Erich Lifka

Erich Lifka (born March 16, 1924 in Vienna ; † April 22, 2007 ibid) was an Austrian writer , journalist and translator . Lifka, who emerged as a literary author primarily with poems and stories, was also one of the most active personalities in European homosexual journalism after the Second World War .

life and work

Lifka attended high school in his hometown. Although he had already joined the illegal Communist Youth Association as a teenager , he was drafted into the Wehrmacht after graduating from high school in 1942 and made a career as an officer candidate . In 1943 he was arrested for contact with partisans and sentenced to death . With the help of an officer friend who destroyed his criminal record, he survived.

After the end of the war, Lifka studied modern languages ​​and newspaper studies at the University of Vienna and passed the interpreter and translator exams for the English and French languages. Between 1956 and 1959 he published three volumes of poetry, which received a lot of attention from contemporary criticism. For his second volume of poetry, Die Flut advances (1957), Lifka was awarded the City of Vienna's Literature Prize in 1958 .

Lifka's remaining literary and journalistic work has appeared almost without exception in homosexual friendship sheets, anthologies and documentaries. In the early 1950s he first published articles on the situation of homosexuals in Austria in the Danish magazine Vennen ( Der Freund ). Soon he was a regular contributor to all relevant German-language magazines. He was particularly close to the multilingual Swiss magazine Der Kreis , with whose editors Karl Meier and Rudolf Jung he was close friends. He also worked as a correspondent and editor for Scandinavian and Italian newspapers.

Lifka's contributions to all of these publications cover a broad spectrum: romantic love stories, tragic novels, historical narratives and committed agitation poetry reflect the realities of life for homosexual men under the constant threat of public morality, government and criminal justice, and design scenarios and situations in which intimate encounters and relationships between men could take place in spite of all external resistance. Far-reaching historical events and autobiographical memories often form the background, for example the Austrian July Putsch (1934), the solidarity homosexual circles of friends in the Weimar Republic, National Socialism and the war experience as well as the homosexual trials of the second Austrian republic in the 1950s.

In the early 1960s, Lifka increasingly began to break away from the more conservative image of homosexuals propagated in the homosexual friendship papers of the immediate post-war period. He now also wrote stories with openly pornographic descriptions of homosexual encounters, which, after the relaxation of the youth protection regulations, could appear in Scandinavia from the early 1960s and in German gay magazines from the early 1970s. With the detective Larry Dawe he also created one of the first gay crime heroes during this time.

In 1954 and 1958 Lifka was sentenced to four and eighteen months in prison for violating Section 129 of the Austrian Penal Code , which punished homosexual contacts. Lifka received the support of prominent Austrian publicists and lawyers during the trials and while in prison, including the then lawyer and later two-time Austrian Minister of Justice Christian Broda . A third case against Lifka was put down in 1969, shortly before the first amendment to the criminal law paragraph.

In addition to literary texts, Lifka wrote and translated countless articles on the cultural and political activities of the European homosexual movement and on the history of homosexuality. In the early 1980s Lifka worked on several publications by the sex historian Joachim S. Hohmann on the history of homosexual literature, including an anthology with homosexual short stories translated by Lifka and a documentation on the history of the circle . In 1980, Hohmann published a selection of stories and poems as well as autobiographical texts by Lifka under the title Freundesliebe .

Lifka also wrote under the following pseudonyms: Theo Blankensee, Hans Hagen, Dr. Erich Klostermann, Georg Rotheisen, Karlheinz Santner and others

Erich Lifka died on April 22, 2007 after a long illness in Vienna. He was cremated at his own request at the Vienna Central Cemetery and buried on May 8, 2007 in a small circle at the Ober Sankt Veiter Cemetery. Part of the estate is in the QWIEN archive.

Works

Book publications (without translations)

• Erich Lifka: Caller in the night. Poems , Vienna: Europa-Verlag 1956
• Erich Lifka: The tide is advancing. Neue Gedichte , Vienna: Verlag für Jugend und Volk 1957
• Erich Lifka: Hunch and signs. The third collection of poems , Vienna: Verlag für Jugend und Volk 1959
• The tiger trap. Homosexual Short Stories from America, England and France , ed. by Joachim S. Hohmann. Translated into German by Erich Lifka, Frankfurt / Main, Berlin: Foerster 1980, 2nd edition 1982
• Erich Lifka: love for friends. From the Life of a Homophile , ed. and with an afterword by Joachim S. Hohmann, Frankfurt / Main, Berlin: Foerster-Verlag 1980
• The circle. Stories and photos , selected, ext. and ed. by Joachim S. Hohmann. Among employees by Erich Lifka, Frankfurt / Main, Berlin: Foerster-Verlag 1980
• Erich Lifka: Larry Dawe chases hot boys. Homosexual crime stories , Berlin: Foerster-Verlag 1982
• Erich Lifka: The PD How Austria started the 3rd World War , Bisamberg: Rundblick-Verlag 1988

Collaboration in magazines (selection)

Amigo (Copenhagen, 1960s) - Friendship (Hamburg, 1950s) - The Companions (Frankfurt / Main, 1950s) - The Circle (Zurich, 1950s-1960s) - The Ring (1950s) - The Way (Hamburg , 1950s-1960s) - Pikbube (Berlin, 1970s) - Vennen (Copenhagen, 1940s-1950s) - him (1970s)

Contributions to anthologies (selection)

• Erich Lifka: The hotel rat (story), in: Male friendships. The most beautiful homosexual love stories of the past seventy years , ed. v. Joachim S. Hohmann, Frankfurt / Main: Foerster 1979, pp. 78-92
• Erich Lifka: Light in the night. A Viennese sketch (story), in: The circle. Stories and photos (see above), pp. [33–37]
• Erich Lifka: In modo antico (poem); Bambi. A memory of prison in Austria (story), in: Disfigured angels. Homosexual writing , ed. v. Joachim S. Hohmann, Frankfurt / Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1983 (Fischer-Taschenbuch 5761), p. 143; Pp. 167-172
• Erich Lifka: [Title of the article not yet determined], in: Men are just what one likes. The gay reader Austria , ed. v. Andreas Brunner and Hannes Sulzenbacher, Vienna: Löcker 2001, ISBN 3-85409-347-0

literature

• Joachim S. Hohmann: Who is Erich Lifka? Marginalia on the life and work of the poet der Freundesliebe , in: Lifka, Freundlesliebe. From the life of a homophile (see above), pp. 135–150 (with numerous illustrations)
• Joachim S. Hohmann: Erich Lifka in the circle , in: The circle. Stories and photos (see above), pp. 257–259
• Irene Brickner, Oliver Tanzer : 'Judging to death with fire'. Since 1950, more than 13,000 people in Austria have been convicted of their homosexuality. An attempt to abolish the remnants of gay laws threatens to fail , in: Profil , September 11, 1995, pp. 58-63 (contains interviews with Lifka and Franz Xaver Gugg as victims of the criminal laws against homosexuality)
• Manuela Bauer, Hannes Sulzenbacher: "My name is Erich Lifka. In Moscow they know me." , in: Invertito No. 15, 2013

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Lifka in the catalog of the German National Library
• Contribution by Karl-Heinz Steinle to Lifka on the website of the archive Der Kreis (cf. Steinle : Der Kreis. Members, Artists, Authors , Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1999, Hefte des Schwules Museum 2, ISBN 3-86149-093-5 )