Ulrich Becher: Ein Dichterarm im Lauf der Zeiten [A storyteller’s arm over time]
Ulrich Becher: Ein Dichterarm im Lauf der Zeiten [A storyteller’s arm over time]
On the day on which the shameful Munich peace agreement saw Czechoslovakia and with it Western democracy sold down the river, Glaeser returned to Germany. Crawled to the swastika. His sycophancy went so far that he, having once sinned against “the people and the Führer”, solemnly undertook not to write any more novels of this type, but rather to compose uplifting descriptions of scenery, for example on the majesty of the German Rhine, as a kind of party guidebook for the Ministry of Propaganda. (ed. trans.)
Ulrich Becher in his essay on Ernst Glaeser
The cord-bound red and silver booklet Blütenlese des deutschen Geistes (Anthology of the German Spirit) contains a collection of nineteen drawings by Ulrich Becher in which he caricatures a wide array of contemporary figures. The gallery ranges from Thomas Mann, Walter Mehring, Joseph Roth and Carl Zuckmayer to Hitler. It also features Ernst Glaeser in a remarkable caricature which with acerbic wit uses the angle of his arm to trace his development from the democrat of 1936 through the staunch German and Prussian to the Nazi of 1939.
In 1936, apparently at the insistence of the publisher Emil Oprecht and against the author's wishes, Glaeser was commissioned to write the foreword to Becher's volume of stories Die Eroberer (The Conquerors). One personal copy in Becher’s estate contains the note, “The author rejects four-fifths of this foreword. It has been prefixed to his book at the publisher's request.” Glaeser, who was celebrated for his anti-war novel Jahrgang 1902 (Born in 1902), which was published in 1928, had originally fled into exile in Switzerland before increasingly distancing himself from the anti-Fascist movement and returning to the Third Reich in April 1939. Like many of his colleagues, Becher saw this as a betrayal of “the other Germany” and described Ernst Glaeser’s development as the “tragedy of a short-sighted opportunist”.
Gallery
![Biedermeier book containing the manuscript of Der Hampelmann [The Jumping Jack]](/KIE/Content/EN/SpecialExhibitions/UlrichBecher-en/Images/Objects/hampelmann.jpg?__blob=thumbnail&v=1 "Biedermeier book containing the manuscript of Der Hampelmann [The Jumping Jack]")
