Franz Kießling (poet)

Franz Kießling (born January 10, 1918 in Znojmo , Austria-Hungary ; died February 20, 1979 in Korneuburg ) was an Austrian poet.

Life

Kießling was the son of a railway official. After attending school in Vienna, he became a tax officer in 1938. Because of a lung condition, he did not have to do military service. From 1945 to 1946 he worked in the literary department of Radio Vienna . He then was editor of the magazine Offenes Wort . In 1951 he became an official in the Ministry of Education.

In 1948 he published his first volume of poetry, which was enthusiastically welcomed by the critics. The formal rigor of his poems was praised and the author was already considered a young classic. In the following years, however, his poetry found less and less resonance, so that his relatively narrow work of around 150 poems fell into increasingly oblivion. As an example of Kießling's poetry, here is the programmatic poem A piece of bread :

A piece of bread
wants to be my poem,
not a festive meal.

A piece of bread,
everyone
who is really hungry asks for it.

A piece of bread that
makes you
feel full, but not satisfied with injustice.

A piece of bread that
helps you
not only think about bread.

Kießling was a member of the board of the Austrian PEN Center and a member of the Austrian Writers' Association.

He was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery .

Appreciations

• 1943 Adalbert Stifter Prize
• 1950 Austrian Promotion Prize for Literature
• 1955 Literature Promotion Prize of the City of Vienna
• 1959 Literature grant from the Central Savings Bank of the City of Vienna

The Association of Catholic Writers in Austria awards a Franz Kießling Poetry Prize, endowed with € 400 (1st prize).

Works

• The unasked heart. Poems. Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1948.
• See how you live. Poems. With 6 woodcuts by Werner Berg . Desch, Munich et al. 1955.
• Praise an hour. Poems and thoughts. From the estate of ed. v. Leopold Wech. St. Pölten 1986, ( excerpt from the introduction )

literature

• Robert Danek: In memoriam Franz Kießling. In: Podium. H. 98, 1995, p. 54 f.
• Hans Heinz Hahnl : Forgotten writers. Fifty Austrian life stories. Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-215-05461-2 .
• Albert Janetschek: Memory of the poet Kießling. In: Niederösterreichische Nachrichten. February 28, 1979.
• Gerhard Jaschke: Kießling, Franz. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann (Hrsg.): Killy Literature Lexicon . Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. 2., completely revised Edition. Volume 6, de Gruyter, Berlin 2009, p. 403.

Web links

• Literature by and about Franz Kießling in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 2nd gate, group 30 b, row 13, grave 13.