Ekkehard Maass

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Ekkehard Maaß (born June 25, 1951 in Naumburg (Saale) ) is a German song singer , publicist and translator .

Life

Ekkehard Maaß was born in Naumburg (Saale) in 1951 as the son of a pastor from the Baltic States who was imprisoned for rejecting the SED dictatorship . Ekkehard Maaß spent his childhood in the village of Schönburg (Saale) .

Ekkehard Maaß studied theology and philosophy , first at church institutions, then at the Humboldt University in Berlin . Because of his friendship with Wolf Biermann and the collection of signatures against his expatriation, he was expelled from his studies; the Stasi initiated "operational measures" against him. He was married to the ceramicist Wilfriede Maaß . This marriage resulted in two children.

He was known in the GDR as the singer of Bulat Okudshawa songs. After Wolf Biermann's expatriation , he organized readings for young poets from 1978 to 1984 in the apartment in which his wife Wilfriede also had her workshop and which had previously taken over from her sister. According to Uwe Kolbe , they were “the most important readings in recent GDR literature” - a contribution to the promotion of a generation of artists who had renounced socialist ideology ten years before the end of the GDR and who became famous as the Prenzlauer Berg scene .

“For example, Detlef Opitz , Bert Papenfuß , Stefan Döring , Eberhard Häfner , Katja Lange-Müller , Peter Brasch , Uwe Kolbe or Wasja Götze , the Halle painter and singer, who sang very biting and very ironic texts about the GDR, read. Or Christa Moog from Eisenach, Dieter Eue , who soon went to the West after reading his manuscript with us, or Dieter Schulze . Ekkehard still has all the invitations hanging in his room today. "

- Wilfriede Maaß

For years Ekkehard Maaß campaigned for the return of the German-Georgian writer Giwi Margwelaschwili, who was forcibly exiled to Georgia, to Germany .

Since 1996 he has headed the German-Caucasian Society he founded.

Awards

In 1998 Ekkehard Maaß received a grant from the German National Foundation for 30 years of commitment to civil and human rights . In 2011 he was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Publications

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Barbara Felsmann, Annett Gröschner , through room Prenzlauer Berg. A Berlin artist's social history of the 1970s and 1980s in self-reports, Berlin 1999, 2nd expanded edition 2012, p. 212
  2. Kurt Drawert : Upright and Split. That was also a place of resistance in the GDR: A large documentary on the history of the literary salon founded in 1978 by Ekke Maaß . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 7, 2017, p. 12.
  3. Uwe Kolbe : Renegade dates . Suhrkamp , 1998, p. 29 .
  4. Barbara Felsmann and Annett Gröschner (eds.): Prenzlauer Berg passage room. A Berlin artist social history of the 1970s and 1980s in self-reports, Lukas Verlag, 1999, ISBN 978-3-86732-121-1 . Note: Wilfriede Maaß describes, among other things, the separation from Ekkehard Maaß and the subsequent love affair with the writer Sascha Anderson , whom Ekkehard Maß invited to Berlin in 1980 and who professionalized the organization of the readings. It later emerged that Anderson had been an informant for the Stasi .
  5. ^ German-Caucasian Society