Paquet, Alfons Hermann

Journalist, Writer

Born: 26.01.1881 in Wiesbaden

Died: 08.02.1944 in Frankfurt am Main

Paquet attended a commercial school in London and completed an apprenticeship as a glove maker, inwardly convinced that he wanted to devote himself to the art of poetry. In 1901 he went to Berlin, then to Mühlhausen (Thuringia) as a local editor and became head of the "Ausstellungs-Tageblatt" of the "Rheinisch-Westfälische Industrie-Gewerbe- und Kunstausstellung". He studied political science in Heidelberg, Munich and Jena from 1902-07 and wrote his doctoral thesis on "The exhibition problem in economics".

In 1910, he married the Frankfurt painter Marie Steinhausen (1881-1958) and moved with her to the garden city of Dresden-Hellerau, where he worked as managing director of the Deutscher Werkbund. In 1914, the family returned to the Rhine-Main region. He traveled the world as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. In the 1920s, he increasingly wrote for the theater. His plays were performed by Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) at the Berlin Volksbühne. Despite his "intellectual cosmopolitanism" (Reinhard Frost), he remained attached to his Rhenish homeland and became chairman of the League of Rhenish Poets in 1930, as well as chairman of the Frankfurt Goethe Prize Board of Trustees in the same year.

In 1932, he was admitted to the Prussian Academy of Arts, from which he resigned in 1933. After the "Frankfurter Zeitung" ceased publication in 1943, Paquet no longer had the opportunity to publish. He died of a heart attack during an air raid in February 1944.

The Frankfurt City Library inherited his literary estate, insofar as it had not been destroyed by the bombs. A street commemorates him in his native city of Wiesbaden, which he had memorialized with his essay "Wiesbaden, die doppelte Stadt" in the magazine Atlantis in 1929.