PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE 170
Richard Dehmel
LIFE
The son of a forester, Richard Fedor Leopold Dehmel was born on November 18, 1863. His birthplace was Hermsdorf near Wendisch Buchholz (now a part of Münchehofe) in the Prussian province of Brandenburg.
Attending school in Hermsdorf, young Richard got his first impressions of nature wandering the oak forests tended by his father. Dehmel then attended the Sophiengymnasium in Berlin. However, he was soon expelled after clashing with the headteacher.
After finishing school in Danzig, Dehmel studied natural sciences, economics, literature, and philosophy at various universities: first at Friedrich Wilhelm in Berlin, then Leipzig. At the latter, he obtained a doctorate in economics with a thesis on the insurance industry in 1887.
Dehmel got his first job working as a secretary at a fire insurance association. He remained in this position… until after the publication of his second volume of poetry. As a result, Dehmel became a full-time writer.
In 1889, Dehmel married Paula Oppenheimer, the sister of Franz Oppenheimer. Richard became active as a freelance writer and co-founded Pan magazine in 1894. Sadly, he divorced Paula after ten years of marriage. Dehmel then traveled Europe with Ida Auerbach (née Coblentz), who had formerly been engaged to Dehmel’s rival Stefan George. Richard and Ida married in 1901 and settled in Hamburg.
Dehmel held a belief in the mystical power of love and sex. He came to view the sensual relations between a man and a woman as the basis for a full development of the human personality and for a higher spiritual life. Dehmel’s use of sexual themes was not only passionate but (for the times) shockingly frank. His 1896 poetic work Weib und Welt (Woman and World) triggered a scandal. It was denounced by the staunch conservative poet Börries von Münchhausen, and Richard Dehmel was tried for obscenity and blasphemy. Despite being acquitted on technical grounds, the court condemned the work as obscene and blasphemous… and ordered that it be burned. Again, Dehmel was prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy, and again, he was acquitted.
Richard Dehmel was also a champion of workers’ rights. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, he extolled individualism and a life of uninhibited instincts and passion. At the same time, Dehmel felt drawn to self-sacrifice and the search for harmonious ethical ideas. This conflict shaped both his tempestuous personal life and the content and style of his work. The latter is characterized by passionate and vigorous expression and by an ecstatic rhetoric that can be sensitive at its finest and sensational at its worst.
But despite his record of fighting right-wing figures, Dehmel joined the many patriotic and pro-war German intellectuals who frenzied the masses to support the Fatherland with the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914.
At that time, Dehmel was not quite fifty-one years old… well past the prime age of a German soldier. Nevertheless, he quickly volunteered and served in the Imperial German Army for the next two years. In 1916, Dehmel was wounded and discharged from active duty. But he remained a patriot and called on his fellow countrymen to keep fighting… right until the guns fell silent in November 1918. His immediate disillusionment with the war was expressed in his last work: a diary entitled Zwischen Volk und Menschheit (Between People and Humanity), published in 1919.
Sadly, the after-effects of his war wound caught up with Richard Dehmel. He died in Blankenese (in Schleswig-Holstein) on February 8, 1920 at the age of fifty-six. His autobiography was published posthumously two years later.
LITERARY LEGACY
Richard Dehmel is considered one of the foremost German poets of the pre-Great War era. His poems are finished in form and use numerous metrical patterns. They were also set to music by noted composers and musicians:
– Richard Strauss (who also met Hugo von Hofmannsthal at Dehmel’s house)
– Max Reger
– Alexander von Zemlinsky
– Arnold Schoenberg
– Luise Schulze-Berghof
– Oskar Fried
– Alma Mahler
– Anton Webern
– Ignatz Waghalter
– Carl Orff
– Kurt Weill
Dehmel’s works also inspired these individuals to write music. His primary theme of “love and sex” was used as a springboard to escape traditional middle-class values. Dehmel’s “Verklärte Nacht” was set to two different forms of music by Schoenberg, and both became very popular.
NOTABLE WORKS
– Erlösungen, poems 1891
– Aber die Liebe, poems 1893
– Weib und Welt, poems 1896
– Zwei Menschen. Roman in Romanzen, 1903
– Die Verwandlungen der Venus, poems 1907
– Michel Michael, comedy 1911
– Schöne wilde Welt, poems 1913
– Die Menschenfreunde, drama 1917
– Mein Leben, autobiography 1922 (posthumously)