20th-century German poets

Rudolf_Pannwitz

Rudolf Pannwitz (27 May 1881 in Crossen/Oder, Province of Brandenburg, Prussia – 23 March 1969 in Astano, Ticino, Switzerland) was a German writer, poet and philosopher. His thought combined nature philosophy, Nietzsche, an opposition to nihilism and pan-European internationalism: Pannwitz's elusive, difficult goal may be seen as the complete re-evaluation of man, art, science and culture envisaged as the expression of an evolving cosmos obeying the laws of eternal recurrence, with Nietzsche-Zarathustra as the supreme prophet.

Johannes_Theodor_Baargeld

Johannes Theodor Baargeld was a pseudonym of Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Grünwald (9 October 1892 – 16 or 17 August 1927), a German painter and poet who, together with Max Ernst, founded the Cologne Dada group. He also used the name Zentrodada in connection with Dada.
Baargeld was born in Stettin (Szczecin), Prussian Pomerania. He studied jurisprudence at Oxford and Bonn. Baargeld was the editor of the periodical The Fan (Der Ventilator) which Ernst and Hans Arp started in 1919, and he collaborated on many other Dadaist publications such as Bulletin D and Dada W/3.

Hans_Sahl

Hans Sahl (born Hans Salomon, 20 May 1902 in Dresden – 27 April 1993 in Tübingen) was a poet, critic, and novelist who began during the Weimar Republic. He came from an affluent Jewish background, but like many such German Jews he fled Germany due to the Nazis. First to Czechoslovakia in 1933, then to Switzerland, and then France. In France he was interned along with Walter Benjamin. He would later flee Marseille and work with Varian Fry to help other artists or intellectuals fleeing Nazism. From 1941, he lived in New York. In 1952, Sahl became an American citizen. He became known as one of the anti-fascist exiles and in the US translated Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams into German. In 1989, he returned to Germany.

Oskar_Maria_Graf

Oskar Maria Graf (July 22, 1894 – June 28, 1967) was a German-American writer who wrote several narratives about life in Bavaria, mostly autobiographical. In the beginning, Graf wrote under his real name Oskar Graf. After 1918, his works for newspapers were signed with the pseudonym Oskar Graf-Berg; only for those of his works he regarded as "worth reading", he used the name Oskar Maria Graf.

Walter_Hasenclever

Walter Georg Alfred Hasenclever (8 July 1890 – 22 June 1940) was a German Jewish Expressionist poet and playwright. His works were banned when the Nazis came to power and he went into exile in France. There he was imprisoned as a "foreign enemy". He died in Les Milles (Camp des Milles) near Aix-en-Provence.

Wolfgang_Borchert

Wolfgang Borchert (German: [ˈvɔlfɡaŋ ˈbɔʁçɐt]; 20 May 1921 – 20 November 1947) was a German author and playwright whose work was strongly influenced by his experience of dictatorship and his service in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. His work is among the best-known examples of the Trümmerliteratur movement in post-World War II Germany. His most famous work is the drama Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside), which he wrote soon after the end of World War II. His works are uncompromising on the issues of humanity and humanism. He is one of the most popular authors of the German postwar period; his work continues to be studied in German schools.

Joachim_Ringelnatz

Joachim Ringelnatz is the pen name of the German author and painter Hans Bötticher
(7 August 1883, Wurzen, Saxony – 17 November 1934, Berlin). His pen name Ringelnatz is usually explained as a dialect expression for an animal, possibly a variant of Ringelnatter, German for grass snake or more probably the seahorse for winding ("ringeln") its tail around objects. The seahorse is called Ringelnass (nass = wet) by mariners, an occupation to which he felt kinship. He was a sailor in his youth and spent the First World War in the Navy on a minesweeper.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as a Kabarettist, i.e., a kind of satirical stand-up comedian.
He is best known for his wry poems using word play and sometimes bordering on nonsense poetry. Some of them are similar to Christian Morgenstern's, but more satirical in tone and occasionally subversive. His most popular character is the anarchic sailor Kuddel Daddeldu with his drunken antics and disdain for authority.
In his final thirteen years Ringelnatz was also a dedicated and prolific visual artist. The bulk of his art went missing during World War II, but over 200 paintings and drawings survived. In the 1920s some of his work was exhibited at the Akademie der Künste along with that of his contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz. Ringelnatz illustrated his own novel called "...liner Roma..." (1923), the title of which is a doubly truncated "Berliner Roman" (Berlin novel), for "Berlin novels usually have no decent beginning and no proper ending." ("Berliner Romane haben meist keinen ordentlichen Anfang und kein rechtes Ende.")
In 1933, he was banned by the Nazi government as a "degenerate artist".
Ringelnatz's widow Leonharda Pieper married Julius Gescher after Ringelnatz's death, and their son Norbert managed Ringelnatz's legacy and assembled a collection. Norbert donated the collection to the Joachim Ringelnatz Museum in Cuxhaven in 2019.