Hasenclever, Walter
HASENCLEVER, WALTER
HASENCLEVER, WALTER (1890–1940), German poet and playwright. Born in Aachen of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, Hasenclever served in the German army during World War i but his experiences made him a pacifist. After 1918 he worked for a time as a foreign correspondent in Paris and the U.S. Leaving Germany in 1933, he eventually settled in France. After the French collapse in 1940, Hasenclever was twice interned and, fearing the arrival of the Nazis, committed suicide in a detention camp near Aix-en-Provence. A friend of the critic Kurt Pinthus and of Franz *Werfel, Hasenclever was an early expressionist who became famous with his revolutionary drama, Der Sohn (1914). This dealt with the conflict between the generations and preached resistance to blind authority. Three verse collections were Der Juengling (1913), Todund Auferstehung (1917), and Gedichte an Frauen (1922). His pacifist ideas were expressed in the plays Der Retter (1916), and Antigone (1917), while satire and pathos distinguished such later dramas as Die Menschen (1918), Gobseck (1922) and Mord (1926). In Jenseits (1920) Hasenclever briefly turned to the occult. From the late 1920s he wrote plays in a more comic or ironic spirit, such as Ehen werden im Himmel geschlossen (1928) and Napoleon greift ein (1929). He also wrote German versions of foreign plays and films, one of his collaborators being Ernst *Toller. His drama Muenchhausen, written in 1934, appeared posthumously in 1952. His collected works in five volumes (ed. D. Breuer and B. Witte) appeared in 1990–97 and a selection of his letters in two volumes (ed. D. Breuer and B. Kasties) appeared in 1994.
bibliography:
K. Pinthus, in: W. Hasenclever, Gedichte, Dramen, Prosa (1963), 6–62; H. Kesten, Meine Freunde, die Poeten (1959), 229–36; A. Soergel and C. Hohoff, Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit, 2 (1963), 274–81. add. bibliography: H. Denkler, in: B. Poll, Rheinische Lebensbilder, 4 (1970), 251–72; M. Raggam, Walter Hasenclever, Leben und Werk (1973); D. Breuer, Walter Hasenclever (1890–1940) (1990, 19962); B. Kasties, Walter Hasenclever, eine Biographie der deutschen Moderne, (1994); C. Spreitzer, From Expressionism to Exile: The Works of Walter Hasenclever (1890–1940) (1999); B. Schommers-Kretschmer, Philosophie und Poetologie im Werk von Walter Hasenclever (2000); K. Schuhmann, Walter Hasenclever, Kurt Pinthus uns Frant Werfel im Leipziger Kurt-Wolff-Verlag (1913–1919) (2000).