Walter Hasenclever


Hasenclever, Walter

 

Born July 8, 1890, in Aachen; died Aug. 15, 1940, in Les Milles, France. German poet and playwright.

Hasenclever emigrated to France when the Hitlerites came to power. In 1939 the French government interned him, and when the Hitlerites invaded France, he committed suicide. His collection of verses Youth (1913) and his drama The Son (1914) were written in the expressionist manner and have an abstractly rebellious character. In his collection A Political Poet (1919), Hasenclever advocated the establishment of a republic in Germany. He expressed his antiwar views in the dramas Antigone (1917) and The Savior (1919). The drama On That Side of Her (1920), the film scenario The Plague (1920), and the play Murder (1926) express the chaos and decay of capitalist Europe after World War I. The comedies The Businessman (1927; Russian translation, 1929; A. N.

Tolstoi’s translation was published in 1953) and Marriages Are Made in Heaven (1929; Russian translation, 1929), the farce Napoleon Intervenes (1930), and the antifascist tragicomedy Münchausen (published posthumously in 1947) mark his retreat from expressionism. Hasenclever’s plays were performed on the Soviet stage in the 1920’s.

WORKS

Gedichte. Dramen. Prosa. Hamburg [1963].
In the collection Expressionismus. Dramen, vols. 1-2. Berlin-Weimar, 1967.
In Russian translation:
Chuzhaia lira. Compiled by V. Neishtadt. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923.
Pevtsy chelovecheskogo. Compiled by S. Tartakover. Berlin, 1923.

REFERENCES

Lunacharskii, A. V. O teatre i dramaturgii, vols. 1-2. Moscow, 1958.
Markov, P. A. Sovremennaia ekspressionisticheskaia drama v Germanii. Moscow, 1923.
Leshnittser, F. “Smert V. Gazenklevera.” Internatsional’naia literatura, 1940, nos. 9-10.
Istoriia nemetskoi literatury, vol. 4. Moscow, 1968.
Walzel, O. Die deutsche Dichtung seit Goethes Tod, 2nd ed. Berlin, 1920.

I. V. VOLEVICH and N. IA. BANNIKOVA