ABSTRACT
A Jew from West Prussia, Salomo Friedländer studied medicine in Munich and philosophy in Berlin and Jena; he gained his doctorate in 1902 with a thesis on Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Berlin he published, under the pseudonym Mynona, in several of the expressionist journals; Franz Pfemfert dedicated to him the first issue of Die Aktion in 1913 and Herwarth Walden published many of his so-called ‘Grotesken’ in Der Sturm. Mynona also produced, with his cousin Anselm Ruest, his own periodical Der Einzige (1919-25). His most important philosophical tracts were Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine intellektuelle Biographie (1911), Schöpferische Indifferenz (1918) and Der Philosoph Ernst Marcus als Nachfolger Kants (1913): these works stress the importance of individual insight and insist upon a principle of polarity (‘Indifferenz’). Apart from the ‘Grotesken’ in Der Sturm and elsewhere (Gute Nacht, Aerosophie, Für Hunde und andere Menschen, Willi Willi, Beschreibung meiner Braut, etc.) the following should be mentioned: Durch blaue Schleier (poems, 1908); Rosa, die schöne Schutzmannsfrau (1913); Hundert Bonbons (grotesque sonnets, 1918); the novel Die Bank der Spötter. Ein Unroman (1919); Mein Papa und die Jungfrau von Orleans (1921); the parody Tarzaniade (1924); Hat Erich Maria Remarque wirklich gelebt? (1929); Der Holzweg zurück oder Knackes Umgang mit Flöhen (1931). In September 1933 Mynona moved to Paris where he died in great poverty in 1946. Rosa die schöne Schutzmannsfrau und andere Grotesken was published in Zurich in 1965 in the series ‘Frühe Texte der Moderne’. Prosa (two vols) was published in 1980 (vol. I: Ich verlange ein Reiterstandbild; vol. II: Der Schöpfer). Das Eisenbahnunglück oder Der Anti-Freud appeared in 1988, and Graue Magie in 1989.
