Paul Ernst

Background

Paul Ernst was born on March 7, 1866, in Elbingerode, Germany. He was the son of Johann Christian Friedrich Wilhelm, a mine foreman, and Charlotte Dittmann Ernst.

Education

As a young man, Ernst studied at several notable universities, including those at Goettingen and Tuebingen, and moved to Berlin in 1886 to study literature at that city’s university. There he became involved in a literary society named “Durch,” or “Through,” and befriended fellow students and writer-hopefuls who, like Ernst, were intrigued by the ideals of Marxism and theories of socialism. Ernst then finished his studies at the University of Bern, from which he received his doctorate in 1892.

Paul's dissertation bore the weighty title Die gesellschaftliche Reproduktion des Kapitals bei gesteigerter Produktivitaet der Arbeit (“The Social Reproduction of Capital through Increased Productivity of Labor”), and was published in 1894.

Career

Ernst's first book, Leo Tolstoi und der slavische Roman (“Leo Tolstoy and the Slavic Novel”), appeared in 1889. Around 1897, Ernst began working as a freelance journalist and was encouraged in his more creative efforts at playwriting by a number of writers and poets whom he had befriended, including Richard Dehmel, Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. His first works for the stage were published in 1898, in the same volume: Lumpenbagasch; Im Chambre Separee. The first play, a comedy whose title means “Riff-Raff,” premiered at Berlin’s Theater der Urania in March of 1898. The second play, Im Chambre Separee, was debuted at the same theater ten months later. The plays failed to achieve their hoped-for success. During this period of his career, Ernst also wrote his first novel, 1904’s Der Schmale Weg zum Glueck (“The Narrow Path to Happiness”). Der Schmale Weg was well received and widely read.

Dejected, Ernst burned several plays, but from the ashes saved a few sections and began creating longer dramatic works. Wenn die Blaetter fallen (“When the Leaves Fall”) and Der Tod (“Death”), published together with the subtitle Zwei Trauerspiele (“Two Tragedies”) in 1900, were the fruits of this labor. The first work consists of maudlin dialogues between a fatally ill woman, Marie, and her romantic interest, Reinhold, who is also doomed. The second play, Death, was another similarly bleak deathroom drama, and never even saw production.

Ernst traveled to Italy in the early years of the century, which instilled in him an even deeper appreciation for classical literature and culture. After returning to Germany, Ernst moved to Weimar in 1903 and remained there for the next eleven years, except for a stint writing plays in Duesseldorf around 1905. He had had some success in that latter city in 1910 with the production of Eine Nacht in Florenz (“A Night in Florence”). Canossa, another of Ernst’s classical plays, was published in 1908, followed the next year by the play which Ernst’s admirers consider his masterpiece.

Ernst began to enjoy more commercial success with his stage works, though he continued a career as editor of a prolific number of volumes from classical German or Romance literature. One of his more popular works was the 1911 play Der Hulla (“The Beggar”), which ran in several cities. Ernst had authored several nonfiction works, based on theories he shared with Lukács, such as 1912’s Ein Credo and Der Zusammenbruch des Marxismus, but broke with Lukács World War I.

Living in Upper Bavaria during the first part of the 1920s, Ernst worked on an exhaustive six-volume project containing over 100,000 verses called Das Kaiser- buch. Published from 1923 to 1928, it was a compendium of the German emperors and their regimes from 990 to 1250. He also wrote other works of a similarly exhaustive scope, such as 1928’s Geschichten von deutscher Art and Deutsche Geschichten, published in 1934; both titles are translated as “German Stories.” His Erdachte Gespraeche (“Imaginary Conversations”), published in 1921 as volume 12 of Ernst’s Gesammelte Werke, was a popular topic in German intellectual circles.

In early 1933, the Nazi government named Ernst one of fourteen founding members of its newly-created Deutsche Academie fuer Dichtung (“German Academy of Poetry”), but he died at his home in Sankt Georgen, Austria, before its first meeting.

Achievements

• Paul Ernst enjoyed an extraordinarily prolific career as a playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, editor, and translator during the first three decades of the twentieth century in Germany, but his prodigious output was often at odds with literary fashions, or thematically disjointed in itself, and as a result, critical and commercial success eluded him until quite late in life.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Der Junge Paul Ernst, 1866-1886
  • Über Dichtungen von Paul Ernst
  • Der Harz
  • Lange Rube Und Genossen
  • Der Zusammenbruch Des Marxismus
  • Beitrag Zur Kenntnis Der Tertiarflora Aus Dem Gebiete Des Vierwaldstatter Sees

Politics

Like the Russian writer, Ernst held to conservative beliefs about art and its role in society. As with many other young German writers of his day, however, Ernst espoused a more radical political doctrine and even began a correspondence with political theorist Friedrich Engels around this time. For a time he was a member of Berlin’s Social Democratic party - he moved to that city once more when he was hired as editor of the Berliner Volkstribuene - but found himself in disagreement over the party’s platform and cut his ties with it in 1896. He had also become involved in Die neue freie Volksbuehne (The New Free People’s Stage), a left-leaning theater group.

Views

In 1906, one of Ernst’s nonfiction works, Der Weg zur Form: Aesthetische Abhandlungen vornehmlich zur Tragoedie und Nove lie (“The Way to Form: The Aesthetics of Tragedy and of the Novella”), engendered a minor literary sensation. In it, he argued that works for the stage should possess a “redemptive” purpose, and espoused a revival of classical themes and ideas. The plays he wrote around this era adhered to these ideas: among them was Demetrios, first performed in Weimar in 1910.

The heavy themes and moral topics that Ernst tried to raise in some of his plays made them, despite the relative sophistication of the German playgoing public, less than commercially successful. Critics also faulted his inability to create sympathetic characters with whom the audience felt empathy; even stage professionals reportedly disliked having to perform his works.

Personality

Paul's plays were often adaptations of classical Greek or old German myths, and in his nonfiction work, Ernst evinced a deep reverence for German culture and history. Because of these two elements, his works came into official Nazi favor after the seizure of state power in Germany by Adolf Hitler in 1933.

In the interim period between the arrival of Nazi politics in Germany and Ernst’s death, his career as a playwright - dormant for over a decade - enjoyed a resurgence.

Quotes from others about the person

• “His social philosophy was uncompromisingly conservative and in sympathy with the sentiments that prepared the ground for National Socialism.” - Victor Lange
  
  “Ernst began to see himself as a dramatist with no proper stage for his works and no audience capable of understanding him.” - Juergen G. Sang
  
  “There is no doubt about Paul Ernst’s talent for writing novellas and short stories. His dramas, however, are not of equal value with his narrative works. The meaning behind the plots of his more than two dozen colorful one-act plays, comedies, and tragedies often eludes readers and viewers alike. The dramas present an ideologically erratic spirit which was also reflected in Ernst’s personal struggles with political and aesthetic issues.” - Juergen G. Sang
  
  “Increasingly he became convinced of the importance of reasserting the grand and formal design of sustained tragedy and altogether abandoned his materialist faith in favor of an uncompromising sort of idealism.”

Connections

Ernst was married to a Russian woman but she died and he married Luise von Benda. They divorced and, in 1916, Paul married Else Apelt.

Father:

Johann Christian Friedrich Wilhelm

Mother:

Charlotte Dittmann Ernst

Wife:

Luise von Benda

Wife:

Else Apelt