Friedrich Sieburg

File:Waldfriedhof Stuttgart, 031.jpg

Friedrich Carl Maria Sieburg (18 May 1893 – 19 July 1964) was a German writer, journalist, civil servant and literary critic.

Biography

Friedrich Sieburg was born in Altena. He came from a family of merchants. He first attended the Realgymnasium in Altena, then a humanistic grammar school in Düsseldorf. At the age of 16, he published his first poems in the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten.

Sieburg began studying philosophy, history, literature and economics in Heidelberg in 1912. In 1919, he completed his doctorate in literature in Münster (The Degrees of Lyrical Formation. Contributions to an Aesthetics of Lyrical Style). His university teachers included Max Weber and Friedrich Gundolf. He was connected to the George circle. During the First World War, he was initially an infantryman and from 1916 an air force officer.

Sieburg lived as a freelance writer in Berlin from 1919 to 1923, was a supporter of the revolution and wrote mainly film reviews during this time. From 1923 onwards, he worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Copenhagen, initially on a loose basis. In May 1926, he became its foreign correspondent in Paris. It was there that he wrote his best-known book God in France? (1929). From 1930 to 1932 he was a foreign correspondent in London, then back in Paris.

In 1929, Sieburg published an article in the young conservative monthly Die Tat, which can be seen as a departure from the general bourgeois-liberal line that characterised the Frankfurter Zeitung. In 1932, he also published several articles in the Tägliche Rundschau, which, like Die Tat, was headed by Hans Zehrer, whose efforts to form a cross-front alliance between left-wing National Socialists around Gregor Strasser, trade unionists and Social Democrats to prevent a Imperial Chancellor Adolf Hitler were supported by Sieburg. In his book Let there be Germany, which he completed in November 1932 but which could only be published after Hitler came to power, he straddled a ‘very dangerous and very blurred line — between nationalism, criticism of “liberal thinking” and political progressiveness’, as his friend Carl Zuckmayer judged in his 1944 Geheimreport. However, this also included a resolute rejection of anti-Semitism, which is why the book was banned in 1936.

Although Sieburg had not yet committed himself to a political party in his book Let there be Germany, he did declare his support for National Socialism in the English translation, which appeared after the handover of power to the National Socialists, and advertised the ‘new Germany’ in daily newspapers abroad, which made him appear as a herald of the Imperial government to former companions Kurt Tucholsky and Lion Feuchtwanger and earned him the contempt of German émigrés. On the other hand, he disapproved of the seizure of power in letters to the publisher Heinrich Simon, for whose Frankfurter Zeitung he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris from 1932 to 1939. In his books New Portugal (1937) and The Steel Flower (1939), he found words of approval for authoritarian regimes such as those in Portugal and Japan. The biography Robespierre, which he wrote in 1935, can only be attributed to inner emigration with some reservations. As a member of the Chamber of Culture, he was by no means an opponent of National Socialism in this book on the French Revolution.

Sieburg was appointed to the German Foreign Service in 1939. According to Longerich, who cites Max W. Clauss, around two dozen journalists with close ties to the NSDAP were brought to Ribbentrop in Fuschl am See in the summer, where Friedrich Berber, who acted as their boss, issued an ultimatum for them to work abroad as propagandists. Clauss claims to have refused, while Sieburg, Hans Georg von Studnitz and Karl Megerle accepted. Sieburg worked at the German Embassy in Brussels from February 1940 as a ‘special representative’ of the Foreign Office. He was given the rank of embassy counsellor. He was in occupied France from 1940 to 1942. In a speech from March 1941 entitled France d'hier et de demain to the ‘Groupe Collaboration’, whose aim was precisely this collaboration with the Nazis, Sieburg declared that his life in France had ‘educated him to be a fighter and a National Socialist’. The NSDAP membership register contains his application for membership dated 9 April 1941, which he submitted to the NSDAP foreign organisation in Paris and which was approved on 1 September 1941. In the questionnaire from the French military government after the Second World War, he stated that he had not been a member of the NSDAP.

Sieburg returned to Germany in 1942 and worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung again until it was banned in 1943, after which he switched to the Börsenzeitung and was ‘honorary companion’ to Marshal Philippe Pétain for the Foreign Office.

Sieburg lived through the end of the war in Bebenhausen, which then belonged to the French occupation zone, and was banned from publishing by the French occupying forces (1945–1948).

Sieburg's writings New Portugal (1937) and The Red Arctic (1932) were placed on the list of literature to be discarded in the Soviet occupation zone and the German Democratic Republic respectively.

In 1948 he became a contributor to the weekly magazine Die Gegenwart, and in 1949 he also became co-editor. In his books about France, he now distanced himself strongly from National Socialism, distanced himself from a sense of particular German mentality and praised modern French literature. Working for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung after 1956, he was one of Germany's most important literary critics until his death.

In 1953, the state of Baden-Württemberg appointed him professor. He became a full member of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1956.

Friedrich Sieburg supported the Adenauer government, was an opponent of post-war literature and repeatedly criticised Group 47 in sharp and even polemical terms. As a conservative, he judged art and life according to a subjectivist standard that only recognised the exceptional.

From 1963 until his death in 1964, Sieburg lived in the Villa Schwalbenhof in Gärtringen. As a university professor of modern history in Saarbrücken, his nephew Heinz-Otto Sieburg also wrote several works on Franco-German relations.

Reception

The background to Sieburg's literary criticism was the basic diagnosis of the lack of German national identity. His work saw itself primarily as a contribution to the creation of a national identity. It represents an attempt to create an intellectual national history with literary essays and critical reviews, to sound out sensitivities and in this way to criticise the epoch.

Literature should enable Germans to reassure themselves of themselves; Sieburg wanted to use it as a national cause to work out the outlines of the multi-layered, difficult to grasp essence of German culture.

As Germany seemed to have been politically disqualified by National Socialism, the reconstruction work that Sieburg's literary criticism up to the 1950s must be regarded as was to be based solely on the ‘spiritual’.

Thomas Mann's interpretation of the German national character can be seen as an intellectual coordinate system for Sieburg's contemporary and literary criticism. For Mann, the German relationship to the world was ‘abstract and mystical’, ‘musical’ as it were, and at the same time determined by the arrogant awareness of being ‘superior to the world in depth’. Sieburg enriched these explanatory patterns, which were expressed in Doctor Faustus and the Deutschlandrede and linked National Socialism with German inwardness, with specifically French elements. Thus, in contrast to the French, he now described the Germans as a people who failed in the face of life.

Sieburg's work as a writer and literary critic was judged controversially. While members of Gruppe 47 rejected him and Alfred Andersch insulted him, there were judgments which, for all their criticism over his political past, also highlighted his achievements and endeavoured to understand and appreciate Sieburg's aesthetic standards as a critic.

Thomas Mann, for example, was deeply impressed by a review of Felix Krull, which Sieburg had praised effusively in the 1954 essay Culture is Parody, speaking of the unspeakable intellectual pleasure that this work, the great parodied successor to Wilhelm Meister, provided. It was unthinkable ‘that a mortal writer could handle language in a more accomplished, refined and meaningful way than Thomas Mann in this picaresque novel.’

To Erika Mann, Thomas Mann described Sieburg, who had shown himself to be ‘astonishingly enthusiastic’, as a ‘strange mind’. Sieburg's book The Desire for Decline (1954) contained clever and stylistically sophisticated things, albeit from the ‘un-German perspective of literature is criticism’. Thomas Mann confided in his diary that he saw similarities with Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, although Mann later clearly distanced himself from his early, anti-democratic writing. A few years earlier, Sieburg had described Mann's work as the ‘greatest cultural-critical achievement that the German spirit has produced’ in the article Frieden mit Thomas Mann(Peace with Thomas Mann), which was published in the magazine Die Gegenwart. The starting point of this essay was the political problem of Mann's dual honouring on both sides of the Iron Curtain with the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt and honorary citizenship in Weimar. Thus, the Iron Curtain went ‘right through the centre of the fragile world of our intellectual values’.

Gottfried Benn praised Sieburg's For Readers Only — Years and Books (1955) and called it a ‘Brockhaus of literary events’. Sieburg also showed concilience towards authors who were not close to his heart. The author had written a popular book of ‘instructive foresight and exquisite literary structure’ with a great sense of style and sensitivity.

According to Klaus Harpprecht, Sieburg demonstratively and defiantly broke away from Heinrich Heine as if from a secret mentor in a ‘shameful failure’. His demonstrative patriotism during the National Socialist era was characterised by self-pity and an expression of the ‘suffering opportunism of a German bourgeois soul’. One could speak of a ‘pathos of adaptation’. For Sieburg, post-war Germany heralded the approaching barbarism in the decay of the language. The German bourgeoisie could discover many truths in his witty writings and find themselves reflected in them.

The writer Wolf Jobst Siedler described Sieburg as a ‘left-writing right-winger’ and praised him as a great stylist.

He had not conformed to the cliché that conservatism had to be dull or righteously bourgeois, while wit and witty irony were the province of the left. Friedrich Sieburg had ‘stolen the joke’ from the writers who detested him, which made him the antithesis of German post-war literature. He was a left-wing writer who wrote on the right, which bourgeois supporters overlooked. The dull polemic against him attacked him in a ‘right-wing, i.e. strong-minded way’. There is no critic of his calibre on the other side, which only increases the anger of his opponents.

Fritz J. Raddatz also called Sieburg the most influential critic of the post-war period. However, his backward-looking judgement was accidental. Although he had discovered Alexander Kluge, he had not seen Paul Celan. His conservatism had forced him to erect an unattainable standard from the past in order to condemn the present. His conspicuous ignorance of literary theory had led him to ignore contemporary debates on the history of ideas and not to ‘know’ Theodor W. Adorno, Georg Lukács and Max Horkheimer. Taste was the only criterion, his judgement was therefore tasteful, but unworldly.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki praised Sieburg as a stylist, emphasising his comprehensive education as well as his acumen and literary taste. He wrote melodically and precisely and had an unusual fondness for the saloppe as well as for dignified, somewhat antiquated expression, which further enhanced the effect of his diction. However, Sieburg later tolerated rather than encouraged him. After Reich-Ranicki had published a series of articles about GDR writers in Die Welt, Sieburg had his collaboration at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung cancelled in 1960. He feared that the competition wanted to create a counter-figure.

However, according to Reich-Ranicki, Sieburg succeeded in ‘extracting unusually comfortable aspects of National Socialist slavery for himself without making any particular concessions to the regime’. Compared to publications by other German journalists, the fatal Paris lecture of 1941 was not a pleasant document, but a rather mild one. Sieburg's genius was expressed above all in the socially critical feuilleton, and he was the first to register many phenomena of everyday life in West Germany. Despite all his stylistic and literary merits, Sieburg's late criticism was characterised by an irritable sense of self, which had been repeatedly wounded since 1945. He was primarily concerned with his own sensitivities and did not present his wounds to the public without self-pity. The description of some of his works tends towards self-defence; his lamentation of the injustice he suffered in post-war Germany is not free of tearful sentimentality. Nevertheless, he was ‘probably the wittiest, indeed the best German feuilletonist of the early post-war period’.

See also

• Günter Blöcker
• Hans Egon Holthusen

Works

• Grade der lyrischen Formung. Beiträge zu einer Ästhetik des lyrischen Stils (1919)
• Die Erlösung der Straße. Gedichte (1920)
• Gott in Frankreich? (1929)
• Frankreichs rote Kinder (1931; 1949)
• Die rote Arktis, ‚Malygins‘ empfindsame Reise (1932)
• Es werde Deutschland (1933)
• Polen, Legende und Wirklichkeit (1934)
• Robespierre (1935)
• Neues Portugal. Bildnis eines alten Landes (1937)
• Afrikanischer Frühling. Eine Reise (1938)
• Blick durchs Fenster. Aus 10 Jahren Frankreich und England (1939)
• Die stählerne Blume. Eine Reise nach Japan (1939; translated into French as La fleur d'acier (Voyage au Japon), 1942)
• Schwarzweiße Magie. Über die Freiheit der Presse (1949)
• Unsere schönsten Jahre. Ein Leben mit Paris (1950)
• Was nie verstummt. Begegnungen (1951)
• Geliebte Ferne. Der schönsten Jahre anderer Teil (1952)
• Die Lust am Untergang. Selbstgespräche auf Bundesebene (1954; 2010)
• Nur für Leser - Jahre und Bücher (1955)
• Napoleon. Die hundert Tage (1956)
• Chateaubriand. Romantik und Politik (1959; translated into English in 1961)
• Das Geld des Königs. Eine Studie über Colbert (1960)
• Helden und Opfer. Fünf historische Miniaturen (1960)
• Lauter letzte Tage. Prosa aus zehn Jahren (1961)
• Abmarsch in die Barbarei. Gedanken über Deutschland (1983; edited by Klaus Harpprecht)
• Zur Literatur: 1924–1956 (1987; edited by Fritz J. Raddatz)
• Zur Literatur: 1957–1963 (1987; edited by Fritz J. Raddatz)
• Die Fliege im Bernstein: Tagebuch vom November 1944 bis zum Mai 1945 (2022; edited with the collaboration of Klaus Deinet and with an epilogue by Joachim Kersten)

Tanslated into English

• "On Board the Malygin," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLI, No. 4383 (1931)
• "Briand," Foreign Affairs, Vol. X, No. 4 (1932)
• Who Are These French? (1932)
• "From Saint Petersburg to Leningrad," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLII, No. 4387 (1932)
• "The Future of Europe," Forum and Century, Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 4 (1932)
• "President Albert Lebrun," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLII, No. 4390 (1932)
• "England, Symbol of Capitalism," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLIII, No. 4394 (1932)
• Germany: My Country (1933)
• "Youth of France, I. The Fascist View," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLV, No. 4408 (1934)
• "From Weygand to Gamelin," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLVIII, No. 4423 (1935)
• "Revolt in North Africa," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXLVIII, No. 4424 (1935)
• "Berlin Revisited," The Living Age, Vol. CCCL, No. 4435 (1936)
• "Yvon Delbos," The Living Age, Vol. CCCLII, No. 4446 (1937)
• "Vigil in Lisbon," The Living Age, Vol. CCCLII, No. 4450 (1937)
• Robespierre: A Study of a Dictator (1937)
• "No Man's Land in Shanghai," The Living Age, Vol. CCCLVII, No. 4476 (1939)
• Chateaubriand (1961)

Selected filmography

• Tingeltangel (1922)
• City in View (1923)

References

Buddenbrock, Cecilia (2007). Friedrich Sieburg 1893–1964. Ein deutscher Journalist vor der Herausforderung eines Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: Societät.

Bullivant, Keith (1977). Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic. Manchester: Manchester University Press/Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield.

Deinet, Klaus (2014). Friedrich Sieburg (1893–1964). Ein Leben zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland. Berlin: NoRa Verlag.

Fest, Joachim (1981). Friedrich Sieburg. Ein Portrait ohne Anlass. In: Ders.: Aufgehobene Vergangenheit. Portraits und Betrachtungen. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, pp. 70–95.

Foucart, Claude (1986). "A l'ombre des clichés franco-allemands: Friedrich Sieburg face à André Gide," Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte Cahiers d'Histoire des Littératures Romanes, No. 1/2, pp. 171–83.

Klünemann, Clemens (2019). "Friedrich Sieburg: Zeitlebens ein Schrittmacher der öffentlichen Meinung". In: Wolfgang Proske, ed., Täter Helfer Trittbrettfahrer. NS-Belastete aus Baden-Württemberg, Band 10: NS-Belastete aus der Region Stuttgart. Gerstetten: Kugelberg.

Kraus, Hans-Cristof (2005). "Als konservativer Intellektueller in der frühen Bundesrepublik. Das Beispiel Friedrich Sieburg". In: Frank-Lothar Kroll, ed., Die kupierte Alternative. Konservativismus in Deutschland nach 1945. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.</ref>

Krause, Tilman (1993). Mit Frankreich gegen das deutsche Sonderbewusstsein. Friedrich Sieburgs Wege und Wandlungen in diesem Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

Kroll, Frank-Lothar (2018). "Konservatismus in Deutschland Nach 1945 – Probleme Und Perspektiven." In: Uwe Niedersen, ed., Reformation in Kirche Und Staat.: Von Den Anfängen Bis Zur Gegenwart. Duncker & Humblot, pp. 366–75.

Liebold, Sebastian (2013). Kollaboration des Geistes. Deutsche und französische Rechtsintellektuelle 1933–1940. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Longerich, Peter (1987). Propagandisten im Krieg. Die Presseabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes unter Ribbentrop. München: Oldenbourg.

Nickel, Gunther (2002). "Des Teufels Publizist. Ein „höchst komplizierter und fast tragischer Fall“. Friedrich Sieburg, Carl Zuckmayer und der Nationalsozialismus. Mit dem Briefwechsel zwischen S. und Z." In: Ulrike Weiß, ed., Zur Diskussion: Zuckmayers „Geheimreport“ und andere Beiträge zur Zuckmayer-Forschung. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 247–95.

Nickel, Gunther (2007). "Über die Schwierigkeiten politischer Hermeneutik am Beispiel Friedrich Sieburgs". In: Michael Braun & Georg Guntermann, eds., Gerettet und zugleich von Scham verschlungen. Neue Annäherungen an die Literatur der „Inneren Emigration“. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, pp. 39–58.

Nickel, Gunther (2010). "Sieburg, Friedrich." In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Vol. 24. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 331–33.

Ormesson, Wladimir d' (1931). "The Destiny of France," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXXXIX, No. 4373, pp. 569–73.

Ponthier, François (1957). "En Traduisant le “Napoléon” de Sieburg," Revue des Deux Mondes,, pp. 668–80.

Raddatz, Fritz J. (1983). Die Nachgeborenen: Leseerfahrungen mit zeitgenössischer Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.

Hohendahl, Peter Uwe; Erhard Schütz (2012). Perspektiven konservativen Denkens. Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten nach 1945. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Todorow, Almut (1996). Das Feuilleton der „Frankfurter Zeitung“ in der Weimarer Republik. Zur Grundlegung einer rhetorischen Medienforschung. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Steber, Martina (2023). "The Arduous Quest for Conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany." In: The Guardians of Concepts: Political Languages of Conservatism in Britain and West Germany, 1945-1980. Berghahn Books, pp. 107–356.

Streim, Gregor (1999). "Junge Völker und neue Technik. Zur Reisereportage im ‚Dritten Reich‘, am Beispiel von Friedrich Sieburg, Heinrich Hauser und Margret Boveri," Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Neue Folge, Vol. IX, No. 2, pp. 344–59.

Trommler, Frank (2001). “Creating a Cocoon of Public Acquiescence: The Author-Reader Relationship in Postwar German Literature." In: Hanna Schissler, ed., The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968. Princeton University Press, pp. 301–20.

Zimmermann, Harro (2015. Friedrich Sieburg – Ästhet und Provokateur. Eine Biographie. Göttingen: Wallstein.

External links

• Works by Friedrich Sieburg at JSTOR
• Works by Friedrich Sieburg at Internet Archive
• Works by Friedrich Sieburg at German Digital Library
• Works by Friedrich Sieburg at German National Library
• Friedrich Sieburg at the Internet Movie Database