Andor Endre Gelléri

Andor Endre Gelléri (born March 30, 1906 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died around May 3, 1945 in Wels , Austria ) was a Hungarian writer . He gained fame primarily through his short stories .

Life

Andor Endre Gelléri was born into a Jewish working-class family in the Budapest district of Óbuda (old furnace). He grew up in the vicinity of the brickworks, locksmiths and turning shops of Bécsi út (Wiener Straße) and thus got to know the living conditions of workers, day laborers, laundresses and maids. Gelléri's father József was a locksmith and at times ran a safe-deposit box workshop. The relationship between father and son was problematic; The father faced all literary ambitions with open rejection.

Gelléri broke off his high school career and, at the request of his father, completed the three-year Technológia, an industrial college. While still at school, his first novella was published in 1924 in the Budapest daily Az Est . Their editor Lajos Mikes became a mentor and a substitute father figure for Gelléri. Later Gelléri's stories were also published in the most important progressive Hungarian literary magazine, Nyugat .

Although he was successful as a writer at a young age, Gelléri always had to earn his living with wage labor. Among other things, he was employed as an educator, carter, secretary, laundry worker and technical draftsman. In 1928 he won a scholarship writing competition from Az Est and then spent several months in Germany (Frankfurt, Munich) and Italy. After his return, Gelléri worked in a Budapest steam laundry. The experiences gathered here served as a template for his novel , published in 1931 , which he dedicated to the late mentor Mikes. In the following years the poet Milán Füst became Gelléri's new mentor.

In 1937 Gelléri married Júlianna (Júdit) Dreier and moved with her to the V district . After József Gelléri's death in 1938, the two moved back to Óbuda, where their daughter Ágnes was born in 1939 and their son József three years later. From 1940 onwards Gelléris' literary productivity decreased. As a Jew he was called up for labor service and was used to fortify the south-east wall . In phases without labor, he wrote the fragments of his autobiography , the last in August 1944. Gelléri came with one of the death marches in the Mauthausen concentration camp . A few days after the camp was liberated by US troops in May 1945, Gelléri died in a hospital near Wels, exhausted from an infection with typhus . His remains were buried in an unspecified grave.

Gelléri wrote a short novel, around 80 novels and an unfinished autobiographical novel, which was published posthumously by his wife. Some of the novellas were published in their own volumes, but the majority in newspapers and magazines. The novellas are now available in a two-volume edition.

The central subject in almost all Gelléri texts is the plight of the proletarians. Mass unemployment, homelessness and poverty are the determining living conditions of the characters. In doing so, his mostly jovial protagonists maintain their zest for life, so that Gelléri's stories go beyond mere naturalistic descriptions of the urban periphery. His peculiar, bizarre-surreal diction, which combines elements with realistic descriptions, is a singular phenomenon in Hungarian literature. It is often labeled with terms such as “fairy realism” ( Kosztolányi ), “unreal realism” ( Déry ) or “dreamer of reality” (Füst).

Works (selection)

• A nagymosoda ( “Phoenix” industrial laundry , title of the new translation: The industrial laundry ). Short novel. 1931.
• Szomjas inasok ( thirsty apprentice ). Novellas 1933.
• Hold utca ( moon street ). Novellas. 1934.
• Kikötö ( harbor ). Novellas. 1935.
• Villám és esti tüz ( lightning and fire in the evening ). Novellas. 1940.
• Egy önérzet története ( story of a sense of self ). Novel. 1957.

The following translations were published in German:

• Phoenix laundry. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1962.
• Budapest and other prose. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1969; 2nd edition 1990, ISBN 3-518-01237-1 .
• Wizard, help! Rütten and Loening, Berlin 1979.
• The large laundry. Guggolz, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-945370-04-9 .
• Stromern. Stories. Translation Timea Tankó . Epilogue by György Dalos . Guggolz, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-945370-18-6 .
• and so far three volumes with selected short stories.

literature

• Kálmán Vargha: Gelléri Andor Endre (1980)
• Sz.Péter Nagy: Az idilltöl az abszurdig (1981)
• Endre Andor Gelléri (1906-1945) , short biography and reviews at hunlit.hu (German)

Web links

• Literature by and about Andor Endre Gelléri in the catalog of the German National Library