Isolde Kurz

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Isolde Kurz.

Maria Clara Isolde Kurz (21 December 1853 – 5 April 1944) was a German poet and short story writer. She is highly regarded among lyric poets in Germany. Her short stories are distinguished by a fine sense of form and clear-cut style.

Biography

She was born at Stuttgart, the second of five children and only daughter of the writer and librarian Hermann Kurz and his wife Marie (née Freiin von Brunnow). Marie Kurz came from an old noble family and was a great-great-grandniece of the prelate Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and great-granddaughter of his nephew, Colonel Heinrich Reinhard Ritter und Edler von Oetinger (1738–1796).

Marie Kurz taught her daughter herself. Isolde lived in Stuttgart for five and a half years until the family moved to Oberesslingen in the spring of 1859, after two moves within Stuttgart. She later described her childhood there as idyllic, but not free of conflicts between her parents' free-spirited lifestyle and upbringing and the down-to-earth views of the village population.

Isolde also learned numerous foreign languages as a child, such as English, French, Italian, Russian, Latin and Greek, and at a young age translated works by Stendhal, Gobineau, Verga and Nievo.

Some time after her father's death in 1873, Isolde Kurz moved to Munich, where her brother Erwin was living as an art student, in order to make a living by translating and teaching languages. Ludwig Pfau, a close friend of her parents, "now did me the labor of love of introducing me to Munich's circles of writers and artists," as she wrote down more than four decades later. Most notably, through Pfau's mediation, she befriended Charlotte and Robert von Hornstein and Rosalie Braun-Artaria and frequented the home of Paul Heyse, another friend of her parents.

Isolde Kurz used her first fee to have a marble monument erected for her father at the Old Cemetery in Tübingen. A year later, together with her mother and youngest brother, she accepted an invitation from her brother Edgar to visit Italy. Shortly before, Edgar had established himself as a doctor in Florence and was running a practice.

In Italy, she socialized with Adolf von Hildebrand, Hans von Marées, Arnold Böcklin, and Jacob Burckhardt, among others. She read Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy at the ladies' table of the Biblioteca Nazionale, wandered the galleries with a teacher and artist named Althofen, and planned to co-author a Cicerone with him.

After Althofen's sudden death, she used the researched material to form her Florentine Novellas, which were published by Cotta in 1890.

This was her third independent publication. In 1888 she had already published her first volume of poems, and likewise in 1890 with the collected Fantasies and Fairy Tales, which had first appeared in magazines. At the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi, she met Eleonora Duse and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio.

In 1904 she published two volumes of poetry by her brother, the physician and lyricist Edgar Kurz, who was barely a year older and had died the same year.

After 1905 she lived with her mother, whom she cared for until her death in 1911, alternately in Munich and in the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi.

In 1911, her childhood friend Ernst von Mohl returned from Russia as a widower and stood by her side as a companion until his death in 1929. Together they took a trip to Greece in 1912. In June 1933, Isolde Kurz was appointed to the Prussian Academy of Arts, which had been restructured by the NSDAP. According to the literary critic Tilman Krause, Kurz had little difficulty "adapting to the new spirit during the period of National Socialism." Yet her relationship to the German government at the time is thoroughly ambivalent.

She wrote the eulogy for the 50th birthday of Adolph Hitler only under pressure from Hanns Johst, the president of the Chamber of Culture. She noted in her diary: "All day long I have been hard pressed by the Führer poem published by the Chamber of Culture, because I see that I cannot avoid the task." Theodor Heuss had already suggested officially honoring Isolde Kurz on her eightieth birthday in his letter of November 24, 1933 to Otto Meißner ("Anregung an die Präsidialkanzlei"). It was not until ten years later that she received the Goethe Medal donated by Hindenburg from Joseph Goebbels' hand. Although she certainly remained a recognized writer in the Third Reich, she had previously signed the French manifesto against "excesses of nationalism, for Europe and for understanding between France and Germany" (1931), as well as the appeals "Against anti-Semitism" and "For the outlawing of the means of war" (May 1930).

Isolde Kurz died in the night of April 5-6, 1944, and was buried in the Tübingen City Cemetery. Her personal library is located as a deposit of the Stuttgart Cultural Office in the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

References

• Hesse, Otto Ernst (1931). Isolde Kurz. Dank an eine Frau. Tübingen: Wunderlich.
• Hillenbrand, Rainer (2000). Isolde Kurz als Erzählerin. Ein Überblick. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Jens, Inge (2008). "Isolde Kurz in Tübingen". In: Sönke Lorenz & Volker Schäfer, eds., Tubingensia. Impulse zur Stadt- und Universitätsgeschichte; Festschrift für Wilfried Setzler. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, pp. 523–36.
• Ónodi, Marion (1989). Isolde Kurz. Leben und Prosawerk als Ausdruck zeitgenössischer und menschlich-individueller Situation von der Mitte des 19. bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main / Bern / New York / Paris: Peter Lang.
• Riepl-Schmidt, Maja (1990). "Isolde Kurz. Deutsche Frau der Feder". In: Wider das verkochte und verbügelte Leben. Frauen-Emanzipation in Stuttgart seit 1800. Stuttgart: Silberburg, pp. 124–35.
• Singer, Sandra L. (1995). Free Soul, Free Women? A Study of Selected Fictional Works by Hedwig Dohm, Isolde Kurz, and Helene Böhlau. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Ujma, Christina (2015). "Florenz, die Renaissance und der Renaissancismus in Isolde Kurz’ Novellen, Kurzgeschichten und Essays," Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Vol. I, pp. 41–60.
• Walter, Eva (1996). Isolde Kurz und ihre Familie. Biographie. Mühlacker: Stieglitz.

External links

• Works by Isolde Kurz at German National Library
• Works by Isolde Kurz at Open Library
• Isolde Kurz at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database