Lili Grün (1904 – 1942) was an Austrian writer and actress. Her debut novel Herz über Bord (2013) was enthusiastically received by critics. In it, she processes her experiences in the Berlin cabaret Die Brücke. Grün wrote two other novels, which are also contemporary novels of the New Objectivity. She also published poems and short stories in newspapers and magazines. Her autobiographically influenced texts deal with the loneliness of the female main characters, love and the tense relationship between the sexes, and the difficulties that young emancipated women have in finding a place in society. Grün's literary work came to an abrupt end as a result of the disenfranchisement and persecution of Jews during the Nazi Germany. In 2007, German studies scholar Anke Heimberg came across the novel Herz über Bord and began researching the writer's life and work, and her texts were published in the following years by AvivA Verlag in Berlin.
Life
Childhood, youth, education
Lili Grün was born on 3 February 1904 as Elisabeth Grün in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. She was the youngest child of Ármin Grün, a Hungarian merchant from Élesd, and his wife Regina Grün, née Goldstein.Anke Heimberg gibt als alternativen Vornamen der Eltern Hermann und Regine an. Vgl. Her three siblings were Frieda (1890), Karl (1894) and Grete (1896). The family lived from 1909 at Arnsteingasse 33 in Reindorf, part of what is now Vienna's 15th district Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus. The father was a moustache bandage manufacturer and sold perfumery and hairdressing supplies in a store on the first floor of the apartment building.
At the beginning of August 1915, Regina Grün died unexpectedly of a cerebral stroke at the age of 47, which for the eleven-year-old Lili probably meant "the end of her until then very sheltered childhood." In January 1922, her father succumbed to a chronic kidney disease at the age of 56. Thus Grün became an orphan before her 18th birthday. Who took over the guardianship is unknown. After graduating from Volksschule and public school in 1918, she trained as a clerk.
In the summer of 1921, Grün gave "Theaterelevin" as her occupation on her Vienna registration form, indicating that she was taking private acting lessons. From 1920 to 1924, she appeared on stage at the Volkstheater in all 60 performances of Henrik Ibsen's drama Peer Gynt, playing the role of Troll. From the 1920s, she also participated in the newly founded stage of Sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend. She probably played a first leading role at a theater in the provinces.
Lili Grün's brother, Karl, had begun studying law and philosophy in Vienna, was drafted and seriously wounded in the war. Afterwards he could not finish his studies and made his way as a private teacher. On 25 March 1923, he was arrested for attempted counterfeiting. In July 1926, Grete's sister married Hellmuth Bettauer, the son of the writer Hugo Bettauer, who publicly advocated sexual education, impunity for homosexuality, and emancipation of women, and who died in 1925 as a result of an assassination attempt. Hellmuth moved in with Grete to live with Lili Grün in Arnsteingasse, continuing her father's commitment. Grün's contact with Hugo Bettauer and her youth in Red Vienna shaped her later literary work.Katharina Achtsnith: Von Indianermädchen und Schafen. Die „Neue Frau“ zwischen Realität und Fiktion in Lili Grüns Romanen „Herz über Bord“, „Loni in der Kleinstadt“ und „Junge Bürokraft übernimmt auch andere Arbeit“. Diplomarbeit. Vienna 2014, p. 97.
Berlin years At the end of the 1920s, there was high unemployment among theater professionals in Vienna. Since under these conditions the chances of finding employment as an actress were slim, Grün left her hometown and moved to Berlin. There, however, the job opportunities were no better. Erich Kästner stated in April 1929: "One may assume without exaggeration that in a city like Berlin there are significantly more actors without engagements than those with engagements." Many artists lived under precarious conditions; the situation of actors was "characterized by inadequate nutrition, poor clothing, extremely modest living conditions, as well as illness [...]" (Anke Heimberg). The situation of actors in Berlin was not as good as in Berlin.
Grün worked as a saleswoman and kitchen assistant in a café confectionery and founded the political-literary cabaret collective Die Brücke with like-minded people in the spring of 1931. In May, they premiered their own evening program in the basement of the Künstlerhaus of the Verein Berliner Künstler at Bellevuestraße 3. The artistic director of Die Brücke was Julian Arendt. The "good twenty young 'creatives'" also included Ernst Busch, Hanns Eisler, Annemarie Hase, Erik Ode, Erwin Straus, and Margarethe Voss.
From 1929 on, Grün published her own poetry and short prose in several newspapers, such as Tempo and UHU, but also in Berliner Tageblatt, Prager Tagblatt, and Wiener Tag. It is not known which texts she read in the Brücke performances. What is certain is that her performances met with a positive response: "Lily Grün brings delightfully cheeky poems," noted Das 12 Uhr Blatt on 5 May 1931, and the Vossische Zeitung on 7 May 1931, characterized Grün's texts as "witty-sentimental poems." The Berliner Film-Kurier wrote of one performance, "... carries eroticism, very personal and very amusing."
After a few weeks, the cabaret had to close because audience numbers were dwindling. The premises were only vacant anyway because the cabaret Die Katakombe, which was based there, was on a summer tour. "Communist inflammatory cabaret" was what the Deutsche Tageszeitung called the Brücke's program as early as 5 May 1931. Possibly the more politically radical orientation compared to the Katakombe contributed to the decline in audiences. Despite this failure, the years in Berlin were significant for Grün: it was here that she found writing. On the other hand, it was apparently in Berlin that she contracted tuberculosis as a result of living conditions marked by poverty and professional strain.
Vienna, Prague, Paris
The exact time of Grün's return to Vienna is not known. One motivation was the intention to "get rid of her lung tip catarrh in a sanatorium." For the years 1932 to 1940 the place of residence is given as the Gemeindebau apartment at Marktgasse 45 in Alsergrund.Heimberg gibt als Adresse die Wagnergasse 5 an. Vgl. Die Straße wurde 1955 in Reznicekgasse umbenannt. Vgl. Grüns Wohnung befand sich in einem Eckhaus, das an beide Straßen angrenzt. In May 1932, she was awarded second best in a talent competition of the cabaret Simpl, in which 50 up-and-coming artists participated, by a jury headed by Hans Nüchtern. For the critics, Lili Grün was "a kind of female Joachim Ringelnatz."Entdeckungsfahrt in die Bundesländer. „Simpl“ sucht junge Talente. – Die Zigarrenkiste als Geige. – Ein weiblicher Joachim Ringelnatz. In: ANNO.
In Vienna, she processed her experiences around Die Brücke in the novel Herz über Bord. It was published in March 1933 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag and was praised, for example, in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt as "a very noteworthy contribution to the contemporary history of the young generation." Grün was nominated for the Julius Reich Poet Prize in the same year. In the same year Grün was nominated for the Julius Reich Poet Prize.
Grün subsequently found no possibility of publication for a story entitled Anni hat Unrecht, but was able to obtain an advance payment from Zsolnay Verlag on an exposé for the novel Loni in der Kleinstadt. She left Vienna again in October 1933. Anke Heimberg explains the move away with the Fatherland Front in Austria. The government in Vienna increasingly looked to the Italian fascism as a model. With her partner, Ernst Spitz, Grün traveled via Prague (1933/1934) to Paris (1934/1935).
In the French capital, her health and economic situation deteriorated. The advance payment was soon used up; the royalties from Herz über Bord were not enough. In November 1934, she sold the copyrighted title of her debut novel to Berlin's Allegro Theaterverlag so that it could call an operetta by Eduard Künneke "Herz über Bord." The money could not alleviate Grün's plight: It did not reach her until June 1935, when she was again living in Vienna, to which she had returned in early 1935, seriously ill, and had apparently once again moved into the apartment at Marktgasse 45.
Zsolnay Verlag conducted a fundraising campaign to finance her stay at a spa in Merano for several weeks in the spring of 1935. The novel Loni in der Kleinstadt was finally published as a serialized novel in the Wiener Tag from 7 August 1935,Loni in der Kleinstadt. Von Lili Grün. In: Der Tag / Der Wiener Tag, 7. August 1935, p. 12 (online bei ANNO). and as a book in the Bibliothek zeitgenössischer Werke, a Zurich branch of Zsolnay Verlag, in October. The last novel Junge Bürokraft übernimmt auch andere Arbeit was published in serialized form in the Wiener Tag in 1936/1937. It was not published in book form until 2016 by AvivA Verlag.
Persecution and death
After the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938 and the associated persecution and disenfranchisement of Austrian Jews, it was no longer possible for the Jew Lili Grün to work as a writer. She was prevented from emigrating abroad because of her poor health and lack of funds. The "Ordinance Introducing the Law on Tenancies with Jews in the Ostmark" of 10 May 1939, made it possible for apartment owners to terminate Jewish tenants without notice at any time. Grün, too, was forcibly relocated several times and last lived in a "collective apartment" at Neutorgasse 9 in the Innere Stadt.
On 27 May 1942, she was deported with 980 others in Transport No. 23 from Vienna to Minsk and murdered on the very day of her arrival, 1 June 1942, in the Maly Trostenets extermination camp. With her, the Austrian poet and storyteller Alma Johanna Koenig met her death. The two writers were buried in a mass grave. Presumably, almost all of the deportees were shot by a Sonderkommando of the Waffen-SS consisting of about 80 people. In Maly Trostenets, the largest extermination camp on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union at that time, three "gas vans" were also used from the beginning of June 1942.
Literary creation
Herz über Bord (1933)
Origin
Grün's debut novel, Herz über Bord, was published by Paul Zsolnay Verlag on 16 March 1933, in an edition of 3,000 copies. The author Robert Neumann had placed the author with the publisher. In it, she processed her experiences that she had gathered as a member of the literary-political cabaret Die Brücke in Berlin in 1931. In the novel, the cabaret collective is called Jazz. The title of the new edition of Alles ist Jazz, published by AvivA Verlag in 2009 under the direction of Anke Heimberg, refers to this. The publisher justified the deviation from the original novel title with title protection.Corinna Prey: Leben und Werk der Schriftstellerin Lili Grün. Magisterarbeit. Wien 2011, p. 91, urn:nbn:at:at-ubw:1-29378.70658.561563-7.
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