Georg Seidel

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Georg Seidel (born September 28, 1945 in Dessau , † June 3, 1990 in Berlin ) was a German playwright .

Life

Georg Seidel completed an apprenticeship as a toolmaker , graduated from high school and then spent a year in catechism. In 1967 he was first a stage worker at the Dessau Theater and then began studying mechanical engineering at the Karl-Marx-Stadt engineering school (today: Chemnitz University of Technology ). Because of his refusal to do military service with a weapon, he was de-registered . This also led to the fact that an already confirmed enrollment at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig was later withdrawn. In 1969/70 he had to serve as a construction soldier and then worked again as a stage worker in Dessau. From 1973 he worked in Berlin at DEFA and from 1975 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin as a lighting technician, and from 1982 to 1987 as a dramaturgist. Since 1987 he has worked as a freelance writer. Georg Seidel "is [...] the most important playwright of the final phase of the GDR, alongside Heiner Müller and Volker Braun ". He died of cancer at the age of 44.

About the dramatic work

An important work by Seidel is the play Villa Jugend , which was awarded the Mülheim Dramatist Prize and premiered posthumously in 1991 , in which the author uses a German family history to paint a complex image of the political upheaval at the time. The teacher couple Neitzel, whose villa was once the center of the cultural life of a small town, wants to avoid the talk and move to a bigger city. At the farewell party with friends, the whole fragility of the small town idyll becomes apparent. The new life in a barren new apartment near an industrial area brings no changes and ends in a catastrophe. “There is an apocalyptic mood in Villa Jugend. Once associated with hopeful socialist human utopias, the villa has long since become a cold mausoleum. Seidel's scenes, most of which were created before the “Wende” and are reminiscent of Chekhov's cherry orchard, are a swan song. ” Stefan Reinecke characterized the drama as the“ endgame of a state, microscoped in prototypical family scenes, the last piece from the GDR ”. Seidel left the text as a fragment, which was supplemented after his death with passages that were discovered on his computer. The piece is considered to be “perhaps the last authentic inventory of the real socialism of the GDR”.

In his pieces, Seidel showed the everyday life of the declining GDR: the destruction of people by the state, the resulting interpersonal alienation and social problems as well as the lack of prospects for young people. He did not portray this through loud indignation, but as a "gentle anarchist" through scarcity and exaggeration. Margot Honecker's Ministry of National Education launched a campaign against the play Jochen Schanotta (1985) , because the young protagonist, who was breaking the norm, did not correspond to the socialist model at all. His most frequently played piece Carmen Kittel (originally: The Slow Child ) with an equally young main character was criticized as it portrayed living and working conditions in the GDR incorrectly and harmful.

Awards

Works

Text publications

Theater and radio play performances

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Critical lexicon for contemporary German literature KLG
  2. ^ Critical lexicon for contemporary German-language literature - KLG
  3. ↑ Stefan Reinecke: Germany! And then? In: Friday June 7, 1991.
  4. ^ Critical lexicon for contemporary German-language literature - KLG
  5. ↑ Maik Hamburger: The gentle anarchist . In: Theater Today . 1990. H. 8

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Seidel, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German playwright
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Dessau
DATE OF DEATH 3rd June 1990
Place of death Berlin