Ernst Lissauer (16 December 1882 in Berlin – 10 December 1937 in Vienna) was a German-Jewish poet and dramatist remembered for the phrase Gott strafe England ("May God punish England"). He also created the Hassgesang gegen England, or "Song of Hate against England".
Reinhard Johannes Sorge (29 January 1892 – 20 July 1916) was a German dramatist and poet. He is best known for writing the Expressionist play The Beggar (Der Bettler), which won the Kleist Prize in 1912 and almost singlehandedly created surrealist theatre and modern theatrical stagecraft. After being subsequently received into the Roman Catholic Church, Sorge began an effort to bring the Catholic literary revival into the literature of the Germanosphere. Instead, Sorge was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in World War I in 1915. He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. Sorge's Der Bettler, however, received a posthumous premiere in a groundbreaking production by legendary Austrian Jewish stage director Max Reinhardt in 1917.
Hans Leip (22 September 1893 – 6 June 1983), was a German novelist, poet and playwright, best remembered as the lyricist of Lili Marleen.
Leip was the son of a former sailor and harbour-worker at the port of Hamburg. He was educated there, and in 1914 became a teacher in the Hamburg suburb of Rothenburgsort. In 1915 he was called up by the German army and after training in Berlin served on the Eastern front and in the Carpathians. After being wounded in 1917 he was discharged on medical grounds.
He first had ambitions as an artist, but then turned to writing, although he illustrated his books himself. In the 1920s, he travelled extensively, to Paris, London, Algiers and New York City, among other places. His breakthrough as a novelist was with the success of Godekes Knecht, which was awarded the prize of the Kölnische Zeitung newspaper. His novels sold well in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, while he also wrote plays, short stories, poems, dramas and was also a painter and sculptor.
Rudolf Kinau, also known as Rudi Kinau (23 March 1887 – 19 November 1975) was a Low German writer.
Johann Wilhelm Kinau (22 August 1880 – 31 May 1916), better known by his pseudonym Gorch Fock (German pronunciation: [ɡɔʀx fɔk]), was a German author. Other pseudonyms he used were Jakob Holst and Giorgio Focco.
Hans Leybold (2 April 1892 – 8 September 1914) was a German expressionist poet, whose small body of work was a major inspiration behind much of the Dada movement, in particular the works of his close friend Hugo Ball. Although Leybold died two years before the emergence of Dada, his absurdist writings and poems represent an important stage in the development of expressionist movement in Germany.
Born into a middle-class family in Frankfurt am Main, Leybold was raised in Hamburg where he completed his schooling in 1911 and joined the German Army. In his compulsory year of conscription he impressed his superior officers so much he was offered a commission and embarked on a military career. Taking a leave of absence to attend university, Leybold traveled to Munich to study German literature and whilst there he fell in with the crowd of German poets and authors who would head the Dada movement post-war. These figures included Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Klabund, Johannes R. Becher, Franz Jung and most importantly of all his particular friend Hugo Ball. It was Ball who interested Leybold in the expressionist movement and soon the two of them were soon producing poetry together under the pseudonym Ha Hu Baley. In the company of these authors, Leybold experimented wildly with technique and imagery in his poetry, seeking both to develop his skills and in the process deconstruct poetry itself, heavily influenced by Alfred Kerr and Friedrich Nietzsche. In consequence of his literary experimentation, his studies went neglected and he began to edit and contribute to expressionist magazines, such as Die Aktion and his own work, the short lived magazine Revolution, in which he and his colleagues issued their literary manifesto.
"Protect yourself against responsibilities! Hit out: against old household rubbish! And if some valuable piece gets torn up in the process: what does it matter? You respected people! You well-polished ones! You bigwigs! We ought to stick our tongues out at you! Boys, you'll say. Old men! we'll reply"
In August 1914 the First World War erupted and Leybold was immediately called up as an active reservist. Less than a month later, Leybold was seriously wounded during operations near Namur and was evacuated to a casualty clearing hospital. He recovered rapidly from his wound but on 8 September, the night he returned to his regiment, he committed suicide by gunshot to the head. His death was never fully explained, although a rumour persisted that he had syphilis and had given up on survival following his wound. His works were collected together many years after his death, as he never had a book published independently, and he is now recognised as an important influence both on Dadism and German expressionism itself.
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 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 (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.
Friedrich Spee (also Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld; February 25, 1591 – August 7, 1635) was a German Jesuit priest, professor, and poet, most well known as a forceful opponent of witch trials and one who was an insider writing from the epicenter of the European witch-phobia. Spee argued strongly against the use of torture, and as an eyewitness he gathered a book full of details regarding its cruelty and unreliability. He wrote, "Torture has the power to create witches where none exist."