Emil Szittya – The Outsider

It’s not often that the forgotten are dragged into the light of the present. And if it does happen, the person who disappeared into the memory hole for a long time and was brought out of it again was rarely a good-for-nothing and maladaptive person. The writer, journalist, magazine editor, painter, anti-fascist, individual anarchist, resistance fighter and drifter Emil Szittya (1886–1964) was one such person. He was also a Dadaist, although he didn’t want to be labeled that way. “The Dadaists,” he wrote, “wanted to laugh childishly at the art pose in order to have the pure act of art again. If Dadaism had not been a failed business fraud, a new art would certainly have emerged from here.

Born as Adolf Schenk in Hungary, Szittya roamed restlessly through Europe as a young man, hung out in the subculture, appeared in the circles around Erich Mühsam in Munich and was “magnetically attracted to Berlin’s artist cafés and brothel crowds, to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich , from the political Parisian scene to the early eco-bohemian vegetarians on Monte Verità in Ticino.” (“Tagesspiegel”). He was friends with Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Franz Jung and others from the artistic and literary avant-garde of his time.

During the First World War he went to Zurich, where, as he said, he wanted to take part “in propaganda against Imperial Germany.” There he also founded the magazine “Der Mistral”, for which the futurist Marinetti, Georg Trakl, Carl Sternheim and other expressionists wrote articles. Szittya about his small avant-garde publication: “Even Romain Rolland wrote about it, albeit negatively.” If you believe his own notes, which you shouldn’t always do without reservation, he also claims to have met Lenin in Zurich (who in turn, at least claims so Szittya is said to have greeted him one day with the words: “Well, still an anarchist?”).

After the end of the war, in the 1920s, the cosmopolitan traveled back and forth between Germany and other countries, lived mostly in Berlin and wrote: journalism, books on art history, a cultural history of suicide and extremely idiosyncratic prose texts. His best-known work was published in 1923, which “has remained indispensable to this day as an information pool for the counterculture of the early 20th century,” as the German scholar Walter Fähnders notes. The book we are talking about here has a very good title: “The Cabinet of Curiosities. Encounters with strange events, tramps, criminals, artists, religious madmen, sexual oddities, social democrats, syndicalists, communists, anarchists, politicians and artists.

In 1927 Szittya moved to Paris, where he published the anti-fascist magazine “Die Zone” for a while from 1934. At this point he had already resigned from his work as an author for German newspapers. A begging letter from back then says: “(…) since Hitlerism, I have stopped working for Germany. You know, I have a wife and children. I haven’t earned anything for 4 years. We are doing very badly. We are starving. We can’t pay rent.”

In his text “The Outsider,” published in 1933, he described his own self-image “as an outsider, as a critic of society and the social order” (Jonas Engelmann). He perceived himself as someone who still retained his senses – in contrast to a social majority that was gripped by irrationality and delusion: “Particularly today, what is important is a decent attitude against power. This time, every creative person must decide against the mass psychoses for a ‘No!’ .

At a young age, Szittya wrote a lot of experimental work, largely consisting of “linguistic material that is teeming with neologisms and seems to be overflowing with avant-garde images and metaphors” (Walter Fähnders), always directed against the bourgeois and petty bourgeois and their one-dimensional understanding of the world. And of course that’s why his books only sold in very limited quantities. Much was published during his lifetime in remote places and in small magazines. Some things have been lost, others remain unpublished. Walter Benjamin wrote in 1928 about a book by Szittya that was long thought lost and had only been found a few years ago, saying that he “didn’t want to miss it any more than many other treacherous first publications by better-known authors.”

Unfortunately, Szittya’s autobiographical notes written in the 1940s, in which he talks about his time as a vagabond and the phase before the start of the First World War, have remained unprinted. In any case, the author also gave these memories a very good title: “I ask for an entry ticket or Have you ever been hungry?”

His study in the Paris apartment where he lived for a long time with his wife Erika was a “windowless room with shelves on the walls overflowing with newspaper clippings and manuscripts.” One of the items inside was “the typewriter that Franz Jung had left with them when he stopped by them during one of his many attempts to achieve safe exile in the 1940s” (Frank Witzel).

In 1963, Szittya’s last book, “82 rêves pendant la guerre 1939–1945,” which was hardly noticed at the time, was published and collected dreams. Together with his wife, who worked in the kitchen of an orphanage during the Resistance, he asked children and adults, some of whom were traumatized by war and flight, about their nightly dreams and recorded them.

Recently, the writer Frank Witzel has thankfully drawn attention to Szittya’s life and work. In his recently published, commendable book “My Literary History of the 20th Century”, a kind of autobiographical report in which he recalls marginal and overlooked figures in literary history in narrative and essay form, Emil Szittya and, above all, his wife Erika, also appear.

Witzel met the widow in Paris in the early 1980s for an interview. In his book he reports (this refers to the years 1939 to 1964): “Both spent most of the following twenty-five years until their husband’s death in more or less extreme poverty. (…) Their life together was riddled with strokes of fate.« In the 1950s, her only daughter died in a car accident. And, we learn: After her husband’s death, Erika Szittya found a box of documents showing that her husband “had an affair throughout the years in which they not only lived in poverty, but often also suffered from hunger had spoken to a dancer in Berlin and supported her with regular money transfers.

The writer died on November 26, 1964, completely impoverished. Six months before his death he wrote in a letter: “In a few months I will be 78 years old and I still have material worries. Maybe I have a lot to blame for this myself. “I’ve never been very good with money.”

An obituary published in the New York exile newspaper “Aufbau” declared Szittya “one of the oldest members of the pre-Hitler German bohemian era.” He was “possessed by the love of the arts.”

»… since Hitlerism, I stopped working for Germany.«

Emil Szittya