Christine Brückner

Christine Brückner (* December 10, 1921 in Schmillinghausen , Hesse as Christa Emde ; † December 21, 1996 in Kassel ), pseudonyms: Christine Dupont , Christian Dupont , Dr. Christian Xadow , was a German writer .

Life

Childhood in Schmillinghausen and schooling during the war

Christine Brückner was born in Schmillinghausen near Arolsen as the daughter of pastor and church councilor Carl Emde, son of the teacher Heinrich Emde, and his ailing wife Clotilde, daughter of an engineer and later gas and water works director from Unna . Christine Brückner and her older sister Ursula Emde were raised Protestants. As a child, her mother read to her from the works of the Low German poet Fritz Reuter . Her small family library also included works by Thomas Mann and Eugen Roth . Her maternal grandfather was friends with the industrialist August Klönne . She spent her childhood until 1934 in the idyllic Schmillinghausen half-timbered parsonage near the village church with an associated small terrace garden with grottos and ferns. She first attended the village school and then in Arolsen (today Bad Arolsen) the Bathildis school and the Christian Rauch high school. She spoke High German with her parents, but flatly with the villagers .

In 1934 the rectory in Schmillinghausen was searched by the Arolser auxiliary police , and nothing was found that incriminated her father. However, her father retired early as a member of the Confessing Church . The family moved to Kassel and after a while built a house on Adolfstrasse.

There was no resistance in her family, but neither were there any followers, they stood aside, as the author writes in one of her autobiographical texts. Christine Brückner passed the secondary school leaving certificate at the Kassel Oberlyzeum for girls in 1937 (the later Jacob Grimm School ). As a student interested in literature, she attended poetry readings by Hans Carossa , Ina Seidel , Werner Bergengruen and Rudolf Alexander Schröder and wrote a play for the farewell party at the Oberlyzeum. She then did the compulsory year for German girls in a household with many children. From 1939 to 1942 she was a. Duty to serve as a specially authorized person in Wehrkommando IX in Kassel. Her father Carl Emde died in 1940. During the air raid on Kassel on October 22, 1943 , she lost her parents' house and her best school friend and then fled with her mother Clotilde to her brother Wilhelm Schulze in Zuchow in Pomerania to recover from the war.

Christine Brückner wrote desperately:

“With the Abitur it didn't work out again! An air raid destroyed my parents' house, the school and the whole city. "

In Pomerania she received lasting suggestions for her first novel "Jauche und Levkojen" from the Poenichen trilogy.

Christine Brückner was then employed in a health resort in Vogelsberg as the second cook of a bombed-out school in Wilhelmshaven and passed the external high school diploma in Fulda in 1944 . Until the end of the war she was an accountant at the Siebel aircraft factory in Halle. These decisive experiences of flight, grief and loss had a lasting impact on her subsequent literary path.

Studies and first success as a writer

In 1944 she met the war disabled industrial designer Werner Brückner (1920–1977) in a Halle hospital, whom she married on August 28, 1948, Goethe's birthday, in the village church of Schmillinghausen. From 1945 to 1946 she was trained as a qualified librarian with exams in Stuttgart , but never practiced this profession.

Christine Brückner studied economics , literature , art history and psychology as a Studium generale at the Philipps University of Marburg in Marburg from 1947 , where she headed the “ Mensa Academica” for two semesters . In 1949 she took part in a study trip to France for art history students.

Her career as a writer began with an anecdote about the picture "Woman at the Window" by Giovanni Bellini , which was published in a magazine and which attracted the attention of the Marburg art historian Richard Hamann . During her studies she was employed by his son Richard Hamann-MacLean as a research assistant at the art institute ( photo archive photo Marburg ). After the position was discontinued, she continued to work there on a voluntary basis until 1953.

As a young writer, she sent Walter Höllerer and Hans Bender short stories for the literary magazine Akzente , but they were never published. During this time she read the great storytellers William Faulkner , Thomas Wolfe , André Gide , Hermann Hesse and Alfred Döblin and was particularly impressed by the late work of the writer Ricarda Huch . In 1951 she wrote for the magazine Frauenwelt in Nuremberg . She lived in a small furnished room in Nuremberg- Erlenstegen for nine months. During this time she was presented to the Cologne painter Helmut Lang . She quit the job and then had her sick feet operated on in an orthopedic clinic in Marburg. From 1952 to 1958 she lived with her husband Werner Brückner in Krefeld and then in Düsseldorf . In 1952 she traveled to Rome for the first time and visited a.o. the Protestant cemetery in Rome . In 1955 the Brückner couple went on vacation to the island of Elba with a couple who were friends . Christine Brückner developed a lifelong love of islands.

In 1953 she anonymously submitted the novel manuscript "Before the traces blow away" in a black notebook to a literary competition organized by Bertelsmann Verlag and won it. Among the jurors was a. Hans Weigel . The first novel published under the stage name Christine Brückner, "Ehe die Tracken" (Before the Traces Blow Away), was published in 1954 and was a great commercial success, which enabled Christine Brückner to live as a freelance writer at the age of 32. She had previously worked in 13 professions. Christine Brückner used the prize money to buy a car and a house in Düsseldorf. Friedrich Sieburg judged this book: “A happy discovery and a worthy work.” Siegfried Lenz wrote about “Marriage blows away”: “A fascinating company.” In 1954, the young, successful writer met the writer Otto for the first time in Bad Godesberg Heinrich Kühner at the “Young German Authors” conference, at which a.o. and Heinrich Boell and Ilse Aichinger participated. There was a lively exchange of letters and they met irregularly. In 1958 Christine Brückner traveled to Greece for the first time and visited a.o. Sparta and Patmos . The Brückner marriage was amicably annulled by mutual agreement in 1958. Under the pseudonym "Christine Dupont", she published the novel "Your Smile Nicole" in 1959, which goes back to a manuscript from 1953 - "distorted by the publisher", as it says in a handwritten note from Christine Brückner. She also published some stories under the name "Christian Dupont" . In 1959 Christine Brückner's mother Clotilde died in Düsseldorf.

Back in Kassel - formation of the Brückner-Kühner authors' association

In 1960 Christine Brückner settled permanently in Kassel. At first she lived with her older sister on Heckerstrasse. In 1961 she was assistant director for Otto Kurth for two seasons at the Schauspielhaus des Staatstheater Kassel . In 1961 she traveled to Ischia and in 1964 with the Germanist Sigrid Bauschinger for four months through 25 states in the USA . She visited inter alia in New York a Vincent van Gogh exhibition in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , Thomas Mann's villa in Pacific Palisades and the Hemingway Memorial on Trail Creek Road near Sun Valley , Idaho .

In 1965 she bought a small terraced house on Hans-Böckler- Strasse in the Kassel district of Auefeld . In 1967 she married the writer Otto Heinrich Kühner for the second time. They were officially married in the village church of Mengeringhausen . The wedding celebration took place in Kassel 's Schönfeld Palace. In Kassel they formed what they called what they called the “authors' association”, which also wrote and published several joint works. The many covers, especially Christine Brückner's paperbacks, were used as templates for paintings by Otto Heinrich Kühner. As an experienced editor, Otto Heinrich Kühner edited his wife's manuscripts before they went to the publishing house. In 1967 the Brückner-Kühner couple traveled to Aegina and Juist and in 1972 to Rome.

On the way to a joint author reading in Königsfeld in the Upper Black Forest, Christine Brückner survived a seriously injured car accident on March 21, 1972 on the federal highway 33 in the Upper Black Forest and has not driven a car herself since then. She recovered during a subsequent cure in Bad Wildbad . In 1975 Christine Brückner began the successful “Poenichen Trilogy” that has gone down in literary history with the novel “Jauche und Levkojen”. This was followed in the Poenichen trilogy by the serial novels "Nirgendwo ist Poenichen" in 1977 and 1985 "The Quints".

In 1978 the Brückner-Kühner couple spent a vacation in Hvar and visited the Renaissance palace of the polymath Petar Hektorović in Stari Grad .

As a scholarship holder of the Agnes Straub Foundation in Gries im Pinzgau, she lived in a wing of the Imshausen manor near Bebra .

Christine Brückner was appointed to the Bertelsmann Verlag's advisory board for the promotion of contemporary German-language writers in 1979. Its meetings were held four times a year with, inter alia, Hans Arnold , Thilo Koch , Rolf Hochhuth , Walther Schmieding and Dieter E. Zimmer held in Hamburg .

In 1980 Christine Brückner was elected to the German PEN Center for the cultural journalist Walther Schmieding who died suddenly . From 1980 to 1984 she was Vice President of the German PEN Center and campaigned for its Writers in Prison movement . In 1980 the Brückner-Kühner couple went on vacation to Rijeka . Christine Brückner read Gustave Flaubert's The Education of the Heart at this time .

The Ullstein publishing house , which publishes her books , gave Christine Brückner a gift of Max Klinger's sculpture Salome in 1981 in recognition of her literary work on her 60th birthday .

With the theater monologues, if you'd talked, Desdemona . Christine Brückner once again had great literary success with indignant speeches by indignant women in 1983.

In 1989 Viera Janárčeková set one of the speeches in the vocal work Donna Laura to music. In 1992 Siegfried Matthus composed the opera Desdemona and her sisters based on motifs by Christine Brückner.

Christine Brückner got to know the Benedictine Abbey in Herstelle Monastery on the Weser in 1984 . She lived there for two weeks according to the rules of St. Benedict .

In 1984 Otto Heinrich Kühner fell seriously ill and several operations followed.

The last few years in Kassel

In 1995 Otto Heinrich Kühner was in need of care and Christine Brückner did not undertake any new novel projects. The honorary citizen of the city of Kassel died in her row house in Kassel just a few weeks after her husband.

At his will, the writer couple were buried together in the village cemetery in Schmillinghausen, not far from Brückner's birthplace, in a grave of honor in the city of Kassel.

On the second anniversary of Christine Brückner's death, the Brückner-Kühner Foundation and the Lord Mayor of Kassel Georg Lewandowski presented the newly prepared grave. In the sense of the poet couple with simple planting and connected to the parents 'and grandparents' graves with ivy. The sculpted gravestone steles come from the property of the Schmillinghausen village church. The gravestone steles were edited and provided with inscriptions by the Rotenburg sculptor Paul Martin Jähde .

Georg Lewandowski about the grave:

"A place where every visitor can find what was fundamental for both of them: basic trust, trust in God, peace."

- From: Speech at the poet's grave Brückner-Kühner published in the HNA on October 19, 1998

Honorary grave of the city of Kassel in the cemetery in Schmillinghausen

Literature fans place gray stones from their homeland on the gravestone stelae according to Jewish custom when visiting the poet's grave.

Brückner-Kühner Foundation

Christine Brückner founded the Brückner-Kühner Foundation with Otto Heinrich Kühner in 1984, which has been awarding the Kassel Literature Prize for grotesque humor since 1985 . Today the foundation acts as a center for comic literature, advanced poetry and as a place of memory of Christine Brückner and her second husband. The Brückner-Kühner house of poets was left in its original state after the death of the writers. It is now the seat of the Brückner-Kühner Foundation and a publicly accessible Hessian literature museum (see the link to the foundation's homepage below). The German scholar Friedrich W. Block manages the estate .

Major works

Christine Brückner was one of the most successful German writers. Many of her books were sold in the millions.

Brückner's main concerns are the creation of meaning, morality, guilt and also consolation in the - also entertaining - treatment of elementary human issues, especially from the author's perspective. These are based on the author's Protestant worldview. The very first novel, Marriage The Traces Blown away , published in Gütersloh in 1954, was a great success, which enabled Christine Brückner to become a freelance writer in the years that followed. The manuscript won a competition organized by Bertelsmann Verlag and had a circulation of 376,000 in its first year. The bestseller has been translated into several languages. The story tells of a man's life crisis coping with who is involved in the accidental death of a young woman through no fault of his own.

Brückner then published a number of other novels which, from the perspective of women, primarily address problems of love, marriage and partnership and play through the possibilities of female self-realization.

In 1975 her novel Jauche und Levkojen , which was also very successful and which, with its sequels Nirgendwo ist Poenichen and The Quints, forms the Poenichen trilogy. The life story of the fictional character “Maximiliane von Quindt”, who was born in 1918 as the granddaughter of a noble landowner in Western Pomerania , is told in a style clearly trained on Theodor Fontane on almost 1000 pages . Using well-known narrative schemes, the story and achievements of the generation of women who experienced the war, expulsion and reconstruction are shaped.

The monologues If you'd talked, Desdemona . Angry speeches by angry women (Hamburg 1983) also achieved large print runs and were translated into numerous languages. The monologues justified also Brückner's success as a playwright and were among the most frequently performed contemporary plays. Historical and fictional female figures from Western history - from Klytämnestra to Christiane from Goethe to Gudrun Ensslin - speak correctly here in a serious to cheerful tone . The book edition was illustrated by the graphic artist Horst Janssen .

In addition to her narrative work, the author has also published autobiographical records such as “My Black Sofa”, “Does Man Have Roots?” And “The Hour of the Partridge” as well as radio plays and children's books. Her numerous journeys flow autobiographically into many of the writer's works.

In the Ullstein publishing a 20-volume collected works was published. In 2005 Eva Mattes read “Jauche und Levkojen” and in 2007 the entire Poenichen trilogy for audio book publications.

Film adaptations

In 1977 and 1978 Jauche and Levkojen and Nirgendwo is Poenichen were each filmed as a multi-part series for television. The main actors were among others. Ulrike Bliefert , Arno Assmann and Edda Seippel .

Christine Brückner followed the shooting of manure and Levkojen on Gut Sierhagen der Plessens from Schleswig-Holstein. She saw the suicide scene of the old Quints on the set. The film actor Arno Assmann, who played old Quint, took his own life on medication in 1979 after his wife committed suicide.

Awards and honors

• 1954 1st prize in the Bertelsmann competition for marriage to blow away the traces
• 1982 Goethe badge from the State of Hesse
• 1982 coat of arms of the city of Kassel
• 1987 honorary citizen of the city of Kassel
• 1990 Hessian Order of Merit
• 1991 Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class
• 1992 Christian Rauch plaque from the city of Bad Arolsen
• 1996 Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

factories

Short stories and novels

• Before the traces disappear. 1954
• Katharina and the onlooker. 1957
• Your smile Nicole . 1959 (Christine Dupont)
• A spring in Ticino. 1960
• The time after. 1961
• Bella Vista and other short stories. 1963
• Last year on Ischia . Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1964, ISBN 3-548-02734-2 .
• The cocoon. 1966
• The happy book of ap Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1970, ISBN 3-548-03070-X .
• Like summer and winter . Ensslin & Laiblin, Reutlingen 1971.
  • new title: Come again, Catarina . Ensslin & Laiblin, Reutlingen 1980; New edition Ullstein 1989; also as Ullstein-Taschenbuch Ullstein, ISBN 3-548-03010-6 .
• Survival stories . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1973, ISBN 3-548-03461-6 .
• Whiskey Skin Serum (Dr. Christian Xadow)
• Liquid manure and levees. 1975.
• The girls in my class. 1975
• Nowhere is Poenichen. 1977
• What's a year already. Early narratives. 1984
• To be one, to love the other. 1981
• The quints. 1985 ( No. 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list from December 16, 1985 to February 23, 1986 )
• The last stanza. 1989
• Sooner or later. 1994

Books for children and young readers

• Alexander the Little. A cheerful story. 1966
• A brother for Momoko. The Bodley Head, London 1970 (German: A Brother for Momoko, 1977, with pictures by Chihiro Iwasaki )
• Like summer and winter. 1971
• Momoko and the bird. 1972 (with pictures by Chihiro Iwasaki)
• Momoko's birthday. 1973 (with pictures by Chihiro Iwasaki)
• Momoko and Chibi. 1974 (with pictures by Chihiro Iwasaki)
• The world tour of the ant. 1974
• Momoko is sick. 1979 (with pictures by Chihiro Iwasaki)
• Paint me a house (with Otto Heinrich Kühner, illustrated by Helmut Lang), 1980

Editorial activity

• Messages of love in German poems of the 20th century. 1960.
• To my child. German poems of the 20th century. 1962
• Juist. A reading book. 1984
• Reading time. A personal anthology. 1986

Other fonts

• Little games for big people. (illustrated by Bele Bachem ), 1957
• Experienced and hiked. (with Otto Heinrich Kühner), 1979
• My black sofa. Records. Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-548-20500-3 .
• If you'd talked, Desdemona . Indignant speeches from indignant women. Illustrated by Horst Janssen , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-455-00366-4 ; as paperback edition: Ullstein, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-548-28638-9
• Laugh so as not to cry. A reading book. 1984
• Your pictures. My words. (with Otto Heinrich Kühner), 1986
• Do people have roots? Autobiographical texts. ed. v. Gunther Tietz, 1988
• The hour of the partridge. Records. 1991
• Dear old friend. Letters. 1992
• More angry speeches. 1995
• Traveling. Travel to not too distant countries. 1995
• Permanent residence. Notes from Kassel. ed. and with an afterword vers. v. Friedrich W. Block, 1998
• I want to teach you the summer. Forty years of letters. (with Otto Heinrich Kühner), ed. and with a foreword vers. v. Friedrich W. Block, 2003

Work edition

The 20-volume edition of the work was published by Ullstein-Verlag, in it new:

• Work and life. With contributions by Walter Pape, Gunther Tietz, Otto Heinrich Kühner and Sigrid Bauschinger . 1994
• The citizens of Calais. Drama, radio plays. ed. and with an afterword vers. v. Walter Hinck, 1997
• Letters from c. b. To publishers, friends and readers. ed. and with an afterword vers. v. Anselm painter, 1999

Settings

• Viera Janárceková: "Donna Laura", Dramatic Scene, 1989
• Siegfried Matthus: "Desdemona and her sisters", 1992

literature

• Christian Adam : The dream of the year zero: Authors, bestsellers, readers: The reorganization of the world of books in East and West after 1945. Galiani, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86971-122-5 , pp. 280–284.
• Friedrich W. Block (ed.): Christine Brückner and Otto Heinrich Kühner. "The only functioning authors' association". euregioverlag, Kassel 2007, ISBN 978-3-933617-31-6 .
• Margaritha Jacobaeus: "Recommended for reading". Readings on Christine Brückner's Poenichen Trilogy. A reception aesthetic study. Almqvist and Wiksell Internat., Stockholm 1995, ISBN 91-22-01671-6 (= Stockholm German Research; 51).
• Karin Müller: "Life often sticks closely to literature". The archetypes in Christine Brückner's Poenichen novels. Galda and Wilch, Glienicke / Berlin and others 2000, ISBN 3-931397-26-2 .
• Elwira Pachura: Poland - the lost homeland. On the homeland problem with Horst Bienek, Leonie Ossowski, Christa Wolf, Christine Brückner. Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-89821-205-X .
• Gunther Tietz (Ed.): About Christine Brückner. Articles, reviews, interviews. 2nd Edition. Ullstein 1990, Frankfurt am Main et al., ISBN 3-548-22173-4 . (= Ullstein book; 22173).
• Pawel Zimniak: The lost time in the lost realm. Christine Brückner's family saga and Leonie Ossowski's family chronicle. Wydaw. Wyzszej Szkoly Pedagog., Zielona Góra 1996, ISBN 83-86832-13-4 .

sources

1. ↑ Friedrich W. Block (Ed.): Christine Brückner permanent residence - Kasseler Notes , Ullstein Buchverlag GmbH, Berlin 1996, 3rd edition
2. ↑ Christine Brückner: If you had spoken, Desdemona. Hoffmann & Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1983.
3. ↑ Death from drugs and / or suicide . In: IMDb .
4. ↑ DIED: Walter Schultze, Hans Nachtsheim, Arno Assmann . In: The mirror . No. 49 , 1979 ( online - December 3, 1979 ).

Web links

Wikiquote: Christine Brückner  - Quotes

• Literature by and about Christine Brückner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of the Brückner-Kühner Foundation
• Homepage of her place of birth Schmillinghausen