Fritz Hofmann (writer)

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Fritz Hofmann (born September 15, 1928 in Leipzig ) is a German writer , editor and editor .

Life

Fritz Hofmann, born in Leipzig in 1928, attended middle school. In the Second World War he was an air force helper . After the end of the war he was employed as a teacher in the Soviet occupation zone . He attended a preparatory college , the forerunner of the workers 'and peasants' faculty , and studied history and German in Leipzig from 1948 to 1952. He then became a publisher's editor at Aufbau-Verlag in Berlin . From 1978 onwards, the Saxon continued his journalistic and editorial work as a freelancer in his new home, Berlin .

He had a special interest in satire . He published satires and wrote them himself up to a gloss on "satire". His first book publication, the novel The General's Legacy, about dealing with a looted estate , has been translated into Polish , Bulgarian and Czech . In 1988/1989 his story Treffen in Travers with Hermann Beyer , Corinna Harfouch and Uwe Kockisch in the leading roles was filmed under the direction of Michael Gwisdek .

reception

The activity as a publisher's editor - as it was said in a review - "trained him in the German language", which is expressed in his own works. His observations, impressions and reflections are "presented in precise, flexible German". Ambivalent it said in another review, the language was indeed "very polished", but there are also stylistically "spiral" from a socialist point of view inappropriate "value-free" unnecessary verklausolierte to "excruciatingly awkward" telling passages. In the satires , his stylistic devices are again effective. Another reviewer wrote that there was “clear, tangible language”, that intellectualization was “carefully avoided”, but that the “narrative virtuosity on the one hand” in the figure drawings was sometimes countered by falling into cliché.

On the novel The General's Legacy, Martin Straub remarked in Neues Deutschland that the hero went through a complex and contradictory development, which aroused both pleasure and thought in the reader at the same time. Certain insights of the hero were inadequately prepared, while less important passages were too rambling, which would therefore, to a certain extent, become independent. The “lively and powerful language” should be emphasized. On Sunday Günter Ebert said the ambition of the text was clouded by the “overly reflective view” of the first-person narrator, which spoils the narrative.

The script he had written for the television film A Picture of a Man was also not entirely convincing. Volker Weidhaas from the Berliner Zeitung found the debut work “half-hearted.” He saw “a staid triangular story, a teasing romance”, irrelevant in view of the “modesty of the problem approach” and wasted potential for conflict. Henryk Goldberg from Neues Deutschland found that the film lacked “an intellectual, organizing center”. In his television review he stated: “The material offered an interesting opportunity to sound out the relationships between artists and workers on site, it could have been a contribution to the discussion on the subject of art, on its relationship to reality. [...] What Fritz Hofmann wrote down was more of a sketch of a story than the story itself. Problems were suddenly, unprepared, sketched out in short scenes, but not carried out, and moreover claims more than designed. The dialogues gave hardly any opportunities to draw the unmistakable profile of people. "

Publications

Works written alone

  • The General's Inheritance (= New Text Edition ). Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1972.
    • Polish edition: Spadek po generale. Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1974.
    • Bulgarian edition: Štastlivijat naslednik. Izdatelstvo Christo G. Danov, Plovdiv 1974.
    • Czech edition: Dědictví po generálovi. Svoboda, Prague 1975.
  • Ascension to Hohenstein. Stories (= New Text Edition ). Montage-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1977.
  • Course shadow. Stories. With illustrations by Ellen Willnow. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1981.
  • Egon Erwin Kisch . The mad reporter. Fritz Hofmann's biography. Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-355-00361-1 .
  • The player and other encounters. Greifenverlag, Rudolstadt / Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86939-406-0 .

Book chapters (selection)

  • "Buddenrooks. Fall of a Family " / " The Magic Mountain " . In: The narrative work of Thomas Mann . History, sources, effect. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1976, pp. 9–59 / 108–171.

Anthology editions (selection)

  • About the big cities. Poems 1885–1967. Edited by Fritz Hofmann, Joachim Schreck, Manfred Wolter , with the assistance of Bernd Jentzsch . Afterword Fritz Hofmann. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1968.
  • Man on the border. Twenty-five stories from anti-fascist exile. Edited and with an afterword by Fritz Hofmann. With contemporary graphics. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1981.
  • Phantom of fear. 33 stories from Germany and Austria 1933–1945. 2 volumes. Edited and with an afterword by Fritz Hofmann. With 76 contemporary graphics, selected by Bruno Brandl. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1987, Volume 1 ISBN 3-373-00279-6 , Volume 3 ISBN 3-373-00281-8 . ISBN total 3-373-00051-3.

Editions of works (selection)

  • Carl Sternheim : Collected works in six volumes. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1963–1968.
  • Nelly Sachs : Landscape of Screams. Selected poems. Selection and epilogue Fritz Hofmann. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1966.
  • Egon Erwin Kisch: Collected Works in Individual Editions. Edited by Bodo Uhse and Gisela Kisch, continued by Fritz Hofmann and Josef Polacek. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1969–1987.
  • Bertolt Brecht : Works in five volumes. Edited by Werner Mittenzwei with the collaboration of Fritz Hofmann. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1973.
  • Thomas Mann: Novels and Stories. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1974.
  • Thomas Mann: 1875–1955. Excerpts from letters and articles. GDR writer on Thomas Mann. Compiled by Fritz Hofmann. Kulturbund der DDR, Berlin 1975.

Forewords and Afterwords (selection)

  • Rudolf Walbiner: With mockery of the emperor and the empire. Verses against German militarism (= satire series ). Selected by Rudolf Walbiner. With an afterword by Fritz Hofmann, vignettes and binding design by Werner Klemke . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1971.
  • Bertolt Brecht: Brecht. A reading book for our time (= reading books for our time ). Text selection by Elisabeth Hauptmann and Benno Slupianek. Introduction by Fritz Hofmann. 11th, revised edition. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1976 (Hofmann's contribution only from the 11th edition).

Film adaptations

Scripts

  • A picture of a man. TV film, GDR 1 , first broadcast May 2, 1982.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Blurb on the Ascension to Hohenstein .
  2. ↑ Blurb to Kurschatten .
  3. ^ Fritz Hofmann: In matters of satire . In: Willi Bredel (Ed.): New German Literature . Monthly magazine for beautiful literature and criticism. No. 1/1957 , January 1957, Umschau, p. 161 f .
  4. ^ Meeting in Travers. In: defa-stiftung.de . Retrieved March 2, 2020 .
  5. ↑ cw: 13 encounters. A volume with stories . In: Norddeutsche Zeitung . 5th December 1981.
  6. ↑ Jochen Kaske: With a limited perspective. Fritz Hofmann: "Kurschatten", short stories . In: National newspaper . Berlin August 3rd 1982.
  7. ↑ RM: Montage-Verlag: Fritz Hofmann. Course shadow. Stories. 220 p .; 9.60 M . In: New Time . Central organ of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany . No. 32/1982 , February 8, 1982, literature / novel. Books Telegram, S. 4 .
  8. ↑ Martin Straub: Experiences of a Generation . In: New Germany . Organ of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany . February 9, 1972, Socialist Contemporary Literature, p. 12 .
  9. ^ Günter Ebert: Fritz Hofmann: The inheritance of the general . In: Sunday . Weekly newspaper for culture, politics, art and entertainment. No. 21/1972 , May 21, 1972, literature, p. 6 .
  10. ↑ Volker Weidhaas: It remains with portrait sketches. “A picture of a man” by Fritz Hofmann . In: Berliner Zeitung . No. 104/1982 , May 5, 1982, cultural policy. On the screen, p. 7 .
  11. ^ Henryk Goldberg: Brigade from the sketch pad. "A Picture of a Man" had its television premiere . In: New Germany . Organ of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. No. 103/1982 , May 4, 1982, Kultur, pp. 4 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hofmann, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, editor and editor
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig