Angelika Mechtel
Angelika Mechtel (born August 26, 1943 in Dresden ; † February 8, 2000 in Cologne ) was a German writer .
Life
Angelika Mechtel was the daughter of the journalist Walter Mechtel , who was a foreign correspondent for ARD in Beirut (Lebanon) and was shot dead by an Arab on November 18, 1967 in Aden , Yemen . Her mother, the actress Gisela Altendorf from Oppenheim in Rheinhessen , died in 1994.
After her parents' flight from Kamenz in 1945, Angelika Mechtel grew up in West Germany and attended Waldorf schools and a monastery school . Before she could take the Abitur exam, she dropped out of school in 1962 because she was pregnant. She married and gave birth to her daughter Anke in the same year. Their second daughter, Silke, was born in 1965. In 1985 Angelika Mechtel divorced; from 1981 she lived with the writer Gerd E. Hoffmann .
She worked in many genres and wrote novels, poems, short stories, reports, children's books, radio plays and screenplays for television films. In 1963 she published her first volume of poems against ice and flood . She had her first major success in 1968 with the volume of short stories The Fine Grave Digger . In Das Gläserne Paradies (1973) she caricatures the middle-class family. In 1975 she started writing for children. Her first children's book was called Hello Vivi! .
At the writers ' congress in Mainz in March 1983, she was elected to the federal board of the Association of German Writers (VS) , now in ver.di , of which she was a member until April 1984. In 1989 she resigned from the VS because of what she believed to be the half-hearted attitude of the association in the Salman Rushdie case .
From 1983 to 1991 Mechtel was also Vice President of the West German PEN Center ; for the international PEN she was the representative for the Writers-in-Prison-Committee .
In 1987 Angelika Mechtel fell ill with breast cancer and suffered a relapse in 1993, which forced her to give up her commitment to persecuted writers all over the world. After her death, her remains were cremated at her request and the ashes were scattered in the spring of 2000 where she had last lived - in the Bay of Boquerón in Puerto Rico .
Awards and honors
- 1970 Promotion Prize of the City of Nuremberg
- 1971 BDI award for literature
- 1971 Toucan Prize
- 1984 Children's Book Prize from the Berlin Senate's Commissioner for Foreigners
- 1989 Hermann Kesten Medal (for services to persecuted writers)
- 1992 Honorary gift from the German Schiller Foundation
- 1993 Max Kade Scholarship, Dartmouth College
- 1994 Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia
Web links
- Literature by and about Angelika Mechtel in the catalog of the German National Library
- Angelika Mechtel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Website about Angelika Mechtel
- Biography, literature & sources on Angelika Mechtel FemBio of the Institute for Women's Biography Research
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sybil Countess Schönfeldt: Duds ... ... and angry drafts. Angelika Mechtel's fashionable novels . In: Zeit-Online (October 11, 1974).
- ↑ Merit holders since 1986. State Chancellery of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, accessed on March 11, 2017 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Mechtel, Angelika |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 26, 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dresden |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 2000 |
| Place of death | Cologne |