1. Reinhard Johannes Sorge was a German dramatist and poet.
16 Facts About Reinhard Sorge
1. 2.
Reinhard Sorge is best known for writing the Expressionist and radically iconoclastic stage play The Beggar, which won the Kleist Prize in 1912.
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In 1915, Sorge was conscripted into the Imperial German Army, promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal, and sent into combat duty in the trench warfare of World War I He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme on 20th July 1916.
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At the time of his death, Reinhard Sorge was only 24 years-old.
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Reinhard Sorge was born in Berlin-Rixdorf, into the family of a middle class salesman of Huguenot descent.
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When he was nine years old, Reinhard Sorge's father died and his family moved to Jena.
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Reinhard Sorge began to write at the age of sixteen, but lost his faith in Christianity after reading Also Sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Reinhard Sorge caused common prayers and grace at table to be given up in his pious Lutheran home, and destroyed his young brother's belief in God and Heaven.
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Reinhard Sorge struggled, amid the constantly overcast skies, to bring a new insight to mankind solely out of himself.
10.
Reinhard Sorge used his winnings to marry his fiancee, Susanne Maria Handewerk.
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Reinhard Sorge succeeded in winning over many of his friends and relatives to Catholicism.
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Reinhard Sorge had less success in his evangelizing letters to Ranier Maria Rilke, Stefan George, and his former mentor, Richard Dehmel.
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Reinhard Sorge was conscripted into the Prussian Army in 1915 and assigned to the 6th Company of Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr.
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Reinhard Sorge spent much of his free time trying to win his fellow soldiers over to Roman Catholicism.
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Reinhard Sorge died the same day, 20 July 1916, at a field dressing station in the ruins of Ablaincourt.
16.
The centenary of Lance Corporal Reinhard Sorge's death was commemorated, alongside those of Allied war poets Alan Seeger and Camil Campanya, who fell serving with the French Foreign Legion during the same battle, during a multinational ceremony at Belloy-en-Santerre on 04 July 2016.