Eduard Goldstücker

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Goldstücker as ambassador to Israel (1950)

Eduard Goldstücker (born May 30, 1913 in Podbiel , Arwa County , Austria-Hungary ; † October 23, 2000 in Prague ) was a Czechoslovak literary historian , journalist , Germanist and diplomat .

Youth and education

Eduard Goldstücker was born in the northern Slovak village of Podbiel into a poor Jewish family. He learned many different languages ​​in his youth. In addition to his mother tongue Slovak and that of his grandmother, Hungarian , he came into contact with German and Czech . In addition, Goldstücker learned French at an early age and he also tried to read Hebrew . He also translated the book Electricity in the Service of Humanity by Alfred Ritter von Urbanitzky as a teenager . Finally, in 1931, Goldstücker began studying German and Romance studies at Charles University in Prague and joined the Communist Party (KSČ) while studying .

First emigration to Great Britain, return and diplomatic service

In 1939 he had to flee to Great Britain from the National Socialists . There he completed his German studies at the University of Oxford with a doctorate in 1942 and became an employee of the Czechoslovak government in exile . After the war he returned to Czechoslovakia and worked for the Foreign Ministry in various diplomatic functions in Paris and London . From 1950 to 1951 he was the first Czechoslovak ambassador in the newly founded state of Israel in 1948 . In 1951 he was ordered back and sentenced to life imprisonment in a show trial for high treason , espionage and conspiracy . He spent the time of his imprisonment, under inhuman conditions, as a slave labor in uranium mines, without radiation protection. In 1955 he was rehabilitated and began teaching at Charles University.

Academic career and second emigration to Great Britain

From 1958 to 1968 Goldstücker held a chair for German studies and was mainly concerned with the works of Franz Kafka . He was the organizer and spiritus rector of the Kafka Conference in May 1963 in Liblice , which is also considered a preparation for the Prague Spring . He became president of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union. After the crackdown on the reform movement in the CSSR in August 1968, Goldstücker emigrated to Great Britain for the second time and taught comparative literature at the University of Sussex until 1978 . In 1981 he taught, as a visiting professor, a semester of literature at the University of Konstanz , where he had previously given several lectures. His autobiography Processes , published in 1989 . He dedicated the experience of a Central European to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Konstanz.

Return and end

After the Velvet Revolution , he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990. There he spent the last ten years of his life with his wife Marta and their two daughters Anna and Helena. Until his death he was valued and honored abroad, but back home he was reviled as a classic left-wing liberal intellectual . And he himself felt like he was in a third exile.

Awards and honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Franz Kafka from Prague's perspective 1963 (1965)
  • Franz Kafka. Aftermath of a Poet (1988)
  • Processes. Experience of a Central European (1989)
  • From the hour of hope to the hour of nothing. Conversations with Eduard Schreiber . Wuppertal: Arco Verlag. (2009) ISBN 978-3-938375-07-5

Movie

  • An interrupted conversation - Eduard Goldstücker , 56 minutes, 2001. Script and direction: Eduard Schreiber

literature

  • Ines Koeltzsch: Liblice. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 511-515.
  • Martin Schulze Wessel: The Prague Spring. Departure into a new world. Reclam, Ditzingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-15-011159-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alfred Ritter von Urbanitzky: Electricity in the service of humanity. Hartleben, Vienna and Leipzig 1885 ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )
personal data
SURNAME Goldstücker, Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak diplomat, German scholar and literary historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Podbiel
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 2000
Place of death Prague