Walter Hasenclever - Life and Career

Life and Career

The son of the doctor Carl Georg Hasenclever (1855–1934) and his wife Mathilde Anna (1869–1953), Walter Hasenclever began studying law at Oxford University in 1908 before changing to the University of Lausanne. From 1909 to 1914 he studied in Leipzig, where he became interested in literature and philosophy. In 1910 he published his first volume of poems, Towns, nights and people (Städte, Nächte und Menschen). In 1914 his play The Son (Der Sohn) was his first successful Expressionist drama.

At first, Hasenclever was pro-war and volunteered for military service; soon, however, he came to reject the war. He simulated mental illness and was released from duty. That same year he was presented with the Kleist Prize for his passionate adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone. He was a good friend of the artist Oskar Kokoschka who depicted him in his 1918 work "The Friends" with Käthe Richter in Dresden, where Hasenclever was recuperating from his "illness" in a sanatorium.

In 1924, Hasenclever met Kurt Tucholsky; at this time he worked as a French correspondent for the magazine 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, spending a lot of time in Paris, where he also befriended the dramatist Jean Giraudoux. In 1926 he produced the successful comedy A Better Gentleman (Ein besserer Herr) and in 1928 the comedy Marriages are Made in Heaven (Ehen werden im Himmel geschlossen). In 1930, he wrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for Greta Garbo; at this time he lived in Berlin in an "artists' colony". When the National Socialists took power in 1933, his works were banned, burnt during the book burning, then removed from libraries. Hasenclever went into exile in Nice. In 1934, he married Edith Schläfer there.

During the Second World War Hasenclever was imprisoned twice as a "foreign enemy" in France. When France fell to Germany, he was in the prison camp of Camp des Milles in the South East of France. In the early hours of 22 June 1940 he took his own life with an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal, so as not to fall into the hands of the Nazis.