Background
Leonhard Frank was born on September 4, 1882, in Würzburg, Germany. He was the son of Johann, a carpenter, and Marie (Bach) Frank.
(A German love story beautifully translated into English. ...)
A German love story beautifully translated into English. Source for the 1930 German language film of the same name. Includes illustrations based on film stills.
https://www.amazon.com/Carl-Anna-Leonhard-Frank/dp/B00085HTLK/?tag=2022091-20
1930
Leonhard Frank was born on September 4, 1882, in Würzburg, Germany. He was the son of Johann, a carpenter, and Marie (Bach) Frank.
As the son of a tradesman, Leonhard Frank had little opportunity for formal education. At the age of thirteen, he left school to learn a trade himself, taking up an apprenticeship with a local mechanic, after which he held a number of other menial jobs. In 1905, however, Frank set out for Munich to study art, in which endeavor he met with some limited success.
There is little record of Frank's artistic output, aside from a 1913 collection of colored lithographs. Perhaps most important, he made enough money from the sale of his drawings to be able to make the move to Berlin in 1910 where he fell in with members of Germany’s budding expressionist movement. Sometime during these early years in Munich, Frank’s interests shifted from art to writing. In 1914, he published his first novel, Die Räuberbande (first translated into English in 1928 as The Rubberband). He met with critical success immediately. In the following year, he brought out Die Ursache: Eine Erzählung (The Cause of the Crime, 1928).
The outbreak of World War I disrupted the creative life that Frank enjoyed in Munich. His publicly avowed antiwar and pro-socialist sentiments dictated that he leave Germany, so he moved with his wife, Lisa Erdelyi to Switzerland. Here he became deeply involved in a group of pacifists and contributed anti-war stories to the Swiss journal Die Weissen Blatter. With the war’s end, however, Frank and his wife returned to his beloved Munich, where he stayed for two years until his move to Berlin in 1920. During this Munich interlude, Frank’s anti-war stories were published by a Zurich press in a collection titled Der Mensch ist gut (1918), which was roundly praised and which garnered him the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1920. A year later he brought out Die Mutter.
This period saw the publication of the novel for which he is perhaps best-known to the English-speaking public: Karl and Anna (1927) as well as the collection Im lelzten Wagen: Erzahlungen (1925, translated as The Last Coach and Other Stories), and numerous other works. It also saw Frank’s debut as a playwright, with the production of a dramatized version of Kart und Anna appearing on stages throughout Germany in 1928 and production of his 1915 novel, Die Ursache, in 1929. An original piece written for the theater, Hufnagel, soon followed in 1920, and throughout this period Frank continued with his fiction as well, publishing Bruder und Schwester: Roman (1929, translated as Brother and Sister) and Von drei Millionen Drei (1932, translated as Three of the Three Million), and other works. His reputation was at a peak, and in 1928 he was elected to the Preussische Akademie der Kunste (the Prussian Academy of the Arts).
With Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, however, Frank was no longer a welcome figure in his homeland - his books were specifically included in the famous lists of banned books, publicly burned as offensive to the Third Reich. Resigning from his appointment to the Academy, Frank once again fled his country for Switzerland, beginning a journey that took him across the European continent and ultimately brought him to the United States in 1940. Even exile, however, could not silence Frank - during his flight from capture he managed to bring out Traumgefahrten: Roman (1936, translated as Dream Mates), and Der Aussenseiter: Komodie (1937), among other works.
Upon his arrival in the United States, Frank was immediately hired by Warner Brothers as a scriptwriter, in which capacity he worked with fellow countrymen-in- exile Heinrich Mann, Alfred Doblin, and Carl Zuckrnayer, and where he enjoyed a professional friendship with novelist Thomas Mann. After five years in Hollywood, Frank moved to New York, and it was here that he wrote Die Juenger Jesu: Roman (published in Amsterdam in 1949) and Deutsche Novelle (published first in translation in 1950, published in German in 1954), but his heart remained tied to his homeland and in 1950 he returned to Germany. He ultimately returned to Munich, where he had first begun his career as a writer. He died in Munich, on August 18, 1961.
(A German love story beautifully translated into English. ...)
1930Frank was increasingly politically active, joining the Räterepublik (Soviet republic) as a member of its revolutionary council. In 1955, Frank was an idealistic socialist who never moved to a commitment to communism, as Russell E. Brown notes in Dictionary’ of Literary Biography, made a visit to the Soviet Union, but, though he never swerved from his commitment to the cause of socialism and enjoyed public acclaim in East Germany, he would never abandon his West German home in Munich.
Frank’s works consistently expressed the themes of socialism, pacifism, and passion, as well as his deep distrust of blind patriotism. These idealistic commitments drove him into exile twice and placed him in great personal danger during his flight from the Nazi regime in the late 1930s. At times his ideology earned him the enmity of his neighbors in the West Germany of the post-World War II era.
Frank's prose was compact and austere. His choice of style was used effectively to highlight his favorite theme-the damage inflicted by bourgeois society on the individual spirit. His thematic concerns are what keep his works relevant today. Literary styles have moved away from the forms Frank employed, but the power of his themes and of his prose remain.
After the war, Frank enjoyed the esteem of the literary worlds in both East and West Germany and accumulated many honors. Nonetheless, Frank’s final decade of life was marked with disappointment and a sense of alienation - themes that he developed and explored in Links, his one explicitly autobiographically based work of fiction. Frank’s reception by U.S. literary critics was less enthusiastic than in Europe. German expressionism - (and later, German realism) - frequently suffered from the attention of English translators, and Frank’s works were no exception to this.
Quotes from others about the person
“Frank's reception in his hometown of Wurzburg in 1950 was hostile, partly because of his 1949 novel Die Junger Jesu, which condemned the smugness and hypocrisy of his former fellow citizens.”
Frank married Lisa Erdelyi, on February 4, 1914, but she died in 1923. In 1929 Frank married Elena Maquenne. The couple divorced in 1952 and Frank married Charlotte London-Jager.