Max Mell

Max Mell
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Born	(1882-11-10)10 November 1882 Marburg an der Drau, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	Vienna, Austria
Occupation	Writer

Max Mell (10 November 1882 – 12 December 1971) was an Austrian writer, noted for his rejuvenation of Medieval and Baroque dramatic forms.

Biography

He was born in Marburg an der Drau, then part of the Austrian Empire but now in Slovenia, the son of the Jurist Alexander Mell and his wife Marie (née Rocek). The Burgtheater actress Mary Mell (1885–1954) was his sister. His brother-in-law was the painter and stage designer Alexander Demetrius Goltz.

In 1886, at the age of four, Mell went to Vienna, where his father had taken over the management of a home for the blind. After a humanistic education at today's Gymnasium Kundmanngasse, Mell studied Germanistics and art history at the University of Vienna. He completed these studies in 1905 with a dissertation on Wilhelm Waiblinger. Already during his studies Mell made his literary debut with poems. His first published text appeared in the Wiener Zeitung in 1901.

Mell did not belong to any literary circle. He was friends with Felix Braun, Hans Carossa, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (with whom he had a long correspondence) and Anton Wildgans.

From 1916 Mell took part in the World War I as a one-year volunteer, served on the eastern and Italian fronts and subsequently experienced the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, which had a strong influence on him. At the suggestion of Viktor von Geramb, he became involved with festival and folk plays and thus received inspiration for his own literary production, which combined the miraculous aspects with the decidedly realistic. He wrote the words for Alban Berg's short composition Der milde Herbst von anno 45 (The mild autumn of the year '45).

With Jedermann (1912) Hofmannsthal began a revival of the medieval morality or mystery play in Austria. He had been preceded by another Viennese poet Richard von Kralik, and was soon followed by Mell in 1921 with The Viennese Manger of 1919. In Seven Against Thebes (1931), he continued the line of von Hofmannsthal’s psychological transformations of Greek plays. Mell was one of the last German-language dramatists to remain faithful to the verse drama.

The Apostel-spiel (1923) is the only one of his plays that has been translated into English. This was translated by Maude Valerie White and was published in London in 1934 under the title The Apostle Play.

Alongise Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Bernhard Paumgartner and Joseph Mefiner among others, Mell was a member of the art council at the Salzburg Festival, founded by Hofmannsthal, Max Reinhardt and Richard Strauss.

In the 1930s, Mell was a supporter of the Fatherland Front. In 1933, he and other Austrian authors demonstratively resigned from the P.E.N. Club because it had condemned the book burning in Germany in May 1933, thereby declaring his allegiance to the nationalist camp. His play German Ancestors (Das Spiel von den deutschen Ahnen), premiered at the Burgtheater on 12 February 1936. He subsequently advanced in 1937 to the presidency of the Association of German Writers in Austria, which was close to the NSDAP, and after the Anschluss published in various party-affiliated anthologies such as the Bekenntnisbuch österreichischer Dichter (Confession Book of Austrian Poets) in 1938, which enthusiastically welcomed the Anschluss.

However, Mell's relationship to National Socialism was ambivalent: He declined the directorship of the Empire Chamber of Literature (RSK) of Vienna, which was offered to him. In 1940 Joseph Goebbels issued a performance ban for Mell's drama Das Spiel von den deutschen Ahnen and, the following year, for Sieben gegen Theben. Goebbels also opposed the awarding of the Grillparzer Prize to Max Mell in 1940; after the intercession of the literary scholar Josef Nadler, Mell finally received the prize.

Mell applied for membership in the NSDAP on February 20, 1940, but withdrew his application for membership on February 19, 1942 — when he had already been granted a membership number and card with an admission date of June 1, 1940, — so that party membership did not take effect. However, he continued to maintain a good relationship with the Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, who also awarded him the Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna on the occasion of his 60th birthday. As late as 1944 he was still publishing in the National Socialist Bozner Tagblatt. After the end of the war, Mell was exempted from the obligation to register in the course of denazification.

After 1945 he became one of the most prominent representatives of Catholic poetry in Austria. Culturally conservative, in 1951 he tried to counter what he regarded as political distortions of the epic Nibelungenlied with a more faithful reading of the original text. In 1959 he was given the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.

In a ceremony marking Mell’s eightieth birthday, Ernst Haeussermann, the director of the Burgtheater, pointed out that Mell’s dramatic work had been performed in the theater in no less than 219 productions. Mell’s last play, Paracelsus und der Lorbeer (Paracelsus and the Laurel), premiered in the newly refurbished Schauspielhaus in Graz in 1964. The play was published posthumously in 1974 under the title Der Garten des Paracelsus (The Garden of Paracelsus).

Max Mell died in Vienna in 1971 and was buried at the Central Cemetery in a grave provided as an honor by the city.

A poetic inscription composed by the writer Max Mell can be seen at St. Stephen's Cathedral on the north-east column of the transept and records the parts of the restoration financed by contributions from individual provinces of Austria.

The provincial government of Styria honored Mell one-hundredth birthday in 1982 by sponsoring a major exhibition on his life and work. In the 13th district of Vienna, the Max Mell Park was named after him in 1985 in the Hacking district on Erzbischofgasse. In Graz-Geidorf, there was a Max Mell Alley (among others, the address of the University Sports Center). In 2018, a commission of the city of Graz classified the Max-Mell Alley there as historically highly questionable. In 2022, it was decided to rename it Oktavia Aigner-Rollett Alley . She was one of the first women to graduate from medical school in Graz.

Honors

• 1914: Bauernfeld Prize
• 1927: Prize of the City of Vienna for Literature
• 1929: Franz Grillparzer Prize
• 1929: Dramatists Prize of the Heidelberg Festival
• 1935: Burgtheater Ring
• 1937: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Prize
• 1940: Franz Grillparzer Prize
• 1942: Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna
• 1951: Peter Rosegger Literature Prize
• 1954: Grand Austrian State Prize
• 1956: Honorary Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
• 1957: Adalbert Stifter Medal
• 1959: Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
• Grilleparzer Ring

Works

Poetry

• Das bekränzte Jahr (1911)
• Gedichte (1919)
• Gedichte (1929)

Tales and novellas

• Lateinische Erzählungen (1904)
• Die drei Grazien des Traumes (1906)
• Jägerhaussage und andere (1910)
• Barbara Naderers Viehstand (1914)
• Die Brille (1916)
• Hans Hochgedacht und sein Weib (1920)
• Die Osterfeier (1921)
• Morgenwege (1924)
• Mein Bruder und ich (1933)
• Das Donauweibchen (1938; "The Danube Water Nymph")
• Adelbert Stifter (1939)
• Steirischer Lobgesang (1939)

Plays

• Wiener Kripperl von 1919 (1921)
• Das Schutzengelspiel (1923; "Guardian Angel")
• Das Apostelspiel (1925)
• Das Nachfolge-Christi-Spiel (1927)
• Sieben gegen Theben (1931)
• Das Spiel von den deutschen Ahnen (1933; "The Play of the German Ancestors")
• Das Spiel von den deutschen Ahnen (1935)
• Der Nibelunge Not (1951)
• Jeanne d'Arc (1956)

Filmography

• Cordula (1950)
• Voices of Spring (1952)

References

• Bangerter, Lowell A. (1995). "Max Mell." In: Donald G. Daviau, ed., Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, pp. 235–60.
• Beniston, Judith (2001). "Max Mell in the First Republic: The Acceptable Face of Catholic Drama?" In: W. E. Yates, Allyson Fiddler & John Warren, eds., From Perinet to Jelinek: Viennese Theatre in its Political and Intellectual Context. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 179–90.
• Beniston, Judith (2009). "'Der Wiener aus Hofmannsthal: The Making of Max Mell's Das Apostespiel'," The Modern Language Review, Vol. CIV, No. 2, pp. 472–98.
• Binder, Christoph Heinrich (1978). Max Mell: Beitrage zu seinem Leben und Werk. Graz: Steiermarkische Landesregierung.
• Winder McConnell. A Companion to the Nibelungenlied. Camden House, 1998.
• Valentin, Jean-Marie (2007). "Un Héraut de la Germanité? L'Image de Stifter dans l'Oeuvre de Max Mell." In: Minerve et les Muses: Essai de Littérature Allemande. Paris: Presses de L'Université Paris-Sorbonne.

External links

• Max Mell, Dramatist
• Max Mell at the Internet Movie Database