Franz Janowitz

Franz Janowitz (28 July 1892 – 4 November 1917) was an Austrian-Jewish poet, who wrote in German.

Life and work Franz Janowitz was born on 28 July 1892 in Poděbrady, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic). He was the younger son of the German-Jewish factory owner Gustav Janowitz (1849–1923) and his wife Hermine (née Schick) (1866–1924). He had two older brothers,

Two years after Janowitz's death, Karl Kraus published in Munich a slim volume of his poetry from his estate, entitled Aus der Erde und anderen Dichtungen ("Out of the Earth and Other Poems"), with Kurt Wolff Verlag. The volume represents the brief selection that the poet himself was preparing for publication.

The first complete collection of his poems, however, came out only in 1992. According to the British scholar and poet Jeremy Adler, "Franz Janowitz conflicts with the received idea of the best German war poets. Neither realistic, nor ironic, nor properly expressionistic, while he excoriated the battlefield that the whole world had become, he still preserved a Faith in nobility, innocence, and song. Forced into maturity by the war, his poetic voice never lost a certain childlike note – indeed, in some of his best poems, naivety and wisdom coexist to an almost paradoxical degree. Such poetry was fired by a vision of a transcendental realm that lay beyond conflict, but never sought to exclude death. His 25 years, the last four of which were spent in the Army, scarcely left him time to develop a wholly independent voice, but his work displays an increasing mastery of form and deepening of vision. His small oeuvre consists of Novellen, essays, aphorisms, and a handful of the best German poems connected with the Great War."

Works Auf der Erde und andere Dichtungen (On Earth and Other Poems), Works, Letters, and Documents (with an appendix edited by Dieter Sudhoff. Innsbruck Haymon-Verlag, 1992 (Brenner Studies; Vol. 12) Die Fackel. Nos. 474-483 / xx (May 23, 1918), pp. 69–71 Judaica Bohemiae IV, Statni Zidovske Muzeum Prague 1968 Die literarische Welt – Erinnerungen. Willy Haas, Paul List Verlag, Munich 1980, p. 257 Bo Osdrowski/Tom Riebe (eds.): Versensporn – Heft für lyrische Reize. No. 17: Franz Janowitz, Poesie Schmeckt Gut e.V., 2014 Prague German Stories, Philipp Reclam Jr., Stuttgart 1992, , pp. 466–477.