Hasenclever, Walter

(1890-1940)

   writer; among the Weimar era's most respected playwrights. Born to a well-established Jewish family in Aachen, he went to Oxford at the wish of his father (a respected physician) to study law. Tiring of the law, he broke with his father and studied literature and philosophy at Leipzig. Although he voluntarily enlisted in 1914, he soon became a pacifist. After the war he entered journalism, lived briefly in the United States, served in Paris during 1924-1929 as a reporter for 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, and then resided in Berlin* during 1929-1932. In 1933 the NSDAP revoked his citizenship and then banned and burned his books. He spent the next eight years in Italy and France with the family of Kurt Wolff.* He was interned by the French at the outbreak of World War II and committed suicide soon after the collapse of France.

   Hasenclever was early intrigued with the Naturalism of Henrik Ibsen, but was drawn to Expressionism* shortly before World War I. As a student, he formed friendships with Kurt Pinthus,* Ernst Rowohlt,* Franz Werfel, and especially Kurt Wolff. Influenced by Werfel and Pinthus, he wrote the loosely autobio-graphical play Der Sohn, published by Wolff in 1914. Featuring a boy of twenty who rebels against his tyrant father, Sohn introduced Expressionism's theme of portraying the younger generation's protest against the old. His antiwar drama Antigone, which appeared in 1917, earned him the Kleist Prize the same year. After the army institutionalized him in 1916 for psychiatric reasons, a disillu-sioned Hasenclever embarked on a mystical phase marked by curiosity about Buddhism and the occult doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. Continuing through 1924, it was represented not only in his play Die Menschen (1918) but also in translations of Swedenborg's work. Kurt Tucholsky* inspired him in 1924 to turn to social criticism via comedy and satire. In 1926 he wrote the witty and successful Ein besserer Herr (A better gentleman). His equally successful 1929 comedy Napoleon greift ein (Napoleon intervenes) is a mockery of fascism. Christoph Columbus, a heavy satire written with Tucholsky, depicts the explorer as a man cheated by Spanish manipulators. Later works, written in exile, went ignored until the 1960s. Among these are mature and beautiful poems, written after Hasenclever had met Edith Schafer in Nice.

   REFERENCES:Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals; Garland and Garland, Oxford Companion to German Literature; NDB, vol. 8; Sokel, Anthology.