Gaston Salvatore

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gaston Salvatore portrayed by Oliver Mark , Venice 2010

Gastón Salvatore Pascal (born September 29, 1941 in Valparaíso ; † December 11, 2015 in Venice ) was a German-speaking writer and playwright of Chilean origin.

Life

Gaston Salvatore was born in Chile in 1941. His Chilean mother Maria Pascal Lyon and his Italian father Ernesto Salvatore Vocca were married in Rome, where his sister was born in 1937. He was therefore a nephew by marriage of the later Chilean President Salvador Allende . Salvatore's father was captured by Japan during World War II and was freed by the Americans. The family reunited in Chile after the war. Salvatore attended St. George's Catholic College, studied law at the University of Chile and graduated as a fully qualified lawyer and with the title of attorney. At the same time he studied economics and graduated with a diploma as an agricultural economist. For a short time he worked as a lawyer in Chile.

With a postgraduate scholarship he came to Berlin in 1965 and studied philosophy, sociology and political science at the FU . During his student days he got to know Hans Magnus Enzensberger , with whom he was friends since then. It was Enzensberger who encouraged Salvatore to write in German.

Salvatore was a close friend of Rudi Dutschke in the student movement of the 1960s . In 1969 Salvatore and Dutschke were charged with a serious breach of the peace , whereby the trial against Dutschke was suspended due to the attack. Only Gaston Salvatore was sentenced to nine months in prison without parole. On the day of this conviction, Gaston Salvatore fled to Italy, later to London and Chile. When the new building of the State Theater in Darmstadt opened on October 7, 1972 with the world premiere of Salvatore's play Büchner's Death , he was arrested because an amnesty previously granted to convicted members of the student movement only applied to German citizens. Salvatore asked the police officers to be able to personally question Federal President Gustav Heinemann , who was present at the festivities, about this incident. As a result, Salvatore immediately received a permanent work permit in Germany.

On September 11, 1973, the Unidad Popular government was overthrown in Chile ; President Allende was killed in the process. Gaston Salvatore, who had been closely connected to Salvador Allende since childhood, experienced the coup in Germany, where his Chilean passport was taken away. Salvatore stayed in Berlin. In 1975 Gaston Salvatore settled in Venice , although he kept his residence in Berlin.

From September 1980, Salvatore and Hans Magnus Enzensberger published the magazine TransAtlantik , which he co-founded . From 1983 to 1984 he was a permanent freelancer at Stern , for whom he wrote portraits of leading figures in Germany.

Gaston Salvatore died on December 11, 2015 at the age of 74 in Venice.

Literary work

Gaston Salvatore (1977)

In 1969, Salvatore's poem An attempt on pigs , set to music by Hans Werner Henze, premiered in London in the Queen Elizabeth Hall . In 1971, the world premiere of the poem cycle The lengthy path to Natascha Ungeheuer's apartment , set to music by Hans Werner Henze, took place, which was broadcast across Europe on the radio. This full-length show with 17 participants was then performed in Berlin, Washington and other opera houses.

In 1970 Gaston Salvatore worked for the film director Michelangelo Antonioni on the completion of Zabriskie Point and prepared a film The Emperor of China , which tells about the builder of the first wall in China. This film was never made; Gaston Salvatore processed this research in his long story The Emperor of China. Life and Death of Emperor Ch'in Schi Huang Ti , published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1980.

In 1973 Salvatore worked in Berlin on the nonfiction novel The Man with the Timpani , which tells the life of Wolfgang Neuss . The book was published in 1974 by S. Fischer Verlag.

In the years 1975 to 1976 he wrote the theater plays Tauroggen, Fossilien and Freibrief in Berlin . The piece Freibrief premiered in Bochum in 1977, followed by a performance at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In addition, Salvatore worked with Peter Zadek on the script for the film Spring Awakening after Wedekind. Zadek planned the filming of carte blanche .

Until 1982, a short story from the Waldemar Müller series was published every month in the monthly magazine Trans-Atlantik, which he and Hans Magnus Enzensberger founded and edited. It was later published in book form by several publishers. The expanded edition from 1993 ( Die Other Bibliothek , Ed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Eichborn Verlag) also includes stories that are located after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

After long years of preparation, the play Stalin was written in Venice in 1985 and published in 1987 by Suhrkamp Verlag. The world premiere took place in October 1987 at the Schiller Theater in Berlin. “The play takes place in 1952/1953 in Stalin's dacha, 32 km from Moscow. Itsik Sager, an old actor and director of the Moscow Art Theater who is currently playing Lear, is brought to Stalin from the performance while still in costume. Sager's fear and apprehension initially subside when Stalin, very sociable and interested, starts a conversation with him about Lear and both declaim the text with assigned roles. ”The play was played with great success worldwide. It was staged by George Tabori at the Vienna Theater Der Kreis , and the production was recorded on television. Gaston Salvatore staged it himself in Karlsruhe. Stalin was translated into numerous languages, including Polish and Russian.

In 1989 the drama Lessons of Darkness appeared , which premiered in Wiesbaden. Salvatore described it as a play in which "different ideas of justice" collide. One critic, on the other hand, spoke of a “too clever and enlightened piece of the thesis” ”. His theater work King Kongo, which premiered in Essen in November 1991, also met with a critical reception . A vaudeville that addressed the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884/1885 and the genocide in Central Africa.

This was followed by work on the pieces Benito Cereno , Der Kampf aus der Ferne , The Visitation and Hess , which appeared in an anthology in 1998 by Suhrkamp Verlag. The piece Hess was premiered in Weimar in 1998. Gaston Salvatore said: “ Hess was not a stray fellow traveler. He had not only sought and found the guide, but made him into a true position and finally surrendered blindly to his creature. 'Give the good lines to the bad guys' is the rule of thumb of the theater makers. ”During the Heidelberg performance, the audience asked why Salvatore did not deal with the character of Salvador Allende. This was the reason for working on the drama Allende . It is the first play that Salvatore has written in Spanish. In 2000 the Italian translation by Franca Trentin and Paolo Vettore was published by Lisi. The Italian publisher Scheiwiller published the anthology Drammi politici in 2008 with the plays Stalin , Hess , Allende and, for the first time, Monsieur Joseph . The drama Monsieur Joseph was written in German in 2003 and translated into Italian and French.

In 2007 the drama Tierra del Fuego was created , which premiered on November 14, 2008 at the Burgtheater in Vienna and was published in the same year by Suhrkamp Verlag. On April 1, 2009, a staged reading of Tierra del Fuego took place in the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe in cooperation with the Badisches Staatstheater as part of the series of events for the Darwin year .

Prizes and awards

Works

  • Intellectuals and Socialism , Wagenbach 1968
  • The tedious way to Natascha Ungeheuer's apartment , 1971, Luchterhand
  • Büchner's death , play, 1972, Fischer
  • Wolfgang Neuss - A child with many wrinkles , 1974, Fischer
  • Fossils , play, 1976, Suhrkamp
  • Free letter , play, 1977, Suhrkamp
  • The Emperor of China , 1980, Hanser
  • Tauroggen , play, 1982, Suhrkamp
  • Waldemar Müller. A German Destiny , 1982, Eichborn
  • Stalin , play, 1985, Suhrkamp
  • Lessons of darkness , play, 1989, Suhrkamp
  • King Kongo , play, 1991, Suhrkamp
  • Hess , play, 1991, Suhrkamp
  • Benito Cereno , play, 1992, Suhrkamp
  • The fight from a distance , play, 1992, Suhrkamp
  • Waldemar Müller's moral roller coaster . A trailer, Eichborn Verlag, 1993
  • The image jammer . Gaston Salvatore in conversation with Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Edition q, Berlin 1994
  • Venice , An Insider Lexicon, Beck-Verlag, Munich 1995.
  • Instructions for dealing with beautiful women , stories, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1997
  • The Visitation , play, 1998, Suhrkamp
  • Allende , play, 2000
  • Invitation to Downfall , Venetian back stairs, Picus Verlag, Vienna 2000 (3rd edition 2006) [also as audio book]
  • Monsieur Joseph , play, 2001
  • Tierra del Fuego , play, 2008

Web links

Commons : Gaston Salvatore  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary notice Gaston Salvatore , FAZ , December 19, 2015
  2. ^ Günther Wessel : The Allendes. With burning patience for a better world . Bastei Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2004, ISBN 3-404-61537-9 , pp. 234-235 (first edition by Campus Verlag, 2002).
  3. ↑ a b Willi Winkler : Dandy and revolutionary. The writer Gaston Salvatore has died at the age of 74. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 14, 2015, p. 11.
  4. ^ Heinrich Heine in the Alfa Romeo . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1980 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Gaston Salvatore is dead. In: lyrikzeitung.com. December 14, 2015, accessed December 14, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Contents of the Suhrkamp Verlag
  7. ↑ Interview with Gaston Salvatore. In: Die Welt , May 2, 1990.
  8. ^ The daily newspaper , May 23, 1990.
  9. ↑ On the content of the piece: “In 1831, Captain Robert FitzRoy surveyed the coasts of South America in the service of the English Navy. On board is the young Charles Darwin, full of curiosity about the unknown world, and also three indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, whom the captain brings back to their homeland after he had kidnapped them and wanted to 'civilize' them in London. Darwin is skeptical: he does not believe in a quick success of education. Thoughts of Darwin's theory of evolution echo in the controversy. Jemmy Button, the Tierra del Fuego, valued by the captain, stands between the two as a visual object. After the aborigines disembark, Darwin's assessment is confirmed. English clothing immediately gives way to nudity and war paint. When a missionary is massacred, everything points to Jemmy Button as the perpetrator. Now FitzRoy must also see that his assessment was wrong: It's a long way to civilization. "
personal data
SURNAME Salvatore, Gaston
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Salvatore Pascal, Gastón; Salvatore, Gastón
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-speaking writer and playwright of Chilean origin
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Valparaíso , Región de Valparaíso , Chile
DATE OF DEATH December 11, 2015
Place of death Venice , Veneto , Italy