Oskar Maria Graf

Life

Graf was born in Berg in the Kingdom of Bavaria, situated in the picturesque landscape around Lake Starnberg near Munich. He was the ninth child of the baker Max Graf and his wife Therese (née Heimrath), a farmer's daughter. From 1900 on he went to the state school in Aufkirchen, in the municipality of Berg. After his father died in 1906, he learned the baker's trade and worked for his brother Max, who had taken over their father's bakery.

In 1911, hoping to earn a living as a poet, he fled to Munich to escape his brother's violence. He joined Bohemian circles and took odd jobs, working at times as a mail sorter or a lift operator. In 1912 and 1913, he traveled to Ticino and northern Italy.

On 1 December 1914, he was drafted for military service. A year later, in 1915, he published his first story, in the magazine Die Freie Straße ["Free street"]. In 1916, Graf was nearly court-martialed for refusing a command. However, after a ten-day hunger strike, he was sent instead to a psychiatric hospital and later discharged from the military.

On 26 May 1917, Graf married Karoline Bretting. A year later, their daughter Annemarie (13 June 1918 – 2008), called Annamirl, was born. In the beginning of the same year, Graf was arrested for participating in a munitions workers' strike. He also met the woman who later became his second wife, Mirjam Sachs, the sister of Manfred George and a cousin of Nelly Sachs. In 1919, Graf was arrested again for participating in revolutionary movements in Munich.

In 1920, he was active as a dramaturg at the working-class theater Die neue Bühne ("The new stage"), until he achieved literary fame in 1927 with his memoir Wir sind Gefangene (Prisoners All), which allowed him to live as a freelance writer.

On 17 February 1933, he traveled to Vienna to lecture, a trip which began his voluntary exile. Graf's books were not destroyed during the Nazi book burning then taking place; instead, most of them approved by the Nazis as recommended reading. In response, Graf published his famous appeal, Verbrennt mich! ["Burn me!"] in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung.

In 1934 Graf's books were in fact prohibited in Germany. On 16 February, he emigrated to Brno in Czechoslovakia. On 24 March, the Third Reich revoked Graf's citizenship. He left Brno to take part in the First Congress of Socialist Writers in Moscow.

In 1938, Graf left Europe via the Netherlands, arriving in New York City in July. Mirjam Sachs followed him, but his wife and child remained in Germany. In October 1938, he was appointed president of the German American Writers Association. In 1942, together with Wieland Herzfelde and other emigrant German writers, he founded the German-language publishing house Aurora-Verlag in New York, considered the successor to Malik-Verlag. Graf's first wife agreed to a divorce in 1944, which allowed Graf and Sachs to marry.

In 1958, Graf received American citizenship, and he visited Europe for the first time since World War II.

In 1960, "in recognition of his uncompromising intellectual attitude," he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1962, he was honored by the City of Munich "in appreciation of his important literary works".

Graf died in 1967 in New York. A year after his death, his ashes were interred in the old Bogenhausen cemetery in Munich.

Works

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