoroughly with Otten’s real categories as per the title.

The publisher did not consider ‘masterly tales’ when he put together this collection, even though plenty of prose literature penned by masters is evident in the collection. It was meant to become a ‘brilliant book’, ‘up to the elbows in blood and up to the thighs in women’, a new orientation of our youth revolution’ (as Otten wrote to Edschmid), ‘in which the introspective-revolutionary thinking and the extrovert erotic principals are given equal weighting in world order under Freud’s influence’, or, as Otten wrote to Pinthus ‘egocentricity and erotic altruism’. ²⁹

Ego and Eros, the influence of psychoanalysis and a thematic extremism are truly ingredients not only of Colbert’s Journey and The Explanation, but also of the majority of Ungar’s other works (perhaps most obvious in The Maimed). But by the inclusion in his anthology, Otten (who made the acquaintance of Ungar during the mid-20s in Berlin³⁰) had drawn up the first guidelines of literary-scientific awareness. In his afterword Schöffler focussed solely on Colbert’s Journey and underlined, as had Thomas Mann in 1930 as a foreword to his posthumous volume of the same name – and which Ellen Otten picked up in her ‘bio-bibliographic notes’,³¹ particularly the figure of the social revolutionary Modlizki with his sarcastic social criticisms.

Sarcasm, this underhand guileless tone, in which social criticism is presented, has created the unforgettable figure of the servant Modlizki - a creation which should find its place in the awareness of modern prose literature. ³²

* * *

An anthology of an altogether different type was undertaken in 1965 by the Austrian theatre and art critic Ruediger Engerth. Entitled In the Shadow of Hradschin. Kafka and his Circle, he put together a collection of lyrics and prose (in part as excerpts) from those authors he regarded as having a biographic connection to the ‘central figure’ of Kafka:

All writers here met him or, through their connection with one or another of his closer friends, impacted to a greater or lesser degree on his life. ³³

In chronological order according to year of birth, the chain of writers from the Prague Cafe Arco Generation ³⁴ extends from Victor Hadwiger and Camill Hoffmann (both 1878) to Karl Brand (1895) and Johannes Urzidil (1896), each being introduced with a short biographical sketch. The famous names were not only of prime importance to Engerth (Brod and Werfel are also included), the rehabilitation of the forgotten writers was the uppermost objective:

Names such as Viktor Hadwiger, Paul Adler and Hermann Ungar have gradually sunk into oblivion today. The whole objective of the selection is to lift these interesting authors from unfair obscurity, to place them into an ethnic-related grouping, which many of them actually attempted to escape. ³⁵

The cause for ‘their not always being accorded a fitting position in German literary history’ is perceived by Engerth to be found in their impact ‘within the various centres of German cultural areas’, where they were often ‘regarded as particles and foreign bodies blown in by the wind’ ³⁶ - a thought, which is not globally correct (many authors fled for precisely this reason into a metropolis such as Berlin or Vienna – with a more dense cultural scene - where they felt that literary success would be more easily obtained than in provincial German Prague). In the case of Ungar this was fairly true, as after 1918 he lived as a convinced Czech national and thus during his Berlin period managed to avoid the literary circles which called themselves German-Nationals.

Engerth used the final pages of the early novel Story of a Murder from Ungar’s first book Boys and Murderers (1920) as a sample text, ³⁷ with the omission of one sexually ‘offensive’ passage, which would not bear negatively on the reader, as no-one would understand the meaning of this excerpt outside the context of the story. Engerth’s intention appears to have been to keep the readers’ interest by including the most extreme, forceful passages. The selection was perhaps motivated by Thomas Mann’s review of Boys and Murderers (easily accessible in the Collective Works – we have to admit at this stage that Mann’s Ungar Essays belong to the most influential texts as many today will only recognise Ungar’s name from these). But he particularly praised the end of the story, he spoke of ‘true daemonic genius’ and of a ‘vision which left an abiding impression on me’.³⁸

In his biographic sketch of Ungar, Engerth expressly refers to Guido K. Brand, with frequent quotes (including The Introduction) from the literary stories of 1933, ³⁹ unfortunately also rather carelessly, for he not only compounds Brand’s own errors by stating Ungar was ‘born in Prague’ (and sending him straight to the Prague Humanistic Grammar School), but also by making an incorrect reference to a Brand quotation on A Man and a Maid (‘it is a typical puberty story...’) as being from Story of a Murder. ⁴⁰ So is it a great surprise then that the publication dates are incorrect? Or that in The Introduction Engerth gives the age of the writer as 36 at death, but then in the brief biography states that he died at the age of 37? But there was no malice meant here. Engerth’s errors reflect in part the general lack of information at the beginning of the 60s, which could only be rectified by a laborious and tedious path to the far-flung sources. The achievement of having presented Ungar’s prose a second time after Otten, remains undiminished, despite the unfortunate choice of text – the insertion into the Prague context was and remains both necessary and meaningful.

* * *

The area of impact of the two anthologies from 1963 and 1965 was not great enough to give rise to a scientific review of the life and work of Ungar. The simple fact that such attempts were actually made at the beginning of the 60s should be seen in isolation and is mainly due to the Fribourg germanistics-scholar Ernst Alker and the Czech researcher Eva Pätkoväs, who rediscovered Hermann Ungar totally independently.

Whilst working on his literary history Profiles and Figures, which appeared posthumously in 1977, ⁴¹ Alker came across Hermann Ungar under the concept of Neo-realism and New Objectivity, later incorporating him during the winter semester 1962/63 into a lecture on History of German Literature in the Post-Expressionism Period (prose epic of New Objectivity, Preconditions and Developments). Finally in January 1964 he convinced one of his students, an Austrian called Nanette Klemenz, to write a dissertation on this subject – a dissertation which will frequently be referred to here, as it remains unfortunately the sole university monograph on the subject of Ungar.

The Fribourg dissertation actually only became possible due to the painstaking biographic research carried out by Eva Pätkoväs, who presented the results of her work in a number of essays during the years 1964-68. Within the framework of the Czech efforts led by Eduard Goldstücker to create a German literary heritage, with the high point in the Liblice conferences on the subject of Kafka (1963) and the Global Friends (1965), but which came to an abrupt end in August 1968 with the completion of the Prague Spring, they formed the basis for further analytical work.⁴² Above all her Sketches of a Biography: Hermann Ungar (1893-1929), (1966) which appeared in Germanistica Pragensia – it was available to Nanette Klemenz in typescript - ‘remains today unsurpassed and is the mandatory basis for any Ungar-related activities’. ⁴³ Pätkoväs did not only accumulate information from libraries and archives (she gained access to the files on Ungar in the Czech Foreign Ministry in Prague), but like Klemenz, she was also able to question numerous friends and acquaintances of Ungar and thus put together a relatively faithful biographic portrait from hundreds of mosaic pieces which today is of incalculable value, as the majority of the contemporary witnesses are now deceased.

An initial, shorter essay from Eva Pätkoväs appeared in November 1964 in Vestnik Z N 0, the Prague newspaper for the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the death of Ungar. She roughly outlined his biography, highlighting his ‘extraordinary attempts to be the cultural ambassador of his country’ [the CSR – DS], and referred to him as ‘one of the most important representatives of German-language authors of the literature generation of the 20s’. His very first work Boys and Murderers had, she stated, not found acclaim with the wider general public, but with the literary critics and authors such as Thomas Mann and had clearly illustrated the main characteristics of his creativity:

Hermann Ungar is a master on the field of psychological analysis of the human soul, his works are examples of an exact, precise dissections of the hidden, often dark depths of the human mind. A second basic characteristic of his creativity is the painfully exact attention paid to the form of his works. A feature of his books is linguistic and compositional subtlety.

She perceives Ungar’s novel The Class as an ‘excellent psychological study’; the drama The Red General as a text in which the question of the relationship between personal and collective merit is discussed; the comedy The Arbour as a ‘witty and caustic satire about the double standards of the lower middle class’. This author, ‘who possessed the best pre-requisites to become a true leading figure in German-language literature’ in Czechoslovakia, died ‘in the full flush of his creativity, exactly at the moment when he decided to give up his job as the Czechoslovakian Diplomat’ and to devote all his energy to literature alone. ⁴⁴

In October 1966, on the 37th anniversary of Ungar’s death, Eva Pätkoväs published a similar review, but as a more detailed assay, in the Düsseldorf Allgemeinen Jüdischen Wochenzeitung (General Jewish Weekly). She went deeper into Ungar’s Jewishness. Although he remained ‘indifferent to religion’, he never denied being a Jew and always showed ‘a lively interest in the national problem’. Ungar’s attempt to introduce democratic reforms within Jewish-national student circles after the war, seemed to her to be typical ‘for the attitude of some Jewish intellectuals in Bohemia, who spoke out on behalf of a defined internationalism.’ She also discovered this attitude in his work:

Only the people as single individuals with their psychological problems were of interest to him as part of his artistic creativity, but these individual problems were generally the same for all, no matter what race, religion or nationality. He plumbed the depths of human psyche, in its active form, often ‘extreme, grotesque, incomprehensible for the outside world’.

This time she also looked more closely at The Maimed (‘written in the spirit of Freudian psycho-analysis, which is evident however in all of Ungar’s creations in the same way that the world of the mentally and physically tortured heroes of Dostojwski emerge’), but evaluates the novel in the same way as Klemenz – not as highly as Boys and Murderers nor even as highly as the novel The Class ‘in which Ungar describes in a masterly way the torturous life of a poverty-stricken schoolmaster suffering from an inferiority complex.’ The reasons that Pätkova gave for the general growth in interest in German literature from Prague towards the middle of the 60s illustrate her own motives for wishing to enliven the muted memories of Ungar:

It is ... an undisputed fact that one of the most important catalysts for researching the phenomena [German literature of Prague - DS] is the figure and the work of Franz Kafka, to find new perspectives and clues to discovering Kafka. It is, however, also obvious that incomplete understanding of the writers of this time is one of the unavoidable and disastrous consequences of Nazism, which strove to erase systematically any trace of Jewish mental and intellectual activities (with which the work of German writers in Prague is inseparably connected). The current focus of literary research is therefore not solely placed on expanding knowledge of Kafka, much rather it is an attempt to rediscover and bring to light the complete spectrum of literary creativity in that period. For soon it would become obvious that a whole series of important authors had without justification disappeared into obscurity. ⁴⁵

There is no need to delve more deeply into Pätkoväs’s Sketch of a Biography, ⁴⁶ an excellent piece of work given the conditions at the time, it is completely biographically positive and will serve frequently as a reference within the framework of Ungar’s curriculum vitae.

One last essay written on Ungar by Pätkoväs, Prazskä nemeckä literatura a Hermann Ungar (Prague’s German-language literature and Hermann Ungar), appeared in 1968, shortly before the end of the Prague Spring, in the Prague philological newspaper Casopis pro Moderni Filologii. This essay was another review of the important results of her research work to date, highlighting the relationship of the Jews to their Czech background and ranking Ungar – in relation to Otto Pick, Vojtech Jirät, Pavel Eisner and Max Brod – amongst the Moravian-Jewish branch of the German-language Prague Literature to which Ludwig Winder and Ernst Weiß also belonged. Common features of these authors were the dark and dismal atmosphere of their work, the psycho-analytic aspects of the characters and the interest in erotic problematic – although Ungar retained a specific, unique and characteristic accent.⁴⁷

The Swiss dissertation by Nanette Klemenz, written in the same year as Pätkoväs’s biographic study (1966), which however only appeared in print in 1970, ⁴⁸ is of a problematic and contradictory nature, with some irritating lines of thought but still not without merit. In the course of my investigations it will often be necessary to correct Klemenz’s factual misalignments and occasionally to contradict her theses. At this point it will suffice if we just look at basic principles.

The main flaws in her work can be explained by the fact that we are dealing with an author who has been encouraged to write on a subject with which she is spiritually and psychologically not well acquainted. There is, of course, no mandatory requirement for a student to discover and select the subject of the dissertation himself/herself – in fact, the alternative is probably the most normal route - and certainly too close a relationship can also cloud objectivity resulting in a subjective image. But it is troublesome when a personal individual world perspective, in Klemenz’s case her Catholicism, becomes the benchmark for all things and is used to assess the writer. As Ungar’s perspectives have quite a different background and are rooted in Judaism, not even marginal harmony can be expected. It is quite simply farcical to attempt to read a writer such as Ungar the riot act from a Christian-moralistic point of view and to compare him to a pseudo-ideal such as Gertrud von Le Fort.⁴⁹ Sentences such as the following are representative of this misjudgement:

He died before discovering an empowering and positive way of life. ⁵⁰

Ungar never succeeded in achieving a thoroughly Christian image. ⁵¹

As Ungar’s work hardly complies with Klemenz’s expectations of Christian empowering literature and she measures literary ranking by the yardstick of success, she viewed Ungar on the whole as a ‘second or third class writer’. She sees the motivation in her work – expressed in a typical pathetic tone – primarily within the concept ‘that it is frequently the unknown and lesser writers who are able to provide a true and revealing impression of their epoch, lifestyle and awareness and that therefore we need their work to capture the fullness and richness of human life in all its different guises.’ Simultaneously she promises to ‘delve deeply into the problematic world of Hermann Ungar’ thus creating a ‘simple, easily negotiable path to the works of the much greater contemporaries’ naming Kafka, Weiß und Werfel.⁵²

It would have been impossible for Klemenz to obtain direct access to Ungar’s thought processes or to the phenomenology of this work using such premises, especially as she totally ignored the central themes such as Ungar’s Jewish background or the sociological structure of Prague and Moravia in her quest for knowledge. Also of questionable value was her attempt to treat the Complete Works in three separate capital chapters (A. Narratives B. Playwriting C. Essays and Journalistic Articles) as she applied no genre or subject-related divisions. If Klemenz failed to get close to her subject because of her groundless assumptions, her monographic procedures also meant that any precise and detailed analysis of the individual works was lacking and singularly failed to go further than just general statements. Reinhard Urbach’s criticism of her dissertation is therefore quite apt ‘She achieves nothing more than drawing attention to his name and encouraging engagement with the writer’, ⁵³ with, however, one notable exception. The introductory biographical study (The Life of Hermann Ungar, pp 9-46) is extremely valuable, despite all the errors and Pätkoväs references, and together with the Sketches, is thus perceived as indispensible for anyone wishing to occupy himself more intensively with Ungar, as both ladies used statements from his contemporaries and peers, many of whom are meanwhile deceased. Thus it is all the more surprising that she failed to assess and incorporate these generally correct biographical findings into the course of the dissertation.

The bibliographic compilation, seen as an initial review, is valuable for information on the primary and secondary literature (Bibliography, Pages 261-272). Ungar’s journalistic articles have barely been documented, translations are only mentioned for self-published pieces, whilst the bibliography for the secondary literature seems to be really coincidental and fails to impart a valid impression of the history of acceptance of the writings.

In a revised summary entitled Worldwide Image of Hermann Ungar (pages 237-257), Klemenz documents the results of her analyses. According to this summary there are ‘three large areas of debate … which impact on Hermann Ungar’s life… the social, sexual and religious world problems’, and she continues:

We must view the human image of Hermann Ungar as the struggle to achieve a fair social order. Hidden behind the image of the women we meet in his writing, are the sexual deprivations of his youth, his time and his environment. The writer’s ideological image forms a collective lens though which all unsolved religious problems encountered by the writer are viewed.

‘The central person or key figure’ in his works is mostly the ‘disenfranchised human being, this despised, hated and downtrodden person’, who, in his existentialist desperation ‘which can extend to despair’, is directed towards ‘the one thing one can never lose: one’s own soul, survival of the spirit and internal freedom’.

Once the base point of the fall and descent has been reached, a counter-reaction takes place and, with it, a new ascent. This is the core of Hermann Ungar’s message. In the wake of collapse and destruction he foresees salvation: an inner transformation. In this spiritualisation lies the path out of misery.⁵⁴

If here Klemenz draws an unutterable comparison of Ungar’s works to Christian-heathen stories and holy legends, in other places she writes longingly that the Jewish writer and Zionist has been striving to achieve a ‘religious and even Christian portrayal of the world’.⁵⁵ This unbalanced view does as little justice to the literary criteria, than to the supposed Christian content and the advances into inner transformation of the protagonists in the relevant evaluation categories. She views the petit-bourgeois satire The Arbour as trivial with its sexual promiscuity (‘The climate of the piece is sexually contaminated’), because it provides ‘no positive guiding images’. (‘This comedy denigrates, renders risible, destroys.’). ⁵⁶ The novel The Class she sees as masterly, as she supposedly identifies in the novel an ‘awareness of the meaning of life’, an ‘illumination of God’s mercy’ which finally verges on an affirmation of Catholic belief .⁵⁷ Klemenz’s concluding Qualification of the Works of Hermann Ungar has to be seen against this background of reasoning with the related dubiousness:

In the two stories A Man and a Maid and Story of a Murder, Ungar presented skilful examples of his stylist capabilities and, at the same time, introduced the main subjects of his works: social, sexual and religious issues. The first, extremely psychologically-orientated novel - The Maimed – is not as good in content or structure as his second novel, The Class. In fact The Class seems to me to be the zenith of Ungar’s creativity in every respect. The transition from epic writer to dramatic production was not quite successful. Although the youth drama War had worthy content, the appropriate form was missing. The Red General possessed a more polished and accomplished dramatic structure, plus a positive area of issues. The Arbour proved that Ungar had achieved the language and structure needed for a stage production, but the content was of an unacceptably low level. The novel The Wine Traveller and the story Colbert’s Journey stand out amongst a whole range of minor epic compositions. Essays and journalistic articles did not flourish beyond the first attempts. ⁵⁸

The ambivalence of the Klemenz dissertation did necessarily continue the trend regarding the awareness and resonance to Ungar’s literary works. On the one side it boosted awareness of this hitherto ignored author in the specialist circle involved with German studies, mainly focussed on Kafka and the German-language literature of Prague, and was almost certainly a contributing factor in the reprinting of Ungar’s works in the following years. However on the other side Klemenz projected a flawed, albeit seemingly all-encompassing character image of Ungar, and thus prevented other literature researchers who encountered Ungar from carrying out their own analyses. The result was that up to the present day the Swiss monograph remains the sole university book on Ungar and his literary legacy.

The critic’s reaction to Klemenz’s work was as contradictory as the dissertation itself and its impact – given the minimal awareness. Although Bruno Scherer apparently only became aware of the Moravian writer via Klemenz, he reviewed the content and wrote about the content without any criticism, similarly without any criticism accepted the thesis on Ungar’s ‘uprooted out of the world of Jewish forefathers’ and described the book as a ‘valuable monograph’, ⁵⁹ Meinhard Urbach went even further than Klemenz’s structure. He ranked the work similar to Pätkoväs’s biographic Sketches and in the Works of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz (to be discussed later), compares Ungar’s novel The Class, which he perceives as his ‘most mature work’ and ‘a piece of satire, which makes as deserving and worthwhile reading as the concise, short stories of Hermann Ungar, with Friedrich Torberg’s The Pupil Gerber has taken his Final Exam, the non-fictional The Murder of Captain Hanika with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (‘even with typical expressionist-accompanying characteristics such as the lamenting O-Wei-Pathos’) and in conclusion delivers the opinion that Ungar is ‘worth remembering’, although Klemenz’s work served no further than to ‘draw attention to the name and to encourage engagement with the author’.⁶⁰

The most sophisticated criticism of the Ungar monograph came from Wilma Abeles Iggers. She wrote about Ungar fading into obscurity (‘To most readers of German literature today, Hermann Ungar is at most a name…A generation ago, however, Ungar was highly praised by writers and critics’), about his bourgeois orderly and (seemingly) contented life which was at strange odds with this writings (‘His work, however, did not reflect this almost un-interrupted sequence of strokes of good luck of which his life consisted, and his personality did so only in part.’), and regards all his texts as being of the same mould, with the exception of the historic Red General.

The settings range from middle class to Lumpenproletariat (bourgeois trash); the protagonists are people who were mistreated, unwanted children, or adults the sources of whose twisted, maladjusted personalities are not always explained...In Ungar’s world men make each others’ lives miserable, and Ungar gives few indications that a change of ‘system’ could alleviate these evils.

In the belief ‘that the essence of humanity is found more frequently in extreme characteristics, in the eccentric, than, as is often thought, in the good’, Ungar displayed conformity with the Expressionists. Iggers’s instincts allow her to identify the defects in the dissertation, an ‘otherwise thorough and competently written study’: ‘namely, that she [Klemenz – DS] doesn’t know the Bohemian and Moravian Jewish environment’, but she misses the importance position that Jewishness/Judaism actually held in Ungar’s life when she writes: ‘with the exception of Kafka, Ungar has more in common with such authors as Wedekind, Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky than with any of the Jewish writers’, and she fails to recognise that the error lies less in the distorted perception of Jewish sociology (‘she visualized the Jewish Community of the period between the two world wars as living apart from the non-Jewish population’) than in the exclusion of such thematic because of the blinkered Christian limitations. Her criticism of Klemenz’s ‘religious, Victorian and ... almost folksy pre-conceptions’ is very similar to our deliberations.

She sees Ungar as a lost soul who appeared to be groping towards Christianity of which there was little indication in his writings - and concluded ‘Unfortunately he died prematurely, too early to experience the value of the protective communities, of one’s own family, of the church, the state, homeland and nation. (p 243)

Iggers concludes

Yet, most of the book is not an interpretation of Ungar’s world, but a relatively factual account of Ungar’s life and work. And here Miss Klemenz has made a much needed and careful contribution to the rediscovery of a writer who deserves to be better known. ⁶¹

* * *

The literary-scientific work of Pätkoväs and Klemenz only reached a limited group of people interested in the German-language literature of Prague. The Otten and Engerth anthologies were only read by a small circle of initiates for whom expressionist or German-language literature of Prague was more than just a stolid definition. Despite this there might have been an impression towards the end of the 60s that a wide-spread renaissance of the obscure author was about to begin. The department within Sender Freies Berlin responsible for television plays discovered Ungar and commissioned a televised, dramatised version of the novel The Class in 1968 (book: George A. Schaafs) and in 1969 the comedy The Arbour (book: Walter Berson, Wolfgang Staudte) by the famous director Wolfgang Staudte. Ungar’s original texts were deemed inadequate for both productions for different reasons and faded into everyday routine of the television-viewing nation, but remain an important point in the history of awareness of Ungar: as signals marking re-emerging interest and as hitherto sole attempts to reach the mass public through the use of film-media for Ungar’s writing. The reasons for selecting The Class and The Arbour are obvious, given the background of events at the time: the student movement, the civil crisis and the related sensitisation for social-psychological phenomena. The two texts are connected loosely by the figure of the servant and the social revolutionary Modlizki, each story deals besides other issues, with the cryptic diabolic retribution for social class distinctions, with the unmasking of the ruling classes who simply do not recognise that their days are over - these are aspects of special interest to a producer such as Wolfgang Staudte, who made his name with social committed films such as Rotation (1949) or the filming of Heinrich Mann’s book Man of Straw (alternatively The Kaiser’s Lackey, The Patrioteer, The Loyal Subject ,1951). Wolfgang Staudte went so far as to work as co-scriptwriter for the television production of The Arbour, however, the film of The Class based on the booked written by George A. Schaafs achieved far greater success.

Filmographic Details: The Class (1968)

Director: Wolfgang Staudte;

Assistant Director: Walter Baumgartner

Book: George A. Schaafs adapted from Hermann Ungar’s work

Camera: Willi Kuhle;

Stage Management: Johannes Ott

Music: Werner Eisbrenner

Actors (Roles): Heinz Meier (Schoolmaster Blau), Lotte Ledl (Selma), Ida Ehre (Mother), Herbert Fux (Modlitzki), Stanislav Ledinek (Bobek), Harald Dietl (Schoolmaster Leopold), Jürgen Lentzsch (Karpel), Hans-Georg Panczak (Laub),Lutz Kramer (Bohrer) Lou Seitz (Mrs Nowack), Josef Wilhelmi (Hainisch),Erich Poremski (Pollatschek)

Production Management: Kurt Kramer; Production: Sender Freies Berlin

First broadcast: 24.9.1968 SFB I; repeat: 26.9.1969 MAZ/black-white

Whereas Staudte fell into unnecessary and distorting attempts to update the material using film-technical methods, Schaafs kept to the most feasible faithful adaptation of the central plot and development lines of the equally difficult dramatisation of The Class whilst also dispensing with any modern film effects for the visual production. Despite a little over-portrayal, the result was a television play reflecting in a semi-realistic and television-orientated manner a psychological Portrait of a Non-Person (Ludwig Metzger), of the protagonist Josef Blau. The fact that in the end the production of The Class was not a huge success lies in equal measures in the constraints imposed by the televison play media and in the particularly formal structure of Ungar’s novel which precludes visualisation. Ungar’s The Class relies decisively on the spoken word and, despite the use of the third person and reported speech, focusses and is written totally from the narrow perspective of the protagonist – this is the only way that the novel can permit the reader to identify with Blau and thus share his existential concern. Schaafs and Staudte were only able to indicate this by using a speaker in ‘off’, who in appropriate places introduced quotations from Ungar or scraps of Blau’s monologues, and also by incorporating slow motion sequences to bring Blau’s deepest fears into play – but this was unable to bridge the distance to the unusual figure of this schoolmaster, to erase the impression of a psychopathic freak, a sick misfit. Moreover Staudte, as in the Josef Roth filming of The Rebellion (NDR 1962), stuck too closely to the limits of the television play genre and - with a few impressive exceptions – dispensed with outside scenes, with the imagination of living reality, without discovering his own alternative image language to equal the dialogues, so that at times the film gave the impression of being a chamber play, a stage performance. ⁶² Egon Netenjacob reminisces in an essay on Wolfgang Staudte’s television work:

The sole notes I made are clichés like ‘notable, calm attention paid to the figures’. And the only passage which stands out from my somewhat faded memories is Schoolmaster Blau’s youth-orientated class trip. The scenes filmed outside are lively, free and unrestrained, in comparison with the Ampex recordings, Staudte is simply not a stage director. He only achieves impact with those passages where he can express himself in images, where the dialogue remains secondary to the movement and the content of the images.⁶³

The critic Ludwig Metzger provides a general impression of the course of the film:

At the beginning of the play the author of the script, Schaafs, uses a narrator (off) to explain the scene of Josef Blau marking pupil’s workbooks: ‘He knew that every weakness he displayed could lead to his downfall. He had to face 18 boys in this year group. He fought with everything at his disposal to maintain discipline…’ The conflict has been declared, the audience is burning to learn about the cause.

Does Blau explain himself? The actor Heinz Meier plays the role using a dry and cold manner, with very few gestures, using language which fears to disclose any information. (Blau says to his wife Selma: ‘One should not speak. One should not say anything, nothing that can cause trouble... One should not speak. One does not know, what fate one tempts...’). Blau is taciturn, suspicious and distrustful, solely reacting to the actions of the others – for this is how without exception Blau perceives fellow mankind – drawing, stroke for stroke, the contours on the expressionless exterior of the ‘nonentity’ Blau.

The camera pans slowly over the interior of the middle class home of the grammar school teacher in a small Moravian town in the year 1910. The greater picture renders Blau’s bland mediocracy frighteningly visible within the bourgeois space of the home, even his close personal space remains strange to him. ‘Obscene’ is the label he gives the unashamed ‘love play’ (flirting?), between his ageing widowed mother-in-law (Ida Ehre) and the Falstaff-like vital figure of Onkel Bobek (Stanislav Ledinek). Incomprehensible for him is the natural animalistic bearing with which his statuesque wife Selma (Lotte