Friedrich Kröhnke

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Friedrich Kröhnke (born March 12, 1956 in Darmstadt ) is a German writer .

Life

Darmstadt

Friedrich Kröhnke grew up with twin brother Karl and two other siblings in Darmstadt . The father comes from East Prussia and worked as a chemist for the pharmaceutical company Merck , the mother comes from Bohemia and wrote novels, poetry and children's books as Margarete Kubelka . Kröhnke attended the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in Darmstadt from 1966 to 1972 . Because of political activities, he was expelled from school with his twin brother in 1972, whereupon he continued attending school until he graduated in 1975 at the Old Electoral High School in Bensheim . At fifteen he joined the SPD . In 1973 there was a party exclusion process, operated by Darmstadt's Lord Mayor and poet Heinz Winfried Sabais . In 1975 Kröhnke left the SPD.

Bochum / Cologne

After graduating from high school, he moved to Bochum to work for a Trotskyist splinter group, the International Workers' Correspondence Group , so-called Lambertists. Shortly afterwards he began studying German , Romance languages and history at the Ruhr University in Bochum . He was a co-initiator of the campaign for Wolf Biermann's right to travel freely from the GDR to appearances in West Germany, which led to Biermann's legendary Cologne concert. Two years later he moved to Cologne , where in 1981 he worked with Karl Otto Conrady as a Dr. phil. to do a PhD. The dissertation was published under the title Boys in Bad Society . This was followed by a two-year legal traineeship in Düsseldorf with the second state examination (1982–1984). At the same time, he and his brothers founded the literary magazine Wanderbühne in Frankfurt, which reached a total of six editions (1981–1983) and, despite the collaboration of well-known authors, including numerous left-wing oppositionists in the GDR, was a financial failure.

At that time he also taught at the schools of the German book trade in Frankfurt, which he broke off to travel. From 1986 he lived again in Cologne, where he worked for two years as a research assistant at the Cologne City Archives. Since then, Kröhnke's life has been shaped more than ever by writing, in addition to love relationships with women and many young men. Texts by him appear in the magazine L'80, edited by Günter Grass and Johano Strasser , as well as the first individual titles.

Berlin / Prague / Berlin / Stuttgart

At the end of the 1980s, Kröhnke moved to Berlin, spending almost every day in both parts of the divided city. 1999 move to Prague, two years later to the twin brother's old half-timbered house near Hamburg. Today he lives again as a freelance writer in Berlin. The grants and awards he received included the Alfred Döblin grant in 1994 and that of the Stuttgart Writers' House in 1995 . He traveled extensively in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In 2007, in exchange with the most famous Ukrainian writer Oksana Sabuschko, he was a long-time guest of the Goethe Institute and the Brandenburg Gate Foundation in Kiev. He is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

To the work

Friedrich Kröhnke wanted to be a writer even as a child. a. the books Die Atterseekrankheit and A book of secrets testify. The will to read, write and be a writer is combined with ideas of the radical left, which for him had to be a left, which rejects and attacks capitalism and 'real socialism', philistinism and prudery. Essays and stories from the 1980s deal primarily with pederasty , but also deal with left-wing politics after 1968. Both subjects are dealt with in the autobiographical story Seventy-Two. The year in which I turned sixteen , the story of Kleymann and Bellarmin (1986) as well as Atterseekrankheit (1999) is visible: The years of political work for the Trotskyist IAC not only led to a freeze of thought, but also to a freeze of feelings. Now the feelings break new ground: in the often changing to male adolescents, the much more stable relationships with women of the same age, and - as a game - with neurotic cuddly toys and 'beings'.

Pederastic experiences and imagery run through - both serious and comical and tragicomic - all early stories and novels - in a triangle of loneliness and unfulfilled longing on the station line on the one hand, successful love relationships with young people on the other, but also of hedonistic exuberance . This triangle is illuminated in many ways , especially in the magnum opus , Attersee disease. On the other hand, according to Martin Krumbholz in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, they are "worldly": Cologne in the past and present (in What is there today at the police station ), the divided and reunited Berlin ( Grundis , P 14 ), Frei-, Fun and indoor swimming pools ( Aqualand ), thieves (there and back from the moon mountains , the story of thieves ), trips to Eritrea ( to Asmara! ).

In the years after 2000, in which the fleeing withdrawal from Prague took place (processed in Ciao Vaschek ), and the time in Hamburg (almost fatal operation in Reinbek hospital, which is also discussed in Ciao Vaschek ), an (still ironically interpretable ) The bitterness of the aging writer and the intensified engagement with religion come to the fore. In the novel Samoa (2006) it says on p. 150 about Kröhnke's alter ego Pirna: “ You will have already noticed that I regard Pirna as a kind of religious person or someone who is increasingly turning towards religious questions or spiritual experiences advances . "

The sudden death of his partner on a joint trip to Estonia, which he processed in his best-known novel Wie in Schöne Filmen (2007), helped to give Kröhnke's previously anarchic-hedonistic life seriousness and weight to the work. Kröhnke's literary encounters with the director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau ( Murnau. Eine Fahrt , 2001) or the poet Max Dauthendey ( Wie Dauthendey died , 2017) offer diverse images of wanderlust, homesickness, illness, love and death.

Works

Single track

prose

Essay / non-fiction book

  • Boys in bad company. On the image of young people in German literature 1900–1933 . Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 1981, ISBN 3-416-01654-8 .
  • Propaganda for Klaus Mann . Materialis Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-88535-035-1 .
  • Pasolini essays . Libertarian Association, Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-922611-21-4 .
  • Gennariello could be a girl, essays on Pasolini . Materialis Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-88535-077-7 .

Publication (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Shown in: Angelika Hüffell: Schülerbewegung 1967–77. Giessen 1978; Kröhnke appears here under the name Tom Lauschke.
  2. ↑ Martin Krumbholz: The last paradises are tiled. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 25, 1996.
personal data
SURNAME Kröhnke, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Darmstadt