WRITER  PHYSICIANS

 

 

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller 1759 – 1805

German poet, dramatist, philosopher, and historian, who is regarded as the greatest dramatist in the history of the German theatre and one of the greatest in European literature.

 

Schiller was born November 10, 1759, in Marbach, Württemberg, the son of an army officer and estate manager for the Duke of Württemberg. He was educated at the duke's military school and then studied law and medicine. In 1780 he was appointed doctor to a military regiment stationed in Stuttgart. As a student, Schiller wrote poetry and finished his first play, Die Räuber, which was successfully presented in 1782 at the National Theatre in Mannheim. Arrested by the duke for leaving Württemberg without permission in order to witness the production, Schiller was forbidden to publish further dramatic works, but, in September 1782, he escaped from prison.

 

Antonio Arrilaga 1886 – 1991

one of the best known writer in Spanish literature.

 

Karl Georg büchner 1813 – 1837

German dramatist. Born in Goddelau and trained in medicine, Büchner was forced to flee to Switzerland because of his radical political activities. There he taught comparative anatomy and wrote. He died from typhoid at the age of 24. His first play, Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), is a pessimistic commentary on the accomplishments of the French revolutionary Georges Jacques Danton, and is perhaps a reflection of his own disillusionment with revolutionary activities. In contrast, Woyzeck tells the story of a humble, obscure figure, a poor man who kills himself and his wife because he cannot cope with society's injustices. Incomplete at Büchner's death, this play shows him at his most pessimistic. It formed the libretto for the opera Wozzeck by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. Büchner's one comedy, Leonce und Lena, is a satire on contemporary political conditions. Never performed in his lifetime, these three plays exerted great influence, however, on later German drama, anticipating the naturalistic drama of the 1890s with its compassion for the poor and oppressed, and later on Expressionism, which voiced the postwar disillusionment of artists and intellectuals.

 

John Keats 1795 – 1821

English poet, one of the most gifted and appealing of the 19th century and an influential figure of the Romantic movement.

 

Keats was born in London, on October 31, 1795, the son of a livery stable owner. He was educated at the Clarke School, Enfield, and at the age of 15 was apprenticed to a surgeon. Subsequently, from 1814 to 1816, Keats studied medicine in London hospitals; in 1816 he became a licensed pharmacist but never practiced his profession, deciding instead to be a poet.

 

 

Gottfried Bermann Fischer 1897 – 1995

After medicine studying he worked as surgeon in Charité Hospital in Berlin. He married the daughter of Jewish publisher Samuel Fischer. In the World War II he first had to go with his wife to Vienna, then to Stockholm and New York. After the war he came back to Germany and make Fischer Publishing world famous.

 

Alfred Döblin 1878 – 1957

German novelist, best known for Berlin Alexanderplatz. Alfred Döblin was born into a Jewish merchant family in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on August 10, 1878. He trained as a physician in Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau and became a specialist in nervous disorders in 1912. As a writer, he was drawn to the work of Hölderlin, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche before becoming associated with Expressionism and the literary magazine, Der Sturm, in which he published many of his early poems. He was an exponent of the modernist novel, and the works he wrote before his departure from Germany in 1933 include Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun), a story of ancient Chinese Daoists; Wallenstein, set in the Thirty Years' War; and Berlin Alexanderplatz, a panoramic work, influenced by the work of the American writer John Dos Passos, about an ex-convict's life in the German capital. Döblin himself wrote the screenplay for a film version which was later adapted for television by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

 

Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Döblin emigrated to France, where he took French citizenship and wrote Das Land ohne Tod (The Land Without Death) and two other novels about the history of Latin America. In 1940 with the occupation of France, he escaped to the United States. By now a member of the Catholic church, he returned to Germany in 1945 as an official of the French military government and completed a series of four novels on the German revolution, November 1918 (1948-1950), before moving back to France in 1951. He also wrote many collections of essays, including Das Ich Über Natur, Judische Erneuerung, and Der Historische Roman. He died in Emmendingen on June 26, 1957.

 

Anton Pavlovich chekhov 1860 – 1904

Russian dramatist and short-story writer, who is one of the foremost figures in Russian literature. The son of a merchant who had been born a serf, Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Ukraine, and educated in medicine at Moscow State University. While still at university he published humorous magazine stories and sketches. He rarely practiced medicine because of his success as a writer and because he had tuberculosis, at that time an incurable illness. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1890 Chekhov visited the penal colony of Sakhalin Island off the coast of Siberia to escape the irritations of urban intellectual life and later wrote The Island of Sakhalin (1891-1894), an account of his visit. Chekhov's frail health caused him to move in 1897 from his small country estate near Moscow to the warmer climate of the Crimea. He also made frequent trips to health resorts in Western Europe. Near the end of the century he met the actor and producer Constantin Stanislavski, director of the Moscow Art Theatre, which in 1898 produced Chekhov's play The Sea Gull. This association of playwright and director, which continued until Chekhov's death, led to the production of several of his one-act dramas and his other notable plays, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In 1901 he married the actress Olga Knipper who was appearing in his plays in Moscow. Chekhov died at the German spa of Badweiler on July 14/15, 1904.

 

Modern critics consider Chekhov one of the masters of the short-story form. He was largely responsible for the modern type of short story that depends for effect on mood and symbolism rather than on plot. His narratives, rather than having a climax and resolution, are a thematic arrangement of impressions and ideas. Using themes relating to everyday life, Chekhov portrayed the pathos of life in Russia before the 1905 revolution: the futile, boring, and lonely lives of people unable to communicate with one another and unequipped to change a society they knew to be inherently wrong. Some of Chekhov's best known stories are included in the posthumously published Darling and Other Stories.

 

In the Russian theatre Chekhov is preeminently a representation of modern Naturalism. His plays, like his stories, are studies of the spiritual failure of characters in a feudal society that is disintegrating. To portray these themes Chekhov developed a new dramatic technique, which he called “indirect action”. He concentrated on subtleties of characterization and interaction between characters rather than on plot and direct action. In a Chekhov play important dramatic events take place offstage and what is left unsaid is often more important than thoughts and feelings that are articulated. Some of his plays were originally rejected in Moscow, but his technique has become accepted by modern playwrights and audiences, and his plays appear frequently in theatrical repertories.

 

Janusz Korczak 1879 – 1942

Whose birth name was Henryk Goldszmit was born in Warszawa, Poland. Even while studying medicine, he visited slums to educate children and also wrote poetry and drama. After graduating from the medical department of Warszawa University in 1903, Korczak completed his medical training in pediatrics during two years in Berlin, Paris and London. 

 

During World War II because he was Jewish, Germans put him with other Jewish people into a construction camp, in which people were incarcerated. The condition of the camp was so bad, that many children and sick people died from starvation. Korczak, who protected the children to their last moments, was himself executed in the gas chamber of Treblinka on August 12, 1942.