Max Mohr and D. H. Lawrence: A Personal and a Fictional Friendship

Max Mohr was one of the more successful writers and literary correspondents of the Weimar Republic and a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence, whom he first met in 1927. In 1934 he left Germany because of his Jewish origin, leaving his family behind in Bavaria to follow him later, and began practicing as physician and revising his latest novel in Shanghai, where he died in 1937. For many years he was practically forgotten as a writer. There was a brief revival of some of his writings in Germany after 1993, when two of his novels were reprinted and his friendship with D. H. Lawrence aroused some new attention. It has recently been revived by the publication of Mohr’s complete correspondence. The article describes the immense impact of D. H. Lawrence’s work and his personality during DHL’s last two months, when the two men became fairly close. DHL wished Mohr to do a German translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (the project came to nothing). After Lawrence’s death Frieda Lawrence and Else Jaffe wrote to Mohr, and DHL’s letters were one of the very few personal items he took with him and kept in his exile. His many letters to his wife show that Lawrence was a constant presence in his imagination, and his writings from 1929 confirm this impression. Especially Mohr’s novel Die Freundschaft von Ladiz (1931), dedicated to the memory of Lawrence and translated into English the following year, is a most interesting document of this powerful influence. It shows that Mohr had been particularly impressed by Lawrence’s earlier writings. His novel of 1931 has a character with a red beard, evidently modeled on DHL, some of whose words are even put in his mouth.