Paul Zech

Paul Zech (19 February 1881 – 7 September 1946) was a German expressionist writer and poet.

Biography

Paul Zech came from the large family of a craftsman as the eldest of six surviving children. At the age of 5, he was entrusted to his maternal grandparents. He attended school until the age of 14 and then began an apprenticeship in baking which was unsuccessful. He then left for Belgium to work in the coal mines of the Charleroi basin, in 1898. Back in Germany he married Helene Siemon, a shoemaker's daughter in July 1904, whom he had a child with.

Zech began writing his first poems in 1901. His poems were published in local or regional magazines. In 1907, he took part in the annual Cologne poetry competition and received “honorable mention”. From 1910 he lived in Berlin and turned to poetry. He published in Herwarth Walden's expressionist journal Der Sturm and founded his own publication Das neue Pathos. His poems earned him the Kleist Prize in 1918. While keeping a classic form, his poems reveal a tendency towards expressionism through the themes of the city, mines, oppression, and alienation.

At the start of the First World War, in 1914 Zech wrote patriotic poems but by 1915, his enthusiasm for the war gave way to skepticism. He participated in the battles on the Western Front, notably at the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. In the summer of 1916 he was seriously injured when he was buried in a trench. He was decorated with the Iron Cross. In 1917, he was assigned to the rear of the front. He then wrote propaganda texts for the army. Under the pseudonym Michel Michael, he published pacifist poems in 1919.