Egon Bondy

Egon Bondy (born January 20, 1930 in Prague , † April 9, 2007 in Bratislava ; actually Zbyněk Fišer ) was a Czech poet and philosopher . He was one of the intellectual greats in the Prague underground of the 1970s.

Life

Born in Prague in 1930 under the name Zbyněk Fišer, the son of a colonel in the Czechoslovak army grew up without a mother, but in a privileged family and prosperous. After the communist putsch in 1948, he quickly felt the absurdities of real socialist everyday life: his father was demoted and expropriated.

At the age of 16 he became a member of the Surrealist group and was a staunch Marxist . From 1957 to 1961 he studied philosophy and psychology at the Charles University in Prague . Bondy was living on the edge of illegality as early as the 1950s . During this time he had a stormy relationship with his daughter Milena Jesenskás - Jana Krejcarová . He soon devoted himself to "total realism", an artistic direction also supported by his friend Bohumil Hrabal . He got his pseudonym in protest against the outright anti-Semitism during the Stalinist excesses of the 1950s in the Czech Republic . This was not his only act of resistance, his whole life was shaped by the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 Bondy's extensive poetic work was just as typescript - samizdat in circulation and the conditions usually moved at a height of thirty copies.

After 1968, Bondy became an astute observer of the events surrounding the Soviet invasion of his homeland. The conflict between the writer and the totalitarian regime intensified. Around him arose the Prague underground , the parallel cultural society in "normalized" Czechoslovakia , that is, adapted to the Soviets . In his unbroken idiosyncrasy, Bondy was a leading figure in the cultural and political arena of Czechoslovakia - before and after the peaceful separation in December 1992. He had criticized this division as an expression of a politically incorrect development and in 1993 moved to Bratislava , his self-chosen Slovakian, in protest Exile .

Bondy worked as an agent with the communist secret police StB repeatedly in the years 1952–1955, 1961–1968 (code name "Klima"), from 1973 to 1977 (code name "Mao") and from 1985 to 1989 (code name "Oskar"). In the early 1990s it became public that Bondy had denounced many fellow students while studying as an informant for the State Security (StB) .

He died in Bratislava in 2007 and was buried in the Malvazinky Cemetery in Prague.

plant

Egon Bondy wrote numerous volumes of poetry, a number of prosaic works, skits , essays and a six-volume history of philosophy in Europe and the world, as well as numerous novels that clearly stand out from traditional literature. He also translated the Galgenlieder of Christian Morgenstern in the Czech language; to this day they are considered the best broadcasts. Several of his own poems have been set to music by the band The Plastic People of the Universe , which opened up a special sphere of activity for him in the 1970s. The later arrest and indictment of the band members by the regime gave the impetus for the formation of the civil rights movement Charter 77 .

Despite his extensive literary work, Bondy is still a myth , a Prague legend. Not least because his long-time friend Bohumil Hrabal made him the main character in several novels. Especially in the book Sanfte Barbaren , published by Suhrkamp in 1992 . Hrabal had success with Bondy. While Bondy was the victim of constant police persecution and was only shown in the media as an ideal example of the class enemy with long hair and a beard, the character Bondy was made into a film by director Jiří Menzel and was a box-office hit in the cinemas.

Bibliography (selection)

• Egon Bondy: The invalid siblings . 1st edition. Elfenbein, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 978-3-932245-25-1 (Czech: Invalidní sourozenci . Translated by Mira Sonnenschein).
• Egon Bondy: Hatto . 1st edition. Elfenbein, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-932245-84-8 (Czech: Hatto . Translated by Mira Sonnenschein).

Web links

• Literature by and about Egon Bondy in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature and other media by and about Egon Bondy in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• www.slovnikceskeliteratury.cz

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive bezpečnostních složek