Friedrich Griese

File:Friedrich Griese 1928.jpg

Friedrich Griese in 1928

Friedrich Griese (2 October 1890 – 1 July 1975) was a German novelist. He was associated with the nationalist literary movement during the Third Reich. In the first half of the 20th century, Griese was at times considered the most important author of Mecklenburg regional literature. Under National Socialism, he was highly honored as a blood-and-soil poet.

Biography

Friedrich Griese was born in Lehsten, Waren, the son of a farmer. He attended the teacher training colleges in Neukloster and Lübtheen and worked from 1913 as an elementary school teacher in Stralendorf near Parchim. During the World War I Griese volunteered as a soldier. Almost deaf after being wounded, he was discharged from military service in 1916 and worked again in Stralendorf as a teacher until 1926.

From the fall of 1926 to the spring of 1931, Griese was a teacher at a boys' elementary school in Kiel. To promote his poetic activity, Griese was appointed principal in 1931 and granted leave from teaching with full pay.

He was influenced by Scandinavian authors such as Knut Hamsun, Selma Lagerlöf and Jens Peter Jacobsen and by Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. In his first novel Fire (1921) he dealt with the subject of "war returnees" with an autobiographical touch. Already here Griese's main literary theme can be found, the mystification of peasant life and the transfiguration of an agrarian-pre-industrial Mecklenburg world. Other novels such as Ur (1922), Das Korn rauscht (1923) and Alte Glocken (1925) as well as plays soon followed.

His first major novel success was Winter (1927), for which he received two awards and which was reprinted several troughout the 20th century. The book depicts the downfall of a Mecklenburg village, which only a young couple escapes. "Close to the land like no other among German poets" attested a contemporary reviewer to the novel and its author. The drama Mensch, aus Erde gemacht ("Man, Made of Earth") premiered in November 1932 at the Landestheater Stuttgart; it had a spectacular performance at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus Berlin in the 1933/34 season. From 1921 to 1933, Griese published fifteen books. With his literature, Griese saw himself in a "struggle of the German world with the foreign world, especially the Eastern world".

Griese wrote mostly about peasant life in northern Germany. His most important books were written before the advent of the Nazi government in 1933, so he cannot be considered so much a proponent of Nazi ideologies as a precursor to them. He wrote his first autobiography, Mein Leben, at the height of his popularity in 1934, his second one, Leben in dieser Zeit, in 1970.

Griese's novels are nostalgic both in their interest in medieval German literature and their enthusiasm for an idealized conception of the spirit of the German peasant. In this sense they are solidly within the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) school popular during the Third Reich. However, according to Charles Albert Schumann, he is more interested in connection to one's ancestors than in race as it was popularly conceived at the time. His best-known novels are Feuer, Winter, and Die Weissköpfe, all stories of agrarian life in 19th and 20th century Germany.

After the Second World War, Griese was briefly interned at the infamous NKVD Special Camp Fünfeichen. However, he was, after his release, able to write, principally as a scholar of Fritz Reuter, during the postwar years. He published one novel, Der Zug der Grossen Vögel, during this period. Like most popular Third Reich authors, he is largely forgotten in contemporary Germany, and his books can only be obtained second-hand.

In 1960, Griese became the first president of the newly established Fritz Reuter Gesellschaft (F. R. Society). In recent years the Literaturtage in Lehsten, a colloquium in Bad Doberan, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, and the Fritz Reuter Literary Archive (Fritz Reuter Literaturarchiv) Hans-Joachim Griephan Berlin have paid scholarly attention to his works. A collection of his letters and manuscripts are one of the focal points of the Fritz Reuter Literaturarchiv which also keeps an index of the more than 600 letters from and to Friedrich Griese.

Major works

Fiction

• Feuer, 1921.
• Ur, 1922.
• Das Korn rauscht, 1923.
• Alte Glocken, 1925.
• Die letzte Garbe, 1927.
• Winter, 1927.
• Die Flucht, 1928.
• Tal der Armen, 1929.
• Der ewige Acker, 1930.
• Der Herzog, 1931.
• Das Dorf der Mädchen, 1932.
• Der Saatgang, 1932.
• Das letzte Gesicht, 1934.
• Die Wagenburg, 1935.
• Bäume im Wind, 1937.
• Das Kind des Torfmachers, 1937.
• Wind im Luch, 1937.
• Die Weißköpfe, 1939.
• Die Dörfer der Jugend, 1947.
• Der Zug der großen Vögel, 1951.
• Der Wind weht nicht, wohin er will, 1960.
• Das nie vergessene Gesicht, 1962.
• So lange die Erde steht, 1965.
• Eure guten Jahre, 1974.

Nonfiction

• Mein Leben, 1934.
• Rede, gehalten bei der Stehr-Feier der Deutschen Akademie der Dichtung, 1934.
• Fritz Reuter, 1938.
• Leben in dieser Zeit, 1970.