Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer

Kolbenheyer, Erwin Guido (Budapest, 1878-1962, Munich), was a student at Vienna University and hoped for an academic career; he gave up this ambition after the success of his earliest works, and devoted himself entirely to authorship. In 1919 he moved to Tübingen, and in 1932 to Munich. In 1926 he was elected to the Sektion Dichtkunst of the Prussian Academy (see Akademien). His strong National Socialist leanings led in May 1933 to his nomination as one of the fourteen founder members of a newly constituted Dichterakademie. Kolbenheyer was among its most conspicuous members, and in 1933 undertook lecturing abroad on the ‘Führerprinzip’ of the National Socialist regime. After the 1939-45 War, as a result of these activities, he was forbidden to publish for five years. In fact, his only post-war work was autobiographical (Sebastian Karst über sein Leben und seine Zeit, 3 vols., 1957-8).

Kolbenheyer held philosophical and mystical ideas which, on supposed biological grounds, devalued the individual, insisting on the primacy of race. He possessed a distinct talent for historical evocation, and, in spite of intellectual perverseness, was an intelligent and fluent narrator. His principal novels, which concentrate chiefly on thinkers of the past, are Amor Dei (1908, Spinoza), Meister Joachim Pausewang (1910, in which, though Pausewang is fictitious, Jakob Böhme is prominent), a trilogy on Paracelsus, Die Kindheit des Paracelsus (1917), Das Gestirn des Paracelsus (1922), Das dritte Reich des Paracelsus (1926), and Das gottgelobte Herz (1938, a reversion to the 14th c., dealing with the mystic and nun, Margareta Ebner). In all these novels, except the first, Kolbenheyer adopted an archaic style of writing. His contemporary fiction includes the novel Das Lächeln der Penaten (1927) and the three stories of Ahalibama (1913). His first play, Giordano Bruno (1903), was followed by a second version entitled Heroische Leidenschaften, and by the plays Die Brücke, Jagt ihn—ein Mensch (all 1929), and Gregor und Heinrich (1934). The tetralogy Götter und Menschen (1944) is his last dramatic work. His verse is contained in Lyrisches Brevier (1929) and Vox humana (1940).

Kolbenheyer gave to his philosophy the curious name ‘Bauhüttenphilosophie’ (perhaps best, though freely, translated as ‘corporative philosophy’) and expounded it in the tracts Die Bauhütte (1925) and Bauhüttenphilosophie (1942). Gesammelte Werke (8 vols.) appeared 1939-41, and Gesamtausgabe der Werke letzter Hand (14 vols., 1957 ff.) is being completed posthumously.