Hermann Ungar


Hermann Ungar was a Czech-Jewish writer and an officer in Czechoslovakia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Biography

His father, Emil, was a cider maker who served as Mayor of Boskovice. After graduating from the public schools in Brno, he went to Berlin, where he took courses in Oriental Studies until 1911, followed by legal and philosophical studies in Munich and Prague. After service in World War I, where he sustained serious injuries on the Galician Front, he passed the state examination and received his degree in 1918.
At first, he worked as a lawyer and director of the theater in Cheb, where he also wrote plays. In 1922, he became the at the new Czechoslovak embassy in Berlin. Later he returned to Prague and became the Ministerial Commissioner at the Foreign Affairs ministry. While there, he began to associate with a literary circle that included Franz Kafka, Max Brod and Ernst Weiß.
His writing was becoming successful, so he quit the diplomatic service in 1929, but died not long after, aged only thirty-six, during an appendectomy that had been postponed for too long. His brother and parents were put to death at Auschwitz in 1942, but his sister was able to escape and went to Tel-Aviv.

His play Der rote General was a great success in Berlin in 1928. His second play Die Gartenlaube was also a great success but was not performed in Berlin until shortly after his death.. According to a 2012 obituary of Tom, his father "wrote about sex and psychosis in a manner that shocked the establishment".

Works

Hermann Ungar Das Gesamtwerk Verlag Paul Zsolnay Wien-Darmstadt 1989 pp.461
Dieter Sudhoff Hermann Ungar Leben-Werk-Wirkung Verlag Königshausen und Neumann Wurzburg 1990 pp.700