Full Name: Fechter, Paul Otto Heinrich
Gender: male
Date Born: 1880
Date Died: 1958
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Expressionist (style) and German Expressionist (movement)
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Art and literary critic; wrote early book on expressionism. Fechter studied architecture and natural science in Berlin. Hiis doctoral thesis, Die Grundlagen der Realdialektik, was completed in 1906. Fechter wrote for the Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten newspaper after receiving his degree, moving to Berlin to write for the Vossischen Zeitung in 1911.Between 1918 until 1933 he was a cultural critic for the Deutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung. In 1914 he published Expressionismus one of the earliest documentations of Expressionism as an art movement. He wrote extensively on literature and the theater, always with a preference for nationalist themes. He published much during this time, mostly novels and other literary forms, the most important of which was the play Der Zauberer Gottes, in 1940. After World War II he published an art dictionary as well as a three-volume survey of European drama, Das europäische Drama in 1956.
Selected Bibliography
Der Expressionismus. Munich: R. Piper, 1914; Das europäische Drama: Geist und Kultur im Spiegel des Theaters. 3 vols. Mannheim: Bibliograph. Inst., 1956-1958; Der Zauberer Gottes: eine Komödie. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1940; Kleines Wörterbuch für Kunstgespräche. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1951.
Sources
Killy, W. (ed.). Literatur Lexicon. Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon, 1988ff., vol.15, p. 342; Stonard, John-Paul. Art and National Reconstruction in Germany 1945-55. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 2004, p. 233.