Frank Thiess
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Frank Thiess, born 1890 in Eluisenstein, Russian Livonia (now Latvia) and died 1977 in Darmstadt, Germany, was a German writer.
Thiess grew up in Berlin, where his family moved after Russia annexed Livonia. He worked as a journalist for four years until he was enlisted into the German army in World War I. Discharged after a few months because of a heart condition, he returned to Berlin and journalism. Within a few years, however. he decided to devote himself full-time to writing. His early novels were focussed on contemporary subjects — Time magazine once called him "the hot trumpet in Germany's jazz age." He married Florence Losey, an American singer. From the 1930s on, he concentrated on historical novels.
His 1936 novel, Tsushima, translated into English as The Voyage of Forgotten Men, recounted the epic journey of the Russian Second Pacific Squadron, under the command of Admiral Rozhestvensky, from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan, and its defeat by the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.
His two-part novel, Neapolitanische Legende and Caruso in Sorrent, was based on the life and career of the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso.
Thiess remained in Germany during the Nazi period, but there is no evidence that he joined the Nazi Party. He became involved in a controversy involving the writer Thomas Mann, who chose exile over remaining in Germany. Mann refused an invitation to return to Germany in 1946 and stated that he could not trust writers who remained in Germany under the Nazis. Thiess responded that those anti-Nazi German writers who stayed "have found in themselves a spiritual resistance ... out of which a new Germany must be formed."
[edit] Bibliography
Novels:
- Claudia (1913)
- Der Tod von Falern (1921)
- Angelika ten Swaart (1923)
- Die Verdammten (English title: The Devil's Shadow) (1923)
- Das Gesicht des Jahrhunderts, Briefe an Zeitgenossen (1923)
- Der Leibheftige (English title: Design for Living) (1924)
- Frauenraub (English title: Interlude) (1927) (revised as Katharina Winter (1949))
- Johanna unde Esther (1933) (revised as Gäa (1957))
- Tsushima (English title: The Voyage of Forgotten Men)(1936)
- Das Reich der Dämonen (1941)
- Neapolitanische Legende (English title: Neapolitan Legend) (1942)
- Caruso in Sorrent (1946)
- Die Strassen des Labyrinths (1951)
- Die grieschischen Kaiser (1959)
- Sturz nach oben (1961)
