Eduard Claudius

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Eduard Claudius (left) and Hermann Kant , 1967

Eduard Claudius ( pseudonym : Edy Brendt ; born July 29, 1911 as Eduard Schmidt in Buer ; † December 13, 1976 in Potsdam ) was a German writer and diplomat .

Life

Eduard Claudius was the son of a construction worker. From 1925 to 1927 he completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and then worked in this profession. From 1927 he was involved in trade union work . He was a trade union cashier and workers correspondent for the KPD newspaper Ruhr-Echo. From 1929 to 1932 he traveled to Austria , Switzerland , Italy , France and Spain . In 1932 he became a member of the KPD . After the National Socialist seizure of power , he was arrested in 1933; In 1934 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he was active in the anti-fascist resistance . In Switzerland he had contact with Hans Marchwitza , who encouraged his literary attempts. In 1936 he was arrested by the Swiss authorities; he escaped the threat of extradition to the German Reich by fleeing to Spain.

Claudius was one of the first to take part in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the International Brigades on the Republican side ; after being wounded, he worked as a culture and war commissioner. Towards the end of the civil war he was interned in France in 1938 ; from there he managed to escape to Switzerland in 1939, where he temporarily hid in a psychiatric institution. As he was staying illegally in the country, he was arrested again and had to spend the years from 1939 to 1945 as an intern in various Swiss labor camps . Here he began his novel Green Olives and Naked Mountains , set in Spain. The threatened deportation to the German Reich was prevented by interventions by the authors Hermann Hesse and Albert Ehrenstein . At the beginning of 1945 Claudius joined the Italian partisan brigade "Garibaldi".

In July 1945 he returned to Germany . From 1945 to 1947 he was press chief of the Bavarian Ministry for Denazification . In Munich he wrote pieces for the "Kleine Komödie"; journalistically, he also dealt with the Nazi era . He then returned to the Ruhr area for a short time . Here he wrote texts about the situation in mining and the situation in Germany after the war - u. a. for the Neue Presse , the Coburger Nachrichten , for Radio Luxemburg and for the Süddeutsche Zeitung .

In 1947 he took part in the first German writers' congress in Berlin. In 1948 he moved to the Soviet occupation zone and settled in Potsdam . He became a lecturer for resistance literature at the Volk und Welt publishing house.

Claudius worked as a freelance writer in the GDR until 1956 . From 1956 he was a member of the diplomatic service of the GDR. From 1956 to 1959 he held the function of consul general in Syria , and from 1959 to 1961 he was the GDR's ambassador in North Vietnam .

Claudius' literary work consists of novels , short stories , reports , memoirs , travelogues and dramas . He became known through the autobiographical novel about the Spanish Civil War : Green Olives and Naked Mountains . His novel People by our side , which is about a socialist activist , was praised by the literary criticism of the GDR when it was published in 1951 as a prime example of a work of the socialist realism demanded by the state .

Claudius was a member of the GDR Writers' Association and its first secretary from 1955 to 1957. Since 1965 he was a member of the German Academy of the Arts in East Berlin , from 1967 to 1969 as its vice-president. From 1963 to 1967 he was a member of the district assembly for the Potsdam district . He received u. a. The following awards: 1951 a national 3rd class prize, 1954 the Theodor Fontane Prize of the Potsdam district , 1955 the literary prize of the FDGB and on May 6, 1955 the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver and 1976 the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.

He died on December 13, 1976 in Potsdam after returning from a trip.

Fonts

  • Youth in transition , Basel 1936 (under the name Edy Brendt)
  • Green olives and naked mountains , Zurich 1945
  • Haß , Berlin 1947
  • Thunderstorm , Potsdam 1948
  • Incidental notes , Berlin 1948
  • Salt of the earth , Berlin 1948
  • From the difficult beginning , Berlin 1950 (as a radio play 1969)
  • At the beginning , Berlin 1950
  • Stories , Berlin 1951
  • People by our side , Berlin 1951
  • The fruits of hard times , Berlin 1953
  • Newly spun seaman's yarn , Berlin 1954
  • Paradise without bliss , Berlin 1955
  • One shouldn't just talk about love , Berlin 1957
  • When the fish swallowed the stars , Berlin 1961
  • The night of the owl and other stories , Berlin 1961
  • The gentle cloud girl , Berlin 1962
  • From the cities near and far , Berlin 1964
  • Winter fairy tale on Rügen , Halle (Saale) 1965
  • Secret of the Brave , Berlin 1967
  • The Sergeant and the Prince , Berlin 1967
  • Restless years , Halle (Saale) 1968
  • With a net and winch on the high seas , Halle (Saale) 1973
  • Wedding in the Alawiten Mountains , Halle / Saale 1975
  • Syria , Halle / Saale 1975
  • Home is far , Berlin 1976
  • Story of a love , Halle [u. a.] 1982

literature

  • Georg Piltz: Eduard Claudius , Berlin 1952.
  • Bode Uhse, Eduard Claudius , Berlin 1960.
  • Marcel Reich-Ranicki : Eduard Claudius, the proletarian daredevil, in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Without Discount. On literature from the GDR, Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag 1991, pp. 61–67.
  • Ortrud Heßke: Investigations on the aesthetic realization of an internationalist worldview in the literary work of Eduard Claudius (1911–1976) , Potsdam 1985.
  • Hugo Ernst Buyer : Go upright and resist, the writer Eduard Claudius - a literary rediscovery, Asso Verlag, Oberhausen 1985.
  • Boris Pawlowski: The Rhetoric of Prejudice , Kiel 2001.
  • Leonore Krenzlin , Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Claudius, Eduard . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Gelsenkirchen City Library: Eduard Claudius - A documentation for the 100th birthday, 2011.

Web links

Commons : Eduard Claudius  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lexicon of socialist writers
personal data
SURNAME Claudius, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt, Eduard (maiden name); Brendt, Edy (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and diplomat (GDR)
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Buer
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 1976
Place of death Potsdam