Franz Xaver Kappus


Franz Xaver Kappus was an Austrian military officer, journalist, editor and writer who wrote poetry, short-stories, novels and screenplays. Kappus is known chiefly as the military academy cadet who wrote to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke for advice in a series of letters from 1902 to 1908 that were assembled and published in the best-selling book Letters to a Young Poet.

Life

Franz Xaver Kappus was born on 17 May 1883 in Timișoara, in the Banat province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Banat region was populated with a large population of ethnic Germans known as Banat Swabians or Danube Swabians of which Kappus' ancestry is derived. As a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria, Kappus wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke after learning that as a young man, Rilke, the son of an Austrian army officer, had studied at the academy's lower school at Sankt Pölten in the 1890s. Kappus corresponded with Rilke, then a popular poet at the beginning of his career, in a series of letters from 1902 to 1908, in which he sought Rilke's advice regarding the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
Aside from his role in writing to Rilke and later publishing these letters, Kappus is largely forgotten by history. Despite the hesitancy he expressed in his letters to Rilke about pursuing a military career, he continued his military studies and served for 15 years as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. During the course of his life, he worked as a newspaper editor and journalist, writing poems, humorous sketches, short-stories, novels, and adapted several works into screenplays for films in the 1930s. However, Kappus did not achieve lasting fame. After World War I, he was the editor of several newspapers, including Kappus Deutsche Wacht, later known as Banater Tagblatt, and other newspapers Temeswarer Zeitung, and the Schwäbische Volkspresse.
On 16 June 1945, shortly after the fall of Nazi Germany, he was part of a group in Berlin that founded the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, becoming one of its board members. The LDP later became one of the bloc parties under the East German communist regime, after whose fall it merged in 1990 with the West German Freie Demokratische Partei, which is affiliated with ideology of classical liberalism.
Kappus died on 9 October 1966 in East Berlin at the age of 83.

Works

Novels

  • 1918: Die lebenden Vierzehn
  • 1921: Die Peitsche im Antlitz
  • 1922: Der Rote Reiter
  • 1929: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter
  • 1929: Martina und der Tänzer
  • 1935: Brautfahrt um Lena
  • 1941: Flammende Schatten
  • 1949: ''Flucht in die Liebe''

Screenwriter