Forschungsschwerpunkte

Deutsches F.P. Greve / F.P. Grove-Archiv sowie Archivalien zum J.C.C. Bruns Verlag im Vorlass von Klaus Martens (Literaturarchiv Saar-Lor-Lux-Elsass, Dudweiler, Saar). Umfangreiches Deponat an Briefen, Büchern, Essays, Kurzgeschichten, Gedichten, Mss., Kritik, Varia, Forschungs-unterlagen sowie Material zum Umfeld des Autors usw. wird z.Z. erfasst und Online gestellt. Das Archiv soll für Forscher und Studenten nach schriftlicher Anmeldung zur Einsicht bereit stehen. Benutzung bedarf der Zustimmung. Ich danke Mrs. Mary Grove und ihrer Famile (Toronto) für das persönliche Geschenk eines wichtigen Teils des nun an das Archiv übergebenen Fundus.

 

Klaus Martens' F.P. Grove Project: The Man, the Times, the Work, the Lasting Influence

FPG established his lasting fame as Frederick Philip Grove, Canadian novelist, poet, and intellectual, and by several accounts the founder of a post-colonial, modern Canadian literature. Between 1922 and 1947 Grove published about 15 books: novels, autobiographies and collections of essays, short-stories and a translation. Beside his novels about the Canadian prairie and its inhabitants, his biggest success were his autobiographical writings Over Prairie Trails (1922) and A Search for America (1927). Notable among his works of fiction are his novels Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Our Daily Bread (1928 ) and Fruits of the Earth (1933). For his late autobiographical work In Search of Myself (1946), Grove received the prestigious "Governor General´s Award" in the category "non-fiction". Today, knowing what we know about Grove's life, the category "non-fiction" symbolizes an ironical twist in his career. While in his 1946 book and in various other, often wildly conflicting autobiographical statements, Grove claimed a wealthy Swede as his father and a cosmopolitan Scotswoman as his mother, in reality he was born into a petit-bourgeois German family in Pomerania, later residing in Hamburg. First knowledge about his identity as the former Felix Paul Greve became known to a wider public only in 1973, twenty-five years after his death, thanks to the detective work of Douglas O. Spettigue. Klaus Martens's 2001 biography (first published in German in 1997) F. P. Grove in Europe and Canada: Translated Lives, based on much documentary, epistolary, and photographic material first discovered by him, re-examines and signficantly extends previous knowledge of Grove's German and Canadian years as an important literary figure in both countries.

In addition, Martens’ 2006 edition of selected poems by Grove, A Dirge for My Daughter - and particularly his large 2007 volume, Over Canadian Trails comprise a wealth of newly published letters – including the Grove-Phelps-Grove correspondence, unpublished letters to Carleton Stanley, etc. – and assembles a wealth of documentary material about the making of Canadian literature in the 1920s to 1940s plus many previously unpublished photos from the Groves’ private archive. Over Canadian Trails is a veritable handbook for the Grove scholar and for everybody interested in one of the most exciting eras in Canadian literature and culture.

FPG, under his German name Felix Paul Greve, was born on February 14, 1879 in Radomno, then in the German province of West Prussia. He spent his childhood and teenage years in Hamburg. After receiving his "Abitur" from the prestigeous Hamburg school "Johanneum" in 1898, having won four generous stipends, Felix Greve left for the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn to study philology and archeology. He made a number of fateful friendships at the Bonn Academic Rowing Club "Rhenus", sometimes playing a public role among the influential and powerful. From Bonn, he moved on to Rome, taking an active part in session of the famous German Archeological Institute (DAI), and on to Munich and Berlin. Greve travelled extensively in Italy, settling, for a while, in Palemo with his companion and future wife Else Ploetz, then still married to the noted "Jugendstil" architect August Endell. When Greve could not settle his debts with a former Bonn friend in 1903, he was accused of fraud and sent to prison in May 1903. Before, during and after his imprisonment in Bonn and after his release in May, 1904, he translated works by Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Henri Murger, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, George Meredith, and many others, also editing and translating (from Burton´s English) the massive and highly influential 14-volume edition of the Arabian Nights in German. He also published, among other works of his own, including Wanderungen (1902), a volume of poetry, and a short play in verse he called Helena und Damon (1902), two novels, Fanny Essler (1905, transl. 1984) and Maurermeister Ihles Haus (1906, translated as The Master Mason's House 1976). In 1909, still financially hard-pressed, he pretended a suicide and left Germany for North America as a "travelling author", followed next year by his wife Else. Sometime in 1911 or 1912 they separated in the USA, probably in or near Sparta, Kentucky. Else went on to New York and from 1913 became the noted "Dada Baroness" Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, having married the baron.

Living a life notorious for its fearless unothodoxy, she became a friend and companion of Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, George Biddle, Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and other luminaries of high modernist art and literature. Among them Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the editors of The Little Review, where she published much of her poetry and prose. After her return to Germany, in 1923, she suffered through a period of obscurity and neglect, finally managing, with the help of her American friends, to settle in Paris where she died of asphyxiation in 1927.

When Else went on to New York, Felix proceeded north to Canada - now calling himself Grove, from 1913 working as a school-teacher in small, predominantly Mennonite towns in Manitoba, and marrying a colleague in 1914, Catherine Wiens. He restarted his career as a writer sometime in 1919, publishing his first volume of essays in 1922. Grove went on to teach in several small Manitoba towns until 1924, when he retired for medical reasons and dedicated himself exclusively to writing and lecturing. His 1928-9 acceptance of an assignment as a speaker under the auspices of the Canadian Club organization led him on three much noticed tours from coast to coast turning the writer into a national celebrity and speaker of note. After the1927 tragic early death of his daughter May in Rapid City, Manitoba, the Groves moved East in 1929, and the author worked for a short time as an editor and a publisher in Ottawa. After the demise of the publishing company, Ariston, the Groves bought a farm outside the little southern Ontario town of Simcoe. A son, Arthur Leonard Grove, was born in 1930. In Simcoe, Grove kept on writing, occasionally teaching and farming. By 1940, Grove`s canonical status within Canadian literature was assured. He earned honorary degrees, was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada and finally won the Governor General´s Award. Having published no less than twelve novels and books of essays, the author died at the age of sixty-nine in Simcoe, Ontario, on August 19, 1948, his incognito largely intact.

Klaus Martens' long-standing F.P. Grove Project owes a debt of gratitude to the early critics and editors of Grove and his work, notably Desmond Pacey, author of the first book-length study of the author and editor (with J.C. Mahanti) of The Letters of F.P. Grove (1976). Margaret Stobie´s meticulous research, published in her monograph Frederick Philip Grove (1970), included much oral history. She collected and established the basis of our knowledge of the Manitoba teacher and prairie writer. D.O. Spettigue first discovered Grove´s German background and unearthed the first important data of the author´s hidden early life in his book, F.P. Grove. The European Years (1973). Paul Hjartarson published an excellent collection of original Grove work and critical essays, A Stranger to My Time (1986). He also first discussed (1986) and edited (with Spettigue) Baroness Elsa (1992), a collection of many of the surving papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, firmly establishing the relationship between the "Dada Baroness" and the famous German-Canadian writer.

FPG and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at the Universität des Saarlandes
A Diary (Visitors, Exhibitions, Talks, Performances, Conferences)

• AUSSTELLUNG I
• AUSSTELLUNG II
• AUSSTELLUNG III

The American / Canadian Pacific Northwest (Cascadia) and its Indigenous Cultures as Represented in Canadian and Central European Cultural and Literary Interrelations

Das gegenwärtige Erkenntnisinteresse von Klaus Martens ist auf die Indianerkulturen des pazifischen Nordwestens gerichtet. Bereits vorhandene Ansätze zur Kulturvermittlung zwischen Europa und Nordamerika in seiner Forschung werden auf diese Kulturen angewendet und erweitert. Er möchte erforschen, auf welche Weise in Europa die Vielschichtigkeit der indigenen Literatur und Kunst rezipiert worden ist. Dabei werden u.a. die Forschungs- und Sammleraktivitäten von Wissenschaftlern wie Franz Boas und Adolf Bastian im Zusammenhang mit der Arbeit von Vermittlern und Sammlern untersucht. Zugleich wird die Rezeptionsgeschichte indigener Traditionen in Deutschland thematisiert und debatiert.

Mediation

Texts are made, and literary texts are more than things made out of words and ideas. Central focus of Klaus Martens' work has been on various issues concerned with the mediation of literature and culture – avenues, conditions, media, criteria of selection, authors and the constitution of texts, including translations and translators. The study of Kulturpolitik in every sense concerning the exchange of texts between North America and Europe ia the core of this work. So far, it has resulted in several international conferences (1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008) as well as a considerable number of publications as books and articles.

On the Art of Poetry

The current state of poetry, I believe, is well worth (re-)considering. In contemporary culture, poetry is both omnipresent and remote. While selected individual poets are able to boast widespread audience awareness and exceptional sales, poetry as a genre is frequently perceived as an elitist but also somehow anachronistic form of artistic expression. The poetic, aesthetic manipulation of language is prominent in popular culture in forms extending from advertisement to contemporary music, and yet poetry and easy familiarity with a range of poets and poems has receded from the cultural repertoire of most readers. On the one hand, poetry occupies a curiously ambivalent position in current society; on the other, poetry seems to be at the cusp of an emergent stage of development. My continuing research is concerned with the status and state(s) of poetry as a contemporary art form.