Bernward Vespers

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Memorial stone for Bernward Vesper on the former Triangel estate in Lower Saxony

Bernward Vesper (born August 1, 1938 in Frankfurt (Oder) , † May 15, 1971 in Hamburg ) was a German publisher and writer . He is the father of the director and university professor Felix Ensslin .

Life

Bernward Vesper was born in Frankfurt an der Oder as the sixth child of the folk poet Wilhelm, called Will Vesper (1882–1962), and the fourth child of Rose Savrada, widowed Rimpau.

“A thunderstorm was falling over the Oderbruch when I was in the private clinic of the lecturer Dr. Hans Dege and his wife Dr. Marie Joachimi-Dege was born in Frankfurt an der Oder, a few weeks after my parents married, [...] as the second child in their relationship. "

- Bernward Vespers

Ludwig Arnold Rimpau , whom Bernward Vesper confused with Hans Rimpau (1854–1919) in his autobiographical novel essay Die Reise , died in 1936. He left his widow the Triangle estate on the southern edge of the Lüneburg Heath in the Gifhorn district , which Will Vesper and his family could relate to . Two daughters of Rose Vespers from her first marriage also lived on the estate. Essential parts of his autobiographical work Die Reise (see below) report on childhood, school days and youth in what he sees as the only seemingly idyllic Gifhorn of the 1950s, as well as the suffering of his authoritarian parents' house in the village of Triangel .

In 1959, Bernward Vesper passed his Abitur at Otto Hahn Gymnasium in Gifhorn . From 1959 to 1961 he completed an apprenticeship as a publishing bookseller with the Westermann printing and publishing group in Braunschweig . He then started studying history, German and sociology at the University of Tübingen , with Walter Jens and Ralf Dahrendorf among others . During his studies he was at times a member of the Roigel student association in Tübingen (resigned in 1962). He later moved to the Free University of Berlin with his then partner Gudrun Ensslin . In 1962 he received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation . He intended to do his doctorate with Ralf Dahrendorf.

In 1963, together with Gudrun Ensslin, he founded the small publishing house Studio Neue Literatur , in which only a few books were published, a volume of poetry by the Spanish writer Gerardo Diego and a book he published with the title Gegen den Tod (voices of German writers against the atomic bomb). Of the Will Vesper Complete Edition planned after the death of his father, which Gudrun Ensslin declared in a review for the newspaper “Das deutsche Wort” in September 1963 as a “task for national Germany”, only one volume was ultimately published.

In 1965 Vesper worked in West Berlin in the election office of German writers as a speechwriter for Willy Brandt and Karl Schiller . In protest against the emergency legislation , he later left the election office. In 1966 he founded the Voltaire pamphlets and in 1968 the Voltaire edition and the Voltaire handbooks. His son Felix was born on May 13, 1967 in Berlin-Charlottenburg . However, the relationship with Ensslin ended when she met Andreas Baader and left Vesper in February 1968.

In 1969 Vesper began the novel essay Die Reise , which he could no longer complete. In the autobiographical fragment, which was only published posthumously in 1977, Vesper thematizes and reflects on the relationship to his father, his own radical political convictions, his writing process on the “journey” and his experiences with drugs. It is an influential representation of the 1968 generation and an important contemporary document.

In 1971 Vesper was admitted to the Haar psychiatry near Munich and then transferred to the psychiatry of the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Clinic , where he committed suicide on May 15, 1971 with an overdose of sleeping pills .

reception

Vesper's novel was filmed in 1986 by the Swiss director Markus Imhoof with the leading actors Markus Boysen , Will Quadflieg , Corinna Kirchhoff and Claude-Oliver Rudolph under the title Die Reise . The radio version of the trip was awarded the Audio Play Prize of the Academy of Arts in 2003. In 2011, Andres Veiel's feature film Who if not we followed , which is based on Gerd Koenen's biography Vesper, Ensslin, Baader and was filmed with August Diehl (as Bernward Vesper), Lena Lauzemis (Ensslin) and Alexander Fehling (Baader).

Works

  • The journey . Novel essay. Edited from the unfinished manuscript and provided with an edition chronology by Jörg Schröder . March, Frankfurt 1977; Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek near Hamburg 1983.
  • Additions to Die Reise. Novel essay. From the last edition. Edited by Jörg Schröder from the unfinished manuscript. March, Frankfurt Main 1979.
  • with Gudrun Ensslin: “Emergency laws from your hand”. Letters. 1968-1969. Edited by Caroline Harmsen, Ulrike Seyer and Johannes Ullmaier. With a comment by Felix Ensslin. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009.

literature

Biographical

  • Gerd Koenen : Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Primal scenes of German terrorism. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-462-03313-1 .
  • Michael Kapellen: Living twice. Bernward Vesper and Gudrun Ensslin. The years in Tübingen. Klöpfer & Meyer, Tübingen 2005.
  • Henner Voss: Before the trip. Memories of Bernward Vesper. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-936345-91-9 .
  • Mathias Brandstädter: National idyll in the slipstream. Notes on Bernward Vesper. In: Culture and Ghosts. Volume 1. Issue 2. Hamburg 2006, pp. 26–32.
  • Jochen Vogt : Vesper, Bernward. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann (Ed.): Killy Literature Lexicon . 2nd, completely revised edition. De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-022041-4 , Vol. 11: Si – Vi , pp. 757 f.

In connection with Die Reise

  • Bernd Neumann: The rebirth of storytelling from the spirit of autobiography? Some comments on the new autobiographical novel using the example of Hermann Kinds Der Schleiftrog and Bernward Vespers The Journey . In: Basis. Yearbook for contemporary German literature. Volume 9, 1979, pp. 91-121.
  • Horst Jesse: The retrospective reflection of the identity development of young people based on autobiographical novels by Bernward Vesper, Christa Wolf and Thomas Bernhard. From the point of view of the interrelationship between identity development and the development of moral levels according to Lawrence Kohlberg. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2000.
  • Stephan Resch: Provoked writing. Drugs in German-language literature since 1945 (= historical-critical work on German literature. Volume 41). Peter Lang, Frankfurt Main 2007.
  • Alban Lefranc : Attacks. Fassbinder, Vesper, Nico. Three novels. Translated from the French by Katja Roloff. Blumenbar, Munich 2008.
  • Mathias Brandstädter: Consequential damage. Context, narrative structures and forms of development of the father's literature. 1960-2008. Determination of a genre. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010.
  • Marina Karlheim: Writing about the fathers. Memory topographies. An analysis. Tectum, Marburg 2010.
  • Jennifer Clare: Protexts. Interactions between literary writing processes and political opposition around 1968 . transcript, Bielefeld 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The journey. Novel essay. Last edition , Berlin 1981, p. 56.
  2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , pp. 703-704.
  3. ↑ Alexander Gallus: A beginning that did not let the end wait. The scholars Meinhof, Mahler, Ensslin, Vesper and the elite funding of the early Federal Republic. Reading files , in: Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie 24/2012, pp. 13–29, ISBN 978-3-8329-7999-7 .
  4. ↑ Der Spiegel, No. 52/1979, pp.146ff. [1]
personal data
SURNAME Vespers, Bernward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, political activist and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt (Oder)
DATE OF DEATH May 15, 1971
Place of death Hamburg