Swiss writer of fiction, poetry, essays and autobiography whose literary estate is today held by the Zurich Central Library.
Adrien Turel was born to Swiss-German parents in the capital of what was then the Russian Empire. From 1891 he grew up in a country estate near Lausanne, Switzerland, then from 1900 in Berlin, Germany. There he attended the Leibniz Gymnasium and from 1912 studied German, Romance studies and history. In 1917 he became acquainted with psychoanalysis through Magnus Hirschfeld and Heinrich Körber, abandoned his studies and worked for two years as a teacher at the French grammar school. Suspected as a Spartakist, he was imprisoned in Moabit for two months. He wrote articles for various newspapers and found a friend in Oskar Loerke who published his first volume of essays at S. Fischer Verlag in 1919. In 1923 he married Margarethe Kallmeyer; they had a daughter before divorcing in 1926.
From around 1927 to 1930 Turel lived with Adolf Moritz Steinschneider in Frankfurt am Main. From 1932 to 1933 he was a member of the editorial team of Franz Jung’s magazine Opponents (Gegner) – a paper that endeavoured to address young people from all denominations and political directions.
After Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich President on 30 January 1933, it had become immensely difficult to carry out normal press work and discussion groups on political issues.
In mid-February 1933, the political police became aware of the activities of this “enemy”. The Berlin State Criminal Police Office published a notice that the “circle of opponents is a radical communist association”. This notification led to an SS Sturm unit occupying the editorial offices at the end of April 1933 and arresting everyone present, including Harro Schulze-Boysen, Henry Erlanger and Adrien Turel. All three were mistreated and taken to a concentration camp that night. When the SS found out that Turel was a Swiss citizen, they released him.
After this experience, he quickly tried to leave Germany again. At the end of 1934 he returned to Switzerland after a six-month stay in Paris and from then on devoted himself as a freelance writer to formulating his idiosyncratic, utopian view of man and the world. During the war he also tried his hand at writing a novel, his science-fiction-like detective novella Die Greiselwerke was published in Zurich in 1942; two longer works were only published posthumously by the “Adrien Turel Foundation” founded in 1958 by his second wife, Lucie Turel-Welti. In 1952 Turel, who had been decried as a communist, joined the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP). Adrien Turel died on 29 June 1957 in Zürich at age 67.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)