Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher (29 January 1899 – 31 October 1970) was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.
Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss (14 October 1899 – 10 August 1987) was a German poet. A survivor of Westerbork and Theresienstadt concentration camps, she wrote largely about the Holocaust.
Henriette Hardenberg (February 5, 1894 – October 26, 1993), born Margarete Rosenberg, was a German-Jewish poet who emigrated to Britain in the late 1930s. In the 1910s, she was part of the circle of writers around the magazine Die Aktion, which championed literary Expressionism. In her poems, she examined the relationship between people and their bodies, especially the skin as both an interface between self and world and a limiting factor. In a late interview, she said that her work expressed a desire to transcend the limits of the body. Hardenberg was one of the few women among German Expressionist writers, and one recent reevaluation of her oeuvre ranks her work among the best of the Expressionists.
Ernst Blass (17 October 17, 1890, (Berlin) – 23 January 23, 1939 (Berlin), (pseudonyms: Daniel Stabler and Erich Sternow) was an important expressionist poet, critic and writer.Blass was a close friend of Kurt Hiller and joined him at Der Neue Club, alongside other writers of early Expressionism, Georg Heym and Jakob van Hoddis. From 1911, he collaborated with the magazine Die Aktion, before distancing himself from Franz Pfemfert in 1914.In Das Wesen der neuen Tanzkunst (The essence of the new dance art) Blass set out to identify abstract categories whereby "a new dance art" could be outlined. He described how the anthroposophical breathing methods taught at Loheland could transform the "marionette" into an animal form which could then leap in an ecstatic manner. In this he was responding to previous theories of dance, such as produced by Heinrich von Kleist who had written in 1807 a short text "Über dem Marionette Theater" according to which the dancer became a marionnette without either will or consciousness.In 1980 Thomas B. Schumann published a three volume collection of Blass' poetry (Volume 1), short stories (Volume 2) and various essays (Volume 3).
Sebastian Droste (born Willÿ Knobloch; 2 February 1898 – 27 June 1927) was a German poet, actor, and dancer associated with the underground art subculture of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.
Droste relocated from his hometown of Hamburg to Berlin in 1919. He earned a living as a naked dancer, choreographer and expressionist poet. His first poem appeared in April edition of Der Sturm that same year, titled 'Tanz' (Dance). A further 15 poems and ‘grotesques’ appeared across 12 editions of the journal alongside other artists and poets such as Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee. He alternated between publishing under the name Willy or Willi Knobloch. Also in 1919 he published a drama in the Dresden based expressionist journal Menschen.In 1922, Droste married expressionist exotic dancer and actress in silent movies of the Berlin scene, Anita Berber. She and Droste performed fantasias with titles such as "Suicide," "Morphium," and "Mad House". Droste appeared as a dancer in the silent movie Algol.
In 1923, Droste and Berber jointly published a book of poetry, photographs, and drawings called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy), based on their performance of the same name. Full of expressionist imagery, the book offered a glimpse into the angst and cynicism shadowing their artistic and personal existences. Their marriage ended in 1923.
In 1925, Droste met with photographer Francis Bruguière in New York City where he styled himself as Baron Willy Sebastian Knobloch Droste. Together they composed over 60 photographs for a proposed expressionist film starring Drost tentatively titled The Way. UFA GmbH rejected the proposal and the photographs were instead published as part of a photographic journal in Die Dame in July 1925.
Droste was diagnosed with tuberculosis in early 1927. He returned to his parents' home in Hamburg, where he died on June 27 of the same year.
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.
Ilse Reicke (4 July 1893 – 14 January 1989) was a German writer, journalist and feminist.
