Werner Beumelburg

Werner Beumelburg (19 February 1899 – 9 March 1963) was a German writer. According to Armin Mohler, historian of the Conservative Revolution, Beumelburg developed a completely original form of historical narrative, which is neither historiographical nor novelistic, but seeks to offer a kind of "living image".

Biography

Werner Beumelburg was born in Traben-Trarbach, the son of the superintendent Eduard Beumelburg and his wife Marie (née Waldeyer). He was the younger brother of Walter Beumelburg (1894–1944), the later director of the Reichssender Berlin, the first radio station in Germany. Werner Beumelburg attended school in Traben-Trarbach and took the emergency school-leaving examination in 1916. He served during World War I, first as an ensign in a pioneer battalion, becoming an officer in 1917. He was a participant in the Battle of Verdun and received the Iron Cross II and I class.

After the end of the war, Beumelburg studied history and political science in Cologne. From 1921, he was editor of the Deutsche Soldatenzeitung, which was published by the Ministry of the Reichswehr in Berlin. Later, he was political editor of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and moved to the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten in 1924.

Within the intellectual agitation of the various currents of the Conservative Revolution, he was, alongside Ernst Jünger and Franz Schauwecker in particular, one of the representatives of "soldierly nationalism", born of the experience at the trenches.

His first novel, Die gestohlene Lüge (1921), was a science fiction work in which the author presented a refutation of German war guilt in World War I. In the following years he became known for "his idiosyncratic portrayal of German war history." Between 1923 and 1928, he wrote four war books for the series Die Schlachten des Weltkriegs (The Battles of the World War), which was commissioned by the Reichsarchiv and was a mixture of documentation and fictional plot. After the positive response, he ventured into freelance writing in 1926.

Beumelburg was in radical opposition to the Weimar Republic. His next books were Sperrfeuer um Deutschland (1929), a literary-historical treatise on the First World War, and Gruppe Bosemüller (1930), the best-known and today most widely studied German nationalist front novel. He had written both works from a deeply nationalist point of view. In them, he defended a "trench community" and a future "front-line soldier state." The works, which were easy to read and written in a matter-of-fact, sober tone, made Beumelburg a best-selling author. In his political pamphlet Deutschland in Ketten (1931), he finally denounced the republic as a "slave state".

Beumelburg's political career began with the seizure of power in 1933. Whereas he had previously viewed Hitler quite critically, he now accepted him as Bismarck's heir and unifier of the Reich and celebrated him in his hymn Deutschland erwacht. Deutsches Wort, deutscher Geist, deutsche Tat (1933): "God is visibly with him". In October 1933, he was among the 88 writers who signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. After the purge of Jewish members of the Prussian Academy of Arts, he and others took their places and Beumelburg became "Schriftführer" (managing director) there. After the death of Reich President Hindenburg, he was one of the signers of the call of cultural workers in August 1934, on the eve of the 1934 referendum. In 1936, Beumelburg received the Great Literature Prize of the Reich Capital Berlin, and a year later the Gau Westmark Art Prize.

As a representative author of the new state, he celebrated National Socialism as the "resurrection of the masses in the spirit of World War II soldiering," wrote about the Reich Labor Service, the Anschluss of Austria, and the deployment of the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War.

From 1942, as an air force officer, he kept the war diary for Hermann Göring. In the course of the World War II, he gradually distanced himself from the government. Beumelburg boycotted a 1944 pledge of allegiance to Hitler initiated by the Reich's Writers Chamber. During the same period, he recommended young soldiers "to aim for a place of deployment in the West and, in the event of contact with the enemy, to seek capture." Shortly before the end of the war, Beumelburg became head of a Luftwaffe war school. After the school finally left Czechoslovakia for Bavaria, he became an American prisoner of war.

After the war, Beumelburg had connections to General George S. Patton. After a short detention in the Dachau internment camp, he was released and initially lived in Faistenhaar near Munich, where he worked and lived with a farmer. He did not have to undergo a denazification procedure. When his living quarters were needed, Beumelburg moved, at the invitation of friends, to the New World in Würzburg, an estate and artists' meeting place owned by the painter Gertraud Rostosky.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone, as well as later in the German Democratic Republic, many of his books were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated.

His first new books, published by renowned publishing houses, were quite successful again. Der Spiegel, however, lamented Beumelburg's "postwar flight into the historical novel." Years Without Mercy, his chronicle of World War II, appeared in 1952. In the book's preface, he announced that he would "not avoid any question that must be dealt with for the sake of historical truth" and went on to describe in detail atrocities committed during the war. Nevertheless, he continued to be discredited politically, in particular due to his participation in the Lippoldsberg Poetry Days founded by Hans Grimm in 1934.

In an interview on February 7, 1955, Beumelburg described his current work as a writer:

My last book, Jahre ohne Gnade (Years without Mercy), an account of the Second World War, published by Stalling, Oldenburg, was written on the New World. The peace and quiet and seclusion suit my work perfectly. At present I am writing a novel Die Elbe fließt mitten durch Deutschland. In the style of simplicism, a fate on this side of the Iron Curtain is portrayed here; it is an attempt to promote the unity of Germany not in the political but in the moral sense.

Years Without Mercy was not accepted by the public, and sales of his other works also dropped rapidly. His postwar career was thus already over in the 1950s. Now rejected by the major publishers for reasons of expediency, he published two more novels in small right-wing publishing houses, which remained without major resonance as conventional entertainment. After 1958, no new editions of his books appeared; he had "fallen into intellectual and literary no man's land." His books, however, were still to be found in the military libraries of the Bundeswehr for a long time. Beumelburg bore his dwindling success and his increasing sidelining at the New World estate in Würzburg with poise. His presence there was characterized as unobtrusive, friendly, and of distinguished determination.

In 1962, Stern announced a "German Narrator Prize," for which Beumelburg applied anonymously. In October 1963, he was awarded one of the 17 prizes. But by then Beumelburg had been dead for months; on March 9, 1963, he had committed suicide on the New World. He was buried in his hometown of Traben-Trarbach.

See also

• Edwin Erich Dwinger
• P. C. Ettighoffer

Works

• Douaumont (1923; re-issued as Douaumont: ein Heldenkampf um Verdun in 1943)
• Ypern 1914 (1925)
• Loretto (1927)
• Flandern 1917 (1928)
• Die Gruppe Bosemüller (1929; re-issued as Die Gruppe Bosemüller: Der große Roman der Frontsoldaten in 1933)
• Die stählernen Jahre (1929)
• Sperrfeuer um Deutschland (1929)
• Der Strom (1930)
• Der Kuckuck und die zwölf Apostel (1931)
• Deutschland in Ketten, Von Versailles bis zum Young-Plan (1931; 1942)
• Bismarck gründet das Reich (1932; 1944)
• Das jugendliche Reich. Reden und Aufsätze zur Zeitwende (1933)
• Friedrich II. von Hohenstaufen (1934)
• Eine ganze Welt gegen uns. Eine Geschichte des Weltkriegs in Bildern (1934; edited by Wilhelm Reetz)
• Preußische Novelle (1935; re-issued as Pflicht und Schicksal. Preußische Novelle in 1942)
• Kaiser und Herzog. Kampf zweier Geschlechter um Deutschland (1936)
• Die Hengstwiese (1937)
• Reich und Rom. Oldenburg (1937)
• Der König und die Kaiserin. Friedrich der Große und Maria Theresia (1938)
• Mont Royal. Ein Buch vom himmlischen und vom irdischen Reich (1938)
• Österreich und das Reich der Deutschen: kurze Geschichte des Großdeutschen Reiches (1938)
• Kampf um Spanien (1939)
• Sieg im Osten. So schlugen wir die Russen 1914/17 (1939)
• Von 1914 bis 1939. Sinn und Erfüllung des Weltkriegs (1940)
• Geschichten vom Reich (1941)
• Reich und Rom (1943)
• Hundert Jahre sind wie ein Tag. Roman einer Familie (1950)
• Nur Gast auf dunkler Erde (1951)
• Jahre ohne Gnade (1952)
• Das Kamel und das Nadelöhr (1957)
• ...und einer blieb am Leben (1958)
• König Nobels letzte Reise (unpublished)

Translated into English

• "Work is Future." In: Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (1966)

References

• Jürgen Hillesheim & Elisabeth Michael, eds., Lexikon nationalsozialistischer Dichter: Biographien, Analysen, Bibliographien. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann (1993).
• Stefan Busch, „Und gestern, da hörte uns Deutschland“. NS-Autoren in der Bundesrepublik. Kontinuität und Diskontinuität bei Friedrich Griese, Werner Beumelburg, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller und Kurt Ziesel. Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann (1998).
• Markus Pöhlmann, "„Das große Erleben da draußen“. Die Reihe Schlachten des Weltkrieges (1921-30)." In: Thomas F. Schneider & Hans Wagner, eds., Von Richthofen bis Remarque. Deutschsprachige Prosa zum I. Weltkrieg. Amsterdam: Rodopi (2003), pp. 113–31.
• Hans Sakowicz & Alf Mentzer, Literatur in Nazi-Deutschland. Ein biographisches Lexikon. Hamburg/Wien: Europa Verlag (2002).
• Karl-Heinz Joachim Schoeps, Literatur im Dritten Reich. Bern: Lang (1992).
• Ernst Klee, "Beumelburg, Werner." In: Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer (2007), p. 50
• Florian Brückner, In der Literatur unbesiegt: Werner Beumelburg (1899–1963) – Kriegsdichter in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus (Dissertation Universität Stuttgart 2016). Berlin/Münster: LIT Verlag (2017).

External links

• Works by Werner Beumelburg at German National Library
• Works by Werner Beumelburg at Gallica