Gert Fritz Unger

Gert Fritz Unger (born March 23, 1921 in Breslau ; † August 3, 2005 in Weilburg ) was a German writer and author of Wild West novels .

Life

Unger first studied mechanical engineering and learned the craft of art locksmithing. During his youth, he became German youth swimming champion in the late 1930s . With these good physical and technical prerequisites and due to the - according to his own statement - seductive propaganda , Unger volunteered at the outbreak of the Second World War as a torpedo mechanic for the German submarine weapon and fell into British captivity .

After his return to Germany, Unger moved to the Ruhr area and initially worked as a fitter and craftsman in Gelsenkirchen ; one of his first jobs was to repair the defective clock on Buer's town hall . Later he was responsible for major projects at Siemens as a site manager.

In 1949 Unger took part in a competition announced by the Northwest German Broadcasting Corporation and won first prize with his contribution to a detective radio play , after which he began writing novels in his spare time and later concentrated on the Western genre . First, however, Unger wrote sea ​​adventures - inspired by his time in the navy . At the request of his publisher, he put his first western on paper. At Uta Verlag , Unger worked on the novel series Billy Jenkins , Tom Prox and Pete and wrote his first independent western. From 1951 he was a full-time writer. In 1960 Unger moved from the Ruhr area to Weilburg in Hesse . From 1972 the Bastei-Verlag published his novels, including in the series Western bestsellers by GF Unger with numerous cover motifs by the Spanish painter and artist Vicente B. Ballestar , from 1973 Unger received his own series from Zauberkreis Verlag .

In the high phase of his activity Unger wrote a novel almost every week, later this number sank to six new novels a year, which always first appeared in paperback before being reprinted in the booklet. Unger died on August 3, 2005 at the age of 84 from a brief, serious illness.

After Unger's death, Bastei-Verlag published two new editions in booklet format and one series in pocket book format, ten paperback books with the imprint “New Roman”, none of which contained any reference to the author's death. All of them were manuscripts that Unger had finished before his death.

Services

Unger's publications can be found in various publishers, including Zauberkreis , Pabel , Indra and Kelter . At first he mainly wrote loan books for the commercial lending libraries that flourished in the 1950s and were later reprinted as notebooks. When the paperback market grew in importance later, Unger managed to gain a foothold there. Apart from his early contributions from the 1950s to the series Billy Jenkins and Tom Prox , for which he wrote a total of around 25 issues, only one of his novels ( Skull-Ranch Volume 1) was published originally as an issue. Normally - contrary to Unger's current image as a novelist - his 742 Westerns were initially published in book form, namely as a loan book or paperback, only the reprints appeared as booklets.

In addition to his real name, Unger used various pseudonyms such as G. F. Bucket or A. F. Peters for his publications . However, it is a widespread misconception that Unger is behind all »G. F. «- hides pseudonyms. For example, G. F. Barner, GF Wego and G. F. Waco stand for Gerhard Friedrich Basner .

Due to the high total number of copies of his works, he became the most successful German-speaking western author, at the same time he is the first and, alongside Thomas Jeier and Alfred Wallon, the only German-language western author whose works have been published as translations in the USA . The numerous reprints and new editions of the approx. 742 western novels a. a. exceed more than 300 million copies.

Unger's novels, if they are told in the third person, are written in the present tense , while the novels told in the first person are in the simple past . His stories accompany cowboys as protagonists in the defense and maintenance of honor . According to Unger, a western is “the lonely struggle of a single man against a fate”.

According to his own statements, Unger's literary models included Mark Twain , Jack London and Louis L'Amour .

Web links

• Literature by and about Gert Fritz Unger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary in Der Spiegel

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ ORF ON News . www.orf.at  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.