Paul Fechter

Paul Fechter (14 September 1880 – 9 January 1958) was a German theater and art critic, editor and writer.

Biography

Paul Fechter was born in Elbing, the son of a master carpenter in an old-established burgher and craftsman family in Elbing/West Prussia. His younger brother was the naval engineer Admiral Hans Fechter.

Fechter graduated from high school in 1899. This was followed by studies in architecture, mathematics and physics. In 1905, he received his doctorate from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Fechter was a relative of the "General Gazetteer King" August Huck, who helped him get started in journalism. From 1906 to 1910, Fechter was a feature editor at the Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten, which belonged to the Huck Group, and from 1911 to 1915 at the Vossische Zeitung, in whose financial consortium Huck had a stake. He became known to a wider audience through his book Expressionism (1914), one of the first published discussions of the expressionist movement, a style for which he continued to advocate later.

During World War I, he served at the Ober Ost's press department in Vilnius. There he met Arnold Zweig, Herbert Eulenberg, Richard Dehmel, Hildebrand Gurlitt, Oskar Kühl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Magnus Zeller, Hermann Struck, among others. He also began a relationship with Cornelia Gurlitt, the older sister of Hildebrand Gurlitt, which came to an end by her suicide in May 1919.

After the war, Fechter was again a feature editor at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ). In the 1920s, he also worked for radio and contributed to literary topics for German Wave (broadcast series Literature of the present, author's lesson and book lesson), for Funk-Stunde Berlin and for Schlesische Funkstunde. In 1929, he contributed to Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente.

In April 1933, Fechter published the programmatic essay Die neuen Aufgaben des Feuilletons (The New Tasks of the Feuilleton) in the organ of the Imperial Association of the German Press (RdP) for the association's annual conference — alongside prominent NSDAP propagandists such as Otto Dietrich, Walther Funk and Wilhelm Weiß. In it, he explicitly took a National Socialist standpoint. Fechter sharply criticized the passive attitude of the bourgeoisie toward the left and the poor performance of right-wing newspapers, advocated a total politicization of the cultural section of the popular press along the lines of the NSDAP press, declared the old forms of literary, art, and theater criticism to be meaningless, and assigned the feuilleton the task of demonstrating the "increased German cultural will" abroad.

Fechter left the DAZ in the fall of 1933 to found the weekly newspaper Deutsche Zukunft with Fritz Klein, of which he remained co-editor until 1940. From 1933 to 1942, Fechter also co-edited the Deutsche Rundschau with Rudolf Pechel. From 1937 to 1939 he was editor of the Berliner Tageblatt. In 1939 he returned to the feuilleton of the DAZ. Between 1937 and 1941, he wrote for Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's monthly Weiße Blätter. From 1938 on, Fechter was a member of the Wednesday Society, a "learned and convivial circle for scholarly entertainment," in which, from 1939 on, key protagonists of the July 1944 abortive coup against Hitler, also gathered, namely Ludwig Beck, Johannes Popitz, and Jens Jessen, although the Wednesday Society as a whole did not coincide with the group of conspirators. Fechter described the Wednesday Society in his 1948 memoir People and Times. Encounters from Five Decades.

Fechter's three literary histories from 1932, 1941, and 1952 are his best known work. His comedy Der Zauberer Gottes was to have premiered in Königsberg on November 2, 1941, but the premiere was postponed until January 11, 1942 and banned after the dress rehearsal. According to Fechter's own account, this was done on the instructions of the RMVP and at the urging of the SS and SD. The premiere did not take place until October 23, 1948, at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg.

In September 1943, Fechter was summoned by the Imperial Association of the German Press to appear before the Berlin District Court on charges of being "an enemy of the National Socialist worldview." The cause, in Fechter's estimation, was his work on a book about Barlach in 1935, the comedy Der Zauberer Gottes, as well as the overall impression that had led to his being placed on the "party's blacklist." Fechter was able to escape the trial, however, with the help of Minister Johannes Popitz and attorney Carl Langbehn because of their connections to SS-Obergruppenführer Müller.

After World War II, Fechter wrote for the feuilleton of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, among other publications. In the German Democratic Republic, Fechter's History of German Literature (1941) was placed on the list of books to be suppressed. Later in life, he worked on a biography of his West Prussian friends the Siewert sisters, — the writer Elisabeth Siewert and the painter Clara Siewert — but he postponed its completion in favor of a new edition of his monumental study on the "European Drama". His unfinished fragment of the Siewert biography was published after his death by Carl Lange in the West Prussia Yearbook 1964.

Paul Fechter died in Berlin at 77 years of age. Fechter's estate is housed in the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar.

Works

• Der Expressionismus (1914)
• Wanderstunden in Wilna (1915; under the pen name Paul Monty)
• Die Tragödie der Architektur (1922)
• Gerhart Hauptmann (1922)
• Die Kletterstange (1925)
• Der Ruck im Fahrstuhl (1927)
• Das wartende Land (1931)
• Agnes Miegel (1933)
• Moeller van den Bruck (1934)
• Die Fahrt nach der Ahnfrau (1935)
• Sechs Wochen Deutschland (1936)
• Der Herr Ober (1940)
• Der Zauberer Gottes. Eine Komödie (1940)
• Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (1941; revised new edition, 1954)
• Die Berlinerin (1943)
• Menschen und Zeiten. Begegnungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten (1948)
• An der Wende der Zeit. Menschen und Begegnungen (1949)
• Kleines Wörterbuch für literarische Gespräche (1950)
• Alle Macht den Frauen (1950)
• Zwischen Haff und Weichsel. Jahre der Jugend (1954)
• Deutscher Osten. Bilder aus West- und Ostpreußen (1955; reprinted as West- und Ostpreußen. Bilder aus dem deutschen Osten, 1962)
• Menschen auf meinen Wegen. Begegnungen gestern und heute (1955)
• Das europäische Drama, Geist und Kultur im Spiegel des Theaters (1956–58; 3 volumes)
• Ernst Barlach (1957)

References

• Frommholz, Rüdiger (1961). "Fechter, Paul Otto Heinrich". In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). 5. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, p. 39.
• Cwojdrak, Günther (1955). Der Fall Fechter. Eine Streitschrift. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.
• Hermand, Jost (1984). "All Power to the Women: Nazi Concepts of Matriarchy," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. XIX, No. 4, pp. 649–67.
• Hoffmann, Meike (2017). "Hildebrand Gurlitt and His Dealings with German Museums during the "Third Reich"," New German Critique, No. 130, pp. 35–55.
• Zeising, Andreas (2008). "Revision der Kunstbetrachtung. Paul Fechter und die Kunstkritik der Presse im Nationalsozialismus". In: Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters & Barbara Schellewald, eds., Kunstgeschichte im „Dritten Reich“. Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken. Berlin: Akademieverlag, pp. 171–86.
• Zeising, Andreas (2015). "Paul Fechter: »Der Expressionismus«". In: Uwe Fleckner & Maike Steinkamp, eds., Gauklerfest unterm Galgen. Expressionismus zwischen »nordischer« Moderne und »entarteter« Kunst. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 96–101.

External links

• Works by Paul Fechter at Gallica
• Works by Paul Fechter at Open Library
• Works by Paul Fechter at German National Library