Edeltraud Eckert

Edeltraud Eckert (born January 20, 1930 in Hindenburg OS , Upper Silesia Province , † April 18, 1955 in Leipzig ) was a German writer .

Life

Edeltraud Eckert came from a family of booksellers. In 1945 the family fled to Brandenburg an der Havel , where Edeltraud Eckert passed her high school diploma . Since 1946 she was a member of the Free German Youth . In 1949 she began a study of pedagogy at the Humboldt University of Berlin . After learning about the continued existence of the Soviet prison camps in the newly founded GDR at the beginning of her studies , she and three friends became involved in the anti-communist resistance group against SED rule, the combat group against inhumanity , for which the group in Rathenow distributed leaflets.

Edeltraud Eckert was arrested in Potsdam on May 10, 1950 . The members of the group were interrogated and mistreated by GDR police officers; after the transfer to the Soviet military tribunal, further interrogations followed. Edeltraud Eckert was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment and forced labor in the trial before the military tribunal, which took place from July 29, 1950 in camera and without defense counsel .

From October 1, 1950, Edeltraud Eckert was an inmate of the Waldheim penitentiary near Chemnitz . Eckert worked a. a. as a seamstress; their connection with the outside world was limited to one short letter a month to the family.

From July 1953 to March 1954 Edeltraud Eckert received permission from the prison administration to copy her poems and compositions into a copybook because of her good work. In the autumn of 1953, her finger was badly crushed in an accident at work, and shortly afterwards she was diagnosed with tuberculosis . In March 1954 she was sent to the Hoheneck prison in Stollberg / Erzgeb. relocated, where she suffered from even harsher detention conditions. At the end of 1954, the prisoner was transferred to the GDR judiciary, who promised her sentence to be reduced and released in 1958.

At that time Edeltraud Eckert was working as a mechanic in the prison tailor's shop. On January 24, 1955, while working on a machine, she suffered a serious head injury, which was not properly treated until a few days later. She was transferred to the prison hospital in Leipzig- Meusdorf and operated on several times in the following months. A series of infections led to tetanus at the end of March , the treatment of which at the Leipzig University Clinic was unsuccessful. Edeltraud Eckert died in hospital on April 18, 1955; her body was cremated and the urn was buried by the authorities in a secret mass grave. The copybook with her poems was sent to the family a few days later with a few personal belongings.

Edeltraud Eckert's work consists of the poems contained in her exercise book as well as a few more that were passed down from memory by fellow prisoners. As a poet Eckert was under the influence of her favorite poet Rilke . Her poems, mostly in song-like form and characterized by deep melancholy , reflect the desperate situation of the prisoners. Eckert's work only became known to a wider audience when it was published in 2005 by the “ Archive of suppressed literature in the GDR ”.

Works

• Behind bars - a person , Munich 1969
• Year without spring , Frankfurt am Main [u. a.] 2005

literature

• Jürgen Blunck: "Lock and bolt separate you from life". Langen-Müller, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7844-2765-0 .
• Gerrit zur Hausen: "The revolution in a drawer": persecuted GDR literature and internal emigration. Techn. Univ., Diss., Berlin 2012.

Web links

• Literature by and about Edeltraud Eckert in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Edeltraud Eckert at perlentaucher.de
• Photo by Edeltraud Eckert