Frederick Forsyth

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frederick Forsyth (2003)

Frederick Forsyth CBE (born August 25, 1938 in Ashford , Kent , England ) is a British writer . According to his own statements, he worked for a good 20 years from 1968 as an agent for the British intelligence service MI6 , including in Nigeria and the GDR .

Life and work

Military time

Forsyth was the youngest jet pilot in the Royal Air Force from 1956 to 1958 (and the youngest at the age of 19) .

journalist

He then worked as a reporter for the Reuters news agency in England as well as France , Spain , Belgium , the GDR , the Federal Republic of Germany and Czechoslovakia ; a job that brought him into contact with the world of international politics. Reporting from war zones in Africa as a TV reporter for the BBC aroused his interest in historical and political backgrounds and motivated him to write The Biafra Story .

During his work as a journalist, Frederick Forsyth, according to his own statements, was a spy for the British foreign intelligence service MI6 for more than 20 years. During this time he carried out jobs in Africa and the GDR, among other things.

writer

Based on his journalistic experience, he began his literary career around 1970 . Due to his travels in Europe , the Middle East and Africa as well as his language skills ( French , German , Spanish ) Frederick Forsyth succeeds in creating a lively and realistic representation.

Frederick Forsyth's novels are mostly political thrillers . The first two books ( The Jackal , The Odessa Files ) were equally great successes.

In his works, the author repeatedly combines actual and fictional events. In the case of the Jackal with the actions of the OAS in its struggle against independence from Algeria and the Odessa file , networks of Nazi hiding and their connections to the Arab states in the run-up to the Six Day War with Israel are discussed. The book The Avenger ties in with the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

In the novella The Pilot , Frederick Forsyth brings his experience as a pilot in the British Air Force. The story is about a pilot who on Christmas Eve 1957, 12 years after the end of the Second World War, on his flight home from Germany to England, got lost in the fog due to a technical defect and from a mysterious pilot in an outdated fighter plane safely to a disused air force base is directed. The Shepherd (that's the original title) has developed into a story traditionally read on the radio on Christmas Eve in Canada . The story is considered "in the opinion of the critics ... exciting and of particular literary quality."

Political position

In an open letter dated July 7, 2000 to the then Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Erwin Teufel , Forsyth wrote that, as a conservative , he reviled and despised the three political extremes he had come to know in his life: Nazism , fascism and communism : “All three are perverted descendants of socialism. All three are brutal and cruel creeds. They also have a lot in common otherwise; they are committed to political correctness and the punishment of anyone who deviates from the prescribed doctrine. This is how political correctness works today. Thus, all four of these political orthodoxy are diametrically opposed to conservatism . ”“ I also reject political correctness because it tried to imagine itself as a creed of tolerance, but is perverted to the exact opposite. ”He fears that political correctness is thinking the majority in Germany dominate.

In a guest article in the news magazine Focus on August 23, 2010 under the title "It is time for Germany to get up again", Frederick Forsyth wrote "The European Union is not a democracy " as a reply to the Lisbon Treaty . In it he called on the Germans to resist and justified this with quotations from Jean Monnet and Abraham Lincoln that he mentioned .

In August 2015 Forsyth publicly announced that he had been recruited by the British intelligence service MI6 during the Biafra War in 1968 to report human rights violations from the war zone. Later he also operated in the GDR. These statements are apparently in connection with his autobiography Outsider , announced for September 2015 , which was published in German parallel to the British edition.

Awards

Works

Film adaptations

The jackal was filmed twice, once in 1973 under the (English) title The Day of the Jackal , and then in 1997 as The Jackal . In addition, The Odessa File was created in 1974 , The Dogs of War in 1981 , The Fourth Protocol in 1987 , The Black Manifesto in 2005 and Avenger (TV) in 2006 . McCready's Doppelspiel was also filmed for television in 1989/90 as a six-part episode film.

literature

  • Craig Cabell: Frederick Forsyth. A matter of protocol . Robson Books, London 2001, ISBN 1-86105-414-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Berliner Zeitung of August 31, 2015; P. 23
  2. Frederick Forsyth in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on December 30, 2012 ( beginning of article freely accessible).
  3. "Loyal to the line dwarfs". Deutschlandlied: Open letter from bestselling author Frederick Forsyth to CDU Prime Minister Erwin Teufel. In: Junge Freiheit, July 7, 2000
  4. "It is time for Germany to get up again". The European Union is not a democracy, believes the British bestselling author and calls on Germans to resist. In: FOCUS magazine | DEBATE No. 34 (2010)