Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich

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Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich , née Elisabeth Charlotte Henrich (born September 15, 1901 in Munich , † June 16, 1979 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen ) was a German writer and ancient historian . During her life Welskopf-Henrich dealt with two cultures: with ancient Greece and with the culture of the North American Indians . Professionally, she dealt with ancient history . Here she was one of the most influential personalities in the GDR. In her private life she devoted herself to the Indians , about whom she wrote novels that belong to the classics of GDR youth literature .

Life

Memorial plaque , Friedlander Strasse 156, in Berlin-Adlershof
tomb

Liselotte Henrich was born in Munich as the daughter of the lawyer Rudolf Henrich and his wife Marie (née Bernbeck). In 1907 the family moved to Stuttgart , where the daughter also attended school. In 1913, the parents moved with her to Berlin . In Berlin she attended the Lyceum and passed her Abitur at the State Augusta School in 1921 . She then studied economics , ancient history , law and philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University (now Humboldt University ), where she in May 1925 work The organization of the international footwear trade doctorate was. From 1925 to 1928 she was initially a business statistician , from 1928 to 1945 a consultant at the Berlin Reich Statistical Office . From 1938 she took part in the resistance against National Socialism . From 1944 to 1945 she hid her future husband, the communist Rudolf Welskopf , from access by the NS authorities. She also helped concentration camp prisoners and was interrogated by the Gestapo in 1944 .

After the war she stayed in East Berlin and initially worked in administration and business. She married Rudolf Welskopf in 1946 and joined the KPD that same year , in April 1946 the SED . Their son Rudolf was born in 1948. At first she worked as an authorized representative for Baustoff-Beschaffungs-GmbH and then became managing director. In 1949 she applied for a scheduled academic traineeship in ancient history at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HUB). Although she was actually a national economist, she was accepted. From 1952 to 1960 she worked as a research assistant at the Humboldt University and was entrusted with teaching. She completed her habilitation in November 1959 with a thesis on the subject of leisure as a problem in the life and thinking of the Hellenes from Homer to Aristotle . Her habilitation thesis, which was actually planned, in which she collected quotes from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on antiquity and the ancient Orient, was rejected as a habilitation because of poor quality. The work was later published under the title The Production Conditions in the Ancient Orient and Greco-Roman Antiquity . There she had already given up her Stalinist position. In January 1960 Welskopf first became a lecturer, in October professor of ancient history. A year later she also became head of the Department of Ancient History at the Institute for General History at the HUB. In June 1964 she was the first woman to be elected a full member of the German Academy of Sciences . In 1966 Welskopf retired, but continued to head her department until 1968, as Johannes Mathwich, who was to be his successor, had not yet received his doctorate.

After her retirement, Welskopf-Henrich started a new project on the classical Greek polis . The conception of this project was probably unique. Neither within the framework of the GDR-typical academy projects nor in their western equivalent, but at their own expense and in their own organization, she worked on the project, in which 60 East and West German scientists and researchers from another ten countries were also involved. The Hellenic Polis - Crisis - Change - Effect appeared in 1974 in four volumes. The chronological focus of the over 2200-page work was the late 5th and 4th centuries BC. After this project she started an even more ambitious project: the social type terms in ancient Greece . Between 1981 and 1985, the similarly organized work, which had a similar time frame, appeared in seven volumes.

From 1963 to 1974, took Welskopf-Henrich travel to the United States and to Canada , to the life and traditions of the Dakota - Indians to study. Welskopf-Henrich was honored by them with the title of a "Lakota-Tashina" (= protective blanket of the Lakota) for their services to a human image of the North American Indians.

Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich died in 1979 at the age of 77 during a stay in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. She was buried in Berlin at the Adlershof cemetery. Her grave is dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave.

Fiction works

Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich became known beyond a scientifically interested audience above all for her scientifically sound, yet imaginative Indian books, which she wrote primarily for young readers. She also wrote the original script for the film adaptation of her novel The Sons of the Great Bear . The DEFA film with Gojko Mitić founded a whole series of DEFA Indian films . Her Indian novels from the pentalogy The Blood of the Eagle , which are set in the present, were also very popular in the GDR.

The novel Zwei Freunde tells of the time of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of National Socialism. She wrote the novel as early as 1943. In the novel Jan und Jutta she processed autobiographically her own experiences (Jutta) and those of her future husband Rudolf Welskopf (Jan) up to the end of the Second World War . She intended to continue these novels with the post-war work Bertold's New World , but gave up the project again. She probably assumed herself that her critical view of developments in the GDR would lead to non-publication.

In 1954, the story Der Bergführer was published by the Mitteldeutscher Verlag Leipzig. The story is about a young mountain guide in the Dolomites in 1939. This story also deals with National Socialism, but also captivates with the description of the landscape. The plot was moved to 1950 for publication, modified for political reasons, which led to discrepancies in the story. The story was therefore unsuccessful, and it was not until 2015 that the work was reprinted, based on the original manuscript.

Awards and honors

Fonts

scientific publications

  • The relations of production in the ancient Orient and in Greco-Roman antiquity. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1957.
  • Problems of leisure in ancient Hellas. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1962 (habilitation thesis).
  • Hellenic Pole Ice. Manual, published under their direction, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1973.
  • Social type terms in ancient Greece and their survival in the languages ​​of the world . Ed. 7 volumes, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1981–1985.

Fiction

  • The Sons of the Great Bear , (novel, 1951)
  • The Sons of the Great Bear , (trilogy, from 1963 to 1982)
    • Vol. 1 - Harka, the chief's son
    • Vol. 2 - Top and Harry
    • Vol. 3 - The Sons of the Great Bear (1982 as The Chief )
  • The Sons of the Great Bear , (novel cycle, from 1964 also published by Union Verlag in Stuttgart)
    • Vol. 1 - Harka
    • Vol. 2 - The way into exile
    • Vol. 3 - The cave in the Black Mountains
    • Vol. 4 - Returning to the Dakota
    • Vol. 5 - The young chief
    • Vol. 6 - Across the Missouri , ISBN 3-8002-5056-X .
  • The Stone Boy , 1952 (freely told after a fairy tale by the Dakota Indians)
  • Jan and Jutta , Roman, 1953
  • Three drops of water , children's book, 1953
  • Hans and Anna , children's book, 1954
  • Der Bergführer , Erzählung, 1954/2015 (in 1954 a version was published that differed greatly from the manuscript and is about 1950 (for ideological reasons: the negative hero here comes from West Berlin and not, as originally presented by Welskopf-Henrich, from Nazi Germany); In 2015, the original version from 1939 was published from the author's estate - ISBN 9783938305942 )
  • Kate on the Prairie , children's book, 1955
  • Two friends , novel trilogy, 1955
  • Mrs. Merriment and her five pranksters , children's book, 1958
  • The Blood of the Eagle , Pentalogy, 1966–1980
    • Night on the Prairie , novel, 1966
    • Light over White Rocks , novel, 1967
    • Stone with Horns , Roman, 1968
    • The Seven Steps Mountain , novel, 1972
    • The light face , novel, 1980
  • Wakiya , (heavily abridged edition of Light Over White Rocks ) novel 1967
  • Berthold's new world , narrative, 2015 (immediate continuation of the novels Jan and Jutta and Zwei Freunde , which is in Berlin in the first weeks after the end of the Second World War; from the author's estate - ISBN 9783938305935 )

New edition of the narrative complete works

At the Leipzig Book Fair 2015, Dr. Frank Elstner from Palisander-Verlag Chemnitz together with Dr. Rudolf Welskopf, the son of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, presented the narrative oeuvre, which was first published as an eBook . These include:

  • The Sons of the Great Bear (6 volumes): The author's afterwords from the first edition from 1951 are contained in volume 6
  • The blood of the eagle (5 volumes)
  • Jan and Jutta (novel)
  • Two friends (novel)
  • Berthold's New World (first published)
  • The mountain guide (in the original version from 1939)

However, the children's books listed above are missing. The biography of Erik Lorenz was also published by Rosander Verlag : Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich und die Inder. A biography and especially interesting also the book by John Okute Sica : The miracle of Little Bighorn - Tales from the world of the old Lakota . This contains a foreword by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, as she was looking for a publisher for these stories during her lifetime. The encounter with the old Indian in 1963 was a key experience for the author in the continuation of the pentalogy The Blood of the Eagle . She received the manuscript from the widow John Okutes.

In 2017 the Palisander-Verlag published the novel The Sons of the Great Bear as a reprint. This is the first time that the author's “Indian novels” have been published by a publisher both as electronic and printed versions.

literature

  • Friedrich von Borries , Jens-Uwe Fischer: Socialist Cowboys. The Wild West of East Germany. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-12528-1 ( Edition Suhrkamp 2528).
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk :  Welskopf, Elisabeth Charlotte . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Thomas Kramer : Adventure and crime literature. In: Rüdiger Steinlein, Thomas Kramer, Heidi Strobel (Hrsg.): Handbook for children's and youth literature. SBZ / GDR From 1945 to 1990. Metzler, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-476-02177-7 , column 451-510.
  • Thomas Kramer: Heiner Müller on the torture stake. Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-89528-548-X ( Aisthesis essay 24).
  • Erik Lorenz : Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and the Indians. A biography. 2nd revised edition. Palisander-Verlag, Chemnitz 2010, ISBN 978-3-938305-14-0 .
  • Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , p. 631.
  • Uli Otto, Till Otto: In the footsteps of the sons of the Great Bear. Investigation of the historical and cultural-historical background of the youth books "The Sons of the Great Bear" by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. Kern, Regensburg 2001, ISBN 3-934983-03-0 .
  • Henner Reitmeier: Red is the eagle's blood. Portrait of Welskopf-Henrich. In: The bridge. 154, May – August 2010
  • Isolde Stark (ed.): Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf and the ancient history in the GDR . Contributions to the conference from November 21 to 23, 2002 in Halle / Saale. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08457-6 Review Review
  • Matthias Willing: Ancient historical research in the GDR. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-428-07109-3 ( Historical Research 45), (see index).
  • John Okute Sica : The Miracle of Little Bighorn - Tales from the World of the Old Lakota . Palisander Verlag, Chemnitz 2009, ISBN 978-3-938305-10-2

Web links

Commons : Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Schuller : Contents of ancient historical research in the GDR , In: Isolde Stark (Hrsg.): Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf and the ancient history in the GDR. Contributions to the conference from November 21 to 23, 2002 in Halle / Saale . Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag 2005, p. 80
  2. ^ Isolde Stark: Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf. A biographical sketch , In: Same (ed.): Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf and the old history in the GDR. Contributions to the conference from November 21 to 23, 2002 in Halle / Saale . Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag 2005, p. 203
  3. ↑ cf. Welskopf, Rudolf (Sohn): Foreword to Bertolds neue Welt In: Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte: Bertolds neue Welt , Palisander-Verlag, Chemnitz 2015, page 8
  4. ↑ cf. Elstner, Frank: Preliminary remarks to Der Bergführer In: Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte: Der Bergführer , Palisander - Verlag, Chemnitz 2015, page 7
  5. ↑ http://www.palisander-verlag.de/ Website Palisander-Verlag, October 27, 2015
  6. ↑ http://www.palisander-verlag.de/pdf/Verlagsprogramm_E-Books_2015.pdf , Palisander-Verlagsprogramm, October 27, 2015
  7. ↑ John Okute Sica: The Miracle of Little Bighorn - Tales from the world of the old Lakota. Chemnitz 2009, page 11
  8. ↑ Here also online nachlesbar, accessed 21 June 2012
personal data
SURNAME Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Welskopf, Elisabeth Charlotte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and ancient historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH June 16, 1979
Place of death Garmisch-Partenkirchen