2023-08-05 15:35:56
Literature Rudolf Borchardt
The most mysterious of all German poets
Status: 3:35 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Rudolf Borchardt (1877-1945)
Source: Keystone Switzerland/laif
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I never knew Rudolf Borchardt, this most mysterious, most exclusive, most incomprehensible of all German authors, or only almost. He died in January 1945 in the Tyrolean village of Trins, a few weeks before we Americans marched there. We had just conquered Innsbruck. In the old town, not far from the Golden Roof, there was an antiquarian bookshop. And, war or no war, I had to go inside. And here was the strangest book I had ever seen: Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated into contemporary Middle High German (!) by a certain Rudolf Borchardt. I had never heard of. And who is still basically confused with Wolfgang Borchert, author of the post-war sensation Outside the Door.
As a soldier, I lived for free in the “Trinser Hof” inn. I found out that this Borchardt had stayed there a few months ago after he and his family had been deported here by truck from his Italian domicile as a Jew, but the responsible SS man was so overwhelmed by his “spirituality” that he let him go there.
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“The German in the Landscape”
He almost held out until the end of the war, the innkeeper said. Only there was his damn smoking mania. In order to break the habit, the gentleman hid his cigarettes on top of the cupboard. But finally couldn’t stand it anymore, then pushed a chair up and when climbing up: death from heart failure. I visit the grave outside the small village cemetery. Expelled not as a Jew, but as a Protestant (he had been baptized as a child in East Prussia).
In the little church, a beginner struggles on the organ. He would have liked that, this fanatical lover of everything conservative, this arch-reactionary and Narodnik. Which ultimately helped prepare the Nazis, but in the end they were much too “unspiritual”. He remained the herald of a “sanctification of poetry” that was under the “protection of the gods”. A long time later, in 2018, a 1000-page porn novel that nobody had ever heard of appeared under his name, held back by the family for years: “Weltpuff Berlin”. An inventory of the 1920s, especially in the sexual.
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In the meantime I myself have remained loyal to the language-loving master, joined the Rudolf Borchardt Society (I think I was its only member for a long time), and also laid stones on his grave according to Jewish custom.
Visit to the widow Marel
In 1982 I go to Bergen in Upper Bavaria. The tiny hillside house was once built for the lyricist Rudolf Alexander Schröder – he too was pretty much forgotten. It has long been occupied by his niece Marie Luise, called “Marel”, married Borchardt. The poet’s second wife (the first died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp). Currently 86 years old. Strong face with engaging authority. The poet dedicated a whole volume of love poems to her, his loveliest. Despite her age, she radiates something physical, almost sensual.
Question: “Mrs. Marel, did you save him?” She, laughing: “You can only save yourself. But, it’s true, he had somehow forbidden sensuality. Apparently it wasn’t appropriate for a German poet. I just laughed at him. And I think so, that laugh brought him some kind of release. We then had our four children.” Of course I’m still full of questions, but Marel urgently needs to go to the hairdresser. What a loss for German literary history.
Georg Stefan Troller was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1921 and lives in Paris. His most important works include around 1,500 interviews, including in the context of the “Paris Journal” and the “Personal Description”.
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