Alfred Polgar
Alfred Polgar (originally: Alfred Polak) 17 October 1873, Vienna – 24 April 1955, Zurich) was an Austrian-born columnist, theater critic, writer and occasionally translator. Life and work 1873—1895 He was born in an assimilated Jewish family in Leopoldstadt, the municipal District of Vienna, which had a Jewish life and culture. He grew up as the youngest of three children of Henriette and Josef Polak, a piano school owner. He graduated from high school and business school. 1895 he joined the team of the "Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung", where he initially worked as a reporter with the main focus of ‚court‘ and the ‚houses of Parliament‘. After a while he advanced there as an editor in the features section. During this time he soon joined the circle around Peter Altenberg and other freethinking persons. With his feature articles and astute local and theater reviews, he developed into one of the most important representatives of the so-called Vienna coffeehouses literature. 1905 to 1914 Since 1905 Polgar wrote regularly for Siegfried Jacobsohn's magazine Die Schaubühne. He also worked as a writer for cabaret. Together with Egon Friedell, he wrote the successful humorous piece Goethe for the Fledermaus Cabaret in 1908. A grotesque in two acts, in which literary lessons in schools are parodied by the fact that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears for a literary exam on Goethe's life and work - and fails. Also 1908, Polgar's first book Der Quell des Übels und andere Geschichten (The Source of Evil and Other Stories) was published. The place where Polgar frequented at this time was Café Central where he could be found in the company of Peter Altenberg, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos and said Egon Friedell. There he found plenty of material for his astute observations and analyzes. Polgar also worked as an editor and translator of plays, for example by Nestroy, and in 1913 translated Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom from Hungarian into German. He moved the plot to the Vienna Prater and added a prologue, which paved the way for the previously unsuccessful play with a triumphant premiere on February 28, 1913 in the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. On September 23, 1914, he officially changed his name from Polak to Polgar (Hungarian polgár = German citizen). During the First World War Polgar must work in the war archive, but continued to write for newspapers, including the German-language Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd. 1920—1955 In the 1920s, Polgar lived mainly in Berlin and from here he supplied as a freelancer many articles for daily newspapers such as Berliner Tageblatt, Prager Tageblatt and for the weekly published literary magazine Die Weltbühne. As a engaged columnist he enriched the college in which such illustrious people worked like Erich Kästner, Else Lasker-Schüler, Erich Mühsam, Kurt Tucholsky, Robert Walser. In October 1929 he married Elise Loewy, born Müller, called Lisl, from Vienna. After the Nazi regime came to power, there was no place for the “Austrian Jew and left-liberal anti-fascist Polgar in National Socialist Germany”, as Ulrich Weinzierl