Nikolaus Berwanger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolaus Berwanger, 1988

Nikolaus Berwanger (born July 5, 1935 in Freidorf , Kingdom of Romania , † April 1, 1989 in Ludwigsburg ) was a German writer and journalist from Romania. Before he left Romania in 1984, he also worked there as a politician .

Life

Nikolaus Berwanger was born as the second of three children to a social democratic Banat Swabian working-class family. He attended elementary school in Freidorf and the textile school in Timișoara , German Timişoara.

At the age of 15 he was the youngest member of the German Antifascist Committee in Romania ( Romanian Comitetul Antifascist German (Antifa) ). Through this organization, founded in 1949 by the Romanian Workers' Party ( Romanian Partidul Muncitoresc Român ), he came to the German-language daily Neuer Weg , Bucharest , in 1952 as a journalist . From 1958 he was the “New Way” correspondent for the Banat region in Timisoara. He graduated from the philological faculty of the Timişoara University (after the political change in 1989 University of the West Timișoara ), specializing in German and Romanian language and literature. Berwanger was deputy chairman of the Romanian journalists' council, member of the executive council of the Romanian Writers' Union and the Timisoara Writers' Association, and co-founder and head of the Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn literary group.

In 1957 Berwanger joined the Romanian Workers' Party , which was renamed the Romanian Communist Party (RKP) in 1965 . He was Bureau member of the County Party Committee Timis, "the Council of the working people of German nationality in Romania, Chairman of the Deputy Chairman of County Council Timis the coinhabiting nationalities - perceived a prominent official who many in the party and state level as well as in areas of cultural life tasks."

On July 3, 1968, in the presence of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the "Consultation at the Central Committee of the RKP with scientists and cultural workers from the ranks of German nationality" took place. The participants were "the comrades: Anton Breitenhofer , Arnold Hauser , Paul Schuster , Eduard Eisenburger , Carl Göllner , Carl Saal, Johann Wolf , Nikolaus Berwanger, Hanns Schuschnig , Ewalt Zweier, Georg Scherg , Norbert Petri , Paul Schuller and Franz Liebhard ", Johann Székler and Hedi Hauser were also invited . At the beginning of November 1968, Berwanger and other representatives of the German minority took part in meetings to establish the district councils of the working people from among the nationalities living with them. The title of the report on the establishment of the body in Timiș County was: "All our strengths to implement party politics".

From 1969 until the late autumn of 1984 Berwanger was editor-in-chief of the Neue Banater Zeitung , Timisoara, in which the literature supplement Pipatsch in Banat dialect appeared regularly . In Timisoara, Berwanger also gathered a group of young writers around him, from which the future Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller emerged .

In autumn 1984 Berwanger did not return to Romania from a trip abroad to the FRG . He first lived in Ludwigsburg. In 1987 he worked as a research assistant at the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar . In 1986 and 1987 stays as a visiting professor at the universities of Portland and Albuquerque in the United States followed . In 1988 he gave readings and lectures at the German Embassy , the German School Washington , Maryland University and George Mason University . Berwanger was married to Sigrid Eckert-Berwanger for the second time. He had two children, Karin Astrid and Harald, from his first marriage to Katharina Berwanger, nee. Wagner.

Publications

Poetry

  • I don't hang up my face, dialect poems (Bucharest, 1976)
  • Late Confession, Poems (Bucharest, 1979)
  • Snow White open your eyes, poems (Timișoara, 1980)
  • Last Polka, Dialect Poems, (Bucharest, 1982)
  • To my unborn grandchildren, poems (Timișoara, 1983)
  • Stone whisper, poems, (Hildesheim, 1983)
  • The most beautiful poems, (Bucharest, 1984)
  • Open milieu descriptions, poems, (Hildesheim, 1985)
  • I would like to say goodbye, dialect poems with ink drawings by Gert Fabritius (Stuttgart, 1987)
  • In love and in hate - the big Swabian sale and other texts, (Hildesheim, 1987)
  • You did not have your life You lived your time, poems from the estate, (Hildesheim, 1992)

prose

  • Swabian, dialect prose (Bucharest, 1971)
  • Satirical letters, dialect prose (Timișoara, 1974)
  • Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn , picture monograph (Bucharest, 1977)
  • Stories about Seppi and Peppi, prose for children, (Timișoara, 1979)
  • Hello my servant, theater, (Bucharest, 1981)
  • My grandma and other stories, (Sersheim, 1987)

Television documentaries

  • The poet Nikolaus Lenau and the Banat
  • A Banat Painter (Franz Ferch)
  • The story of a painting (Stefan Jäger)
  • Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn today
  • Johann Szimits , the founder of Swabian literature in the Banat
  • The Timisoara poet and cultural historian Franz Liebhardt
  • The soul of the earth, in Romanian
  • I drank water from the Bega, in Romanian
  • Timisoara monuments, in Romanian language

Others

The New Banat Newspaper (FBG), whose chief editor was Nikolaus Berwanger many years has he not only influenced the content but as a passionate advocate of banatschwäbischen dialect poetry and the dialect supplement Pipatsch issued founded and (until 1984). The NBZ, the "Pipatsch", the numerous other supplements , weeklies and campaigns of the newspaper were of importance for the Banat Swabians in an economically and politically difficult time in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s and certainly helped to strengthen the self-confidence of this German-speaking minority contributed. He was editor of the first people's calendar of the NBZ (1978, ff).

reception

Nikolaus Berwanger was a public figure in Romania; he was well known among the Banat-Swabian ethnic group. In May 1987 he wrote about that time:

“I consciously made politics, under difficult conditions, with the main goal of creating a new German cultural landscape in Romania at that time. (...) I thought that the daily detailed work would be a modest contribution to the hoped-for renewal in the country. I and my friends thought that one could really influence everyday political life through education, through literature, through culture as a whole. The small NBZ, with a daily circulation of 20,000, was able to show itself in the Romanian media landscape, but was becoming increasingly 'dangerous'. We had only tried to practice a little democracy or freedom of the press, and none of us was a hero, we just gave up much later than other people or groups. (...) I felt jointly responsible for all the negative excesses of socialism in Romania at that time, for all of its manifestations that injured humanity; I wanted to improve, I was waiting for the big change, I wanted to put the word democracy, which is sacred to me, before the word socialism. "

Margit Pflagner : In the few years that were given to him in his new homeland, he continued to publish and tried again, in his poems, prose and articles, as well as in readings and lectures: “The situation of his homeland through poetry to circle around, to cope with them, not only for yourself personally, but to find words to express the tragedy, doubts and a remnant of hope. He has (...) remained the same, a fighter [...] whose texts can hardly be classified literarily. But the point of view from which he speaks has changed. If he was previously in the center of the action, [...] he is now on the outside, he has become an outsider, with great freedom to speak, who nevertheless cannot detach himself from what he had to leave behind. "

All his life he was a controversial personality, an upright character, an uncomfortable fighter on many different barricades, an idealist who selflessly stood up for his ideas, his cause, with the risk of ultimately being bitterly disappointed and with the insight, like himself in a poem regrets having put the ladder on the wrong wall. Richard Wagner paid tribute to Berwanger in a lecture in Munich in 2006. He described him as a “problem solver”, “head of a critical dialect poetry school in Timisoara” and “man of the hour”: “As a party official, Nikolaus Berwanger was certainly a completely atypical figure for the communist hierarchy. At the same time, he represented a type for whom there was a lot to do, especially in a dictatorship whose joints, to put it mildly, were no longer good. He was a problem solver. If you had any hurdle to overcome with whatever and didn't know what to do next, you went to him. One of the main characteristics of such problem solvers was listening to everyone, no matter what they had to say. In doing so, they have already exceeded the system's usual code of conduct. They came across as non-conformist and made a good impression on the people. ”And finally Wagner came to a very one-sided conclusion:“ Since the communist system appears to us to be a lumber room, what counts above all is the performance in those dark times from the great, cold To peel out the current of the historical movement in order to wrest its meaning, perhaps also its historical power, from oblivion and to let it speak to us, the present. "

Dieter Michelbach: “Nikolaus Berwanger is one of the well-known personalities of the Banat Swabians . With his name, the preservation of the identity and political action of this group are closely linked [...]. ”As a cultural politician, he made an important“ contribution to the restructuring of the Neue Banater Zeitung ”, and he also“ advocated the preservation of German schools during this period of Romanian national communism ”.

Elke Sabiel: “Berwanger was a doer who promoted cultural life in the long term. [...] In his contribution “The relationship between Nikolaus Berwanger and AG Banat from the Securitate's point of view” , Stefan Sienerth discussed Berwanger's position in the power structure at the time. [...] He called things by their names and pointed out grievances, but was also ready to compromise with those in power. He had been under surveillance by the Securitate since the 1960s, but was not overly observed as he enjoyed the trust of the RKP. Yet his Secu file is over a thousand pages long! He held his protective hand over the young authors and opened the NBZ to critical topics. "

The estate is at the Institute for German Culture and History of Southeast Europe e. V. (IKGS) open to the public.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Richard Schwarz: The Circle of Niki Berwanger , Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 17, 2009
  2. ↑ Monica Barcan, Adalbert Millitz : The German Nationality in Romania , Kriterion Verlag, Bucharest, 1977, p. 55
  3. ↑ Siebenbürgische Zeitung: Nikolaus Berwanger Symposium in Munich , November 28, 2006 (→ online )
  4. ^ General German newspaper for Romania , Hannelore Baier : The year 1968 and the German minority , July 11, 2009 (→ online )
  5. ^ Neuer Weg, Bucharest, November 9, 1968
  6. ↑ Berwanger, Nikolaus . In: banaterra.eu
  7. ↑ Österreichischer Rundfunk , keyword literature, Margit Pflagner , Studio Burgenland, 1986
  8. ↑ Siebenbürgische Zeitung, Dieter Michelbach: Multifaceted personality , January 14, 2007 (→ online )
  9. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung für Romania, Elke Sabiel: There is no obituary for Romanian-German literature, because they are still writing today , May 12, 2012 (→ online )

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Berwanger, Nikolaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Freidorf , Kingdom of Romania
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1989
Place of death Ludwigsburg