Paul Zech
Paul Zech was a notable German poet, playwright, and translator born on February 19, 1881, in Briesen, Poland. He pursued his education in several prestigious universities and held diverse jobs, including working as a miner and a librarian. Zech initially gained recognition for his lyric poetry and short stories, transitioning to antiwar poetry during World War I. By the 1920s, he became associated with the German Socialist Republic, earning the title of "the workers' poet," particularly after his work was featured in prominent anthologies. His play "Das trunkene Schiff" gained popularity in the mid-1920s, but later scandals and criticisms of his style impacted his reputation.
With the rise of the Nazis, Zech's antifascist stance led to his arrest and subsequent exile to Argentina in 1933. In Argentina, he continued his literary career, publishing works that challenged fascist ideologies and critiqued the consequences of industrialism and European capitalism. Zech's body of work includes dramas, poetry, and novels, encompassing themes of socialism and the critique of colonialism, although many of his major works remained unpublished during his lifetime. His contributions to literature are characterized by a strict adherence to poetic form and a reflective exploration of the worker's experience.
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Paul Zech
Poet
- Born: February 19, 1881
- Birthplace: Briesen, near Thorn (now Toruń), Poland
- Died: September 7, 1946
Biography
Paul Zech was born February 19, 1881, in Briesen, near Thorn (now Toruń), Poland. He studied in Bonn, Heidelberg, and Zurich, and worked in the Ruhr as a miner and in Berlin as a librarian and playwright. Before World War I, he wrote lyric poetry and short stories; during the war, he wrote antiwar poetry. By the 1920’s, working with the propaganda service for the German Socialist Republic, he considered himself “the workers’ poet.” Twelve of his poems were anthologized in Kurt Pinthus’s Menschheitsdammerung (1920), which describes him as a major expressionist poet.
When Zech’s play Das trunkene Schiff (the drunken ship) was successfully produced in Berlin in 1926, his popularity as a writer increased. However, a series of scandals and critiques labeling his style as old-fashioned affected his reputation. His antifascist inclinations attracted the attention of the Nazis, who had come to power by then, and he was arrested and exiled in 1933. He immigrated to Argentina, where he revived his writing career by publishing poems and stories in Mexican and Chilean publications. Surrounded in Argentina by fascist sympathizers who insisted European culture was superior to all others, he tried in his writing to argue against that view and criticized the role industrialism played in causing wars and poverty and the detrimental effect of European capitalism and colonialism on its victims. His longer works, novels such as Kinder vom Parana (1952), Die Voegel des Herrn Langfoot (1954), and the one considered his masterpiece, the panoramic Deutschland, dein Taenzer ist der Tod (1980), were unpublished during his lifetime.
During his lifetime, Zech was best known for his translations and adaptations of François Villon’s works. Zech’s work covers a variety of genres: dramas that denounce decadent colonialism, lyric poetry, and novels with socialist themes. Critics say his expressionist poetry shows a strict adherence to form, and his plays well convey the crushing tedium of the worker’s life.