Christian Geissler

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Christian Geissler (born December 25, 1928 in Hamburg ; † August 26, 2008 there ) was a German writer .

Life

Christian Geissler, whose father was a building contractor, took part in the Second World War as a flak helper in 1944/45 . After graduating from high school, he began to study Protestant theology in Hamburg in 1949 . In 1950 he was a commercial apprentice in an industrial company, and in 1951 he worked as a farm worker in England for six months. From 1952 he continued his theology studies at the University of Tübingen . In 1953 he converted to Catholicism and switched to studying philosophy and psychology at the University of Munich . In 1956 he broke off his studies for good and became a freelance writer.

In the following years (until 1959) Geissler worked for Norddeutscher Rundfunk , where he produced his first radio and television programs. From 1960 to 1964 he was editor of the workbooks for Catholic lay people . In 1962 he resigned from the Catholic Church . From 1962 to 1968 he was a member of the “Kuratorium of the Campaign for Disarmament and the Easter March ”; from 1965 to 1968 editor of the left-wing literary magazine Kürbiskern . In 1967 he joined the illegal Communist Party of Germany , which he left again in 1968 because he did not approve of the legalistic course of the planned and 1968 re-establishment of the German Communist Party .

Grave site of the writer Christian Geissler in the cemetery of the Reformed Church in Ditzumerverlaat in Rheiderland (East Frisia)

From 1969 Geissler worked as a documentary filmmaker ; from 1972 to 1974 he was a lecturer at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. From 1973 he was involved in the Hamburg committee against torture of political prisoners in the FRG . He lived in Hamburg until the end of the 1970s, then in different places at home and abroad. From 1985 to 2004 he lived in East Friesland, then again in Hamburg. He was a member of the PEN Club from 1971 until he left the company in 1976 .

His son Benjamin Geissler (* 1964) also works as a documentary filmmaker.

Portrait of the writer Christian Geissler on his grave cross. (Porcelain picture)

In the 1980s, Geissler had come closer to the anti-imperialist left politically and artistically. The novel Kamalatta from 1988 was a literary examination of the armed struggle of the RAF. In 1989 Geissler took part in solidarity campaigns that accompanied the hunger strike of the prisoners from the RAF. It was about better conditions and an end to isolation in prison. In the work “Dissonances of Clarification” Geissler also made political differences with parts of the anti-imperialists the subject of his literary work. Until a few years before his death, Geissler defended the armed struggle as a form of left-wing politics on podiums and at discussion events. He kept making historical comparisons. For him, the surrender of the labor movement to the Nazi regime without a fight is the basic trauma with which he repeatedly dealt both in literature and in his political work.

Christian Geissler's work, which includes novels, poems, political journalism, television plays and radio plays, documents the development of a committed author from a left-wing Catholic social critic of the early 1960s to a communist and anti-imperialist , who in the 1970s also embarked on an extremely idiosyncratic path in terms of language. The publications of the 1990s, with their increasing enigma, affirmed Geissler's position as an outsider within contemporary German-language literature.

Geissler succumbed to cancer.

The autobiographical novel by his wife Sabine Peters , Feuerfreund (Göttingen 2010) describes - barely encrypted - the common life and the reaction of the protagonist to the death of their long-time companion.

In 2012, authors, friends and companions of Geissler founded the Christian Geissler Society, which is committed, among other things, to a new edition of the works. In spring 2013, Verbrecherverlag published a new edition of Will Time That We Live. The story of an exemplary action for which the Hamburg journalist Detlef Grumbach wrote an afterword on the historical basis of the novel.

Others

His estate is located in the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World in Dortmund .

Works (selection)

Books

  • Inquiry. Claasen, Hamburg 1960.
    • 1961 license issue, construction, Berlin (GDR), 1961.
    • 1962 engl. as The Sins of the Fathers , trans. by James Kirkup
    • 1963 French La Honte des fils , transl. Nicole and Michael Riom, Gallimard, "Du monde entier"
  • The Third Reich with its prehistory, 1918–1945. Langewiesche & Brandt, Ebenhausen near Munich, 1961. Part of the reading series on history.
  • Slaughter cattle. Claasen, Hamburg 1963.
  • Cold times. Narrative, not fictitious. Claassen, Hamburg 1965.
  • How followers can become free people. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1965.
  • End of inquiry. Rütten & Loenig, Munich 1967 [About the Hartheim Euthanasia Center ]
  • The bread with the file. Roman, Bertelsmann, Gütersloh a. a. 1973.
  • It's time we lived. Story e. copy. Action, Rotbuch, Berlin 1976.
New edition with an afterword by Detlef Grumbach , Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-943167-19-1
  • The plague against the stone. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1978.
  • In the run-up to a gunshot wound. Poems from July 77 to March 80, Rotbuch, Berlin 1980.
  • Play on monsters. Poems from April 80 to November 82, Rotbuch, Berlin 1983.
  • Kamalatta. Romanfragment, Rotbuch, Berlin 1988.
New edition, Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-9573-2343-9 .
  • Dissonances of clarification - to the comrades of the Red Army faction . Zapata bookshop, Kiel 1990.
  • Process in break. Paperwork February 89 to February 92, music with singing voice and drum, measurements and knives, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-89401-206-4 .
  • We declare enmity . A fragment of a novel, published in 1992 as "Sunday story" in Neues Deutschland
  • Deer crossing with siding - children's song. Rotbuch, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-88022-510-9 .
  • Knock sign. Poems from 83 to 97, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-88022-687-3 .
  • bird shadow circles kiss, poems. edition zapata, Kiel 1999.
  • eat a child. love song. Rotbuch-Verlag, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-88022-695-4 .
  • Black German . With woodcuts by Jean-Jacques Volz , SchwarzHandPresse, Flaach 2006. A portfolio with texts and woodcuts.
  • from the knock marks of the chamber saw . Selected poems. Woodcuts by Jean-Jaques Volz, Mappe, Flaach 2008.

As editor:

  • The Third Reich: From Hitler's Mein Kampf to the Atomic Bomb. 1918-1945 . Munich 1968. Series reading work on history. Goldmann Verlag Munich part 9.

Radio plays

  • An old woman goes home. WDR 1956.
  • It was just love. Director: Otto Kurth . WDR 1957.
  • Dreaming is cheaper. Director: Friedhelm Ortmann . WDR 1957.
  • The children of Gallatin. Director: Raoul Wolfgang Schnell . WDR 1957.
  • Vacation in Mallorca or The Death of Dr. Stone. Director: Fritz Wilm Wallenborn . BR 1958.
  • End of inquiry. Director: Hans Bernd Müller . SWR 1965.
  • Anniversary of a murder. Director: Dieter Munck . SWF 1968.
  • Communication difficulties. Director: Hermann Naber . SWF 1969.
  • Taxi Trancoso. Director: Hermann Naber. SWF 1993.
  • Our boat to Bir Ould Brini. Director: Hermann Naber. SWR 1993 ( radio play award of the war blind , radio play of the year ).
  • Walkman White Asshole One A - radio play from my village. Director: Hermann Naber. SWF 1994.
  • Wandering words. Director: Ulrich Lampen . SWR 2001.
  • Twin alleys. Director: Ulrich Lampen. SWR 2003.
  • Boring ears. Monologue of the villain woman. Director: Ulrich Lampen. SWR 2011.

literature

  • Sven Kramer : The subversion of literature. Stuttgart 1996.
  • Thomas Hoeps : Working on the contradiction. 'Terrorism' in German novels and short stories (1837–1992). Dresden 2001, ISBN 3-933592-24-0 .
  • “Vorwärts & Wohin?” Or: Literature as crossing boundaries / From writing to the limits of experience. die horen , Volume 43 (1998), no. 192, 4th quarter 1998. (With texts by and about Christian Geissler / on the author's 70th birthday).
  • Egbert-Hans Müller : Laudation for Christian Geissler in Documentation 2003 of the German Schiller Foundation from 1859. ISBN 3-931548-40-6 .
  • Jan Decker : Ahlers and the others. Christian Geissler's radio play. Leipzig 2016, ISBN 978-3-945849-02-6 (book edition with an expanded and updated version of the original article on www.christian-geissler.net).
  • Detlef Grumbach (ed.): The radical. Christian Geissler's literature on crossing borders. Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95732-275-3 .

Award

Web links

Commons : Christian Geissler  - Collection of Images

Single receipts

  1. ^ Christian Geissler Society
  2. ^ Verbrecherverlag, Berlin
  3. Der sture Blick In: Junge Welt , September 27, 2019, p. 10