Gerhard Fritsch

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Gerhard Fritsch (born March 28, 1924 in Vienna ; † March 22, 1969 there ) was an Austrian writer and librarian .

Life

Gerhard Fritsch was born as the son of the middle school teacher Otto Fritsch (1886–1965) and his wife Hermine, nee. Teller (1902–1987) born. Both came from northern Bohemia, from Karlsbad and Oberleutensdorf . His maternal great-grandparents had run the friendship hall café and a liqueur production facility in Karlsbad, which was later taken over by Jan Becher . Until the mid-1920s, they ran a delicatessen shop in Hyberner Gasse in Prague, now Hybernska, near Café Arco.

In 1942 he passed his Matura in Vienna and then had to do the compulsory labor service (Saarland). He was then called up to the Air Force and served as a radio operator for a transport group in Norway, Finland and on the Eastern Front.

In 1945 he was briefly captured north and west of Prague . After months on a farm in Eichsfeld in Germany, he returned to Vienna with his first wife in autumn 1945 and lived in Gföhl in the Waldviertel (at that time in the Soviet occupation zone ) until he began his studies in 1946 and then in the so-called Porzellaneum, which is still in existence today Student residence on Porzellangasse in Vienna- Alsergrund (US sector).

He studied history and German and wrote his dissertation at the University of Vienna in 1949 (see works), but did not take the Rigorosen.

In 1949 he was involved in founding the magazine Lynkeus Heft 4 and 5/6. In 1949/50 he worked as the editor of Abend (Globus-Verlag) and as a lecturer at Zwei-Berge-Verlag, he also became a member of the working group of the 'New Paths' editorial team. From 1951 he was one of the collaborators of the publications founded .

In 1951 Fritsch became an employee of the Wiener Städtische Libraries and worked there until he made the decision in 1959 to become a freelance writer.

From 1954 he became a scientific consultant, head of librarianship training and co-founder of the Vienna Book Letters (1955). It was during this period in Fritsch's life that he wrote his well-known novel Moos auf den Steinen and all of his volumes of poetry, which he published in magazines and anthologies. In the period from 1954 to 1959 he was awarded many prizes - as an author of the avant-garde, he received the promotion award of the city of Vienna. In 1957 he worked as an external editor at 0. Müller-Verlag.

In 1959, the activity as a freelance writer made him free of professional obligations, but he had to carry out editing and editing activities because otherwise he would not have been financially secure. His side work included radio broadcasts, reviews, articles for magazines and newspapers. From the beginning of his freelance work, he was responsible for the literary magazine Wort in der Zeit (1960) as an editor , thus enabling the magazine to open up to the avant-garde . From 1961 to 1964 he worked as an editor at Stiasny, which gave him influence on the publishing industry in Austria. After the publication of the February 1964 issue, which focused on the experimental literature, he was allegedly dismissed without any connection with this issue. In the same issue he published the poem “Bilanz”, which is intended to put an end to the faceless, mythic spelling of the previously published works.

In 1966 the literary magazine Literatur und Critique appeared for the first time , which can be seen as the successor to Wort at the time when Fritsch was the editor.

Fritsch was married three times and the father of four children.

On March 22, 1969, Fritsch was hanged and found wearing women's clothes. It is assumed that it was not a suicide, but an accident during an autoerotic strangulation ritual that Fritsch apparently practiced repeatedly. He was buried in Vienna in the Hietzinger Friedhof in an honorary grave (group 57, number 110).

plant

After his first attempts at writing in verse and prose since the early 1940s, around the turn of the year 1947/48 he came into contact with colleagues of the same age at the university studios, who also dealt with poetry and costumes ( Michael Kehlmann , Helmut Qualtinger , Franz Hiesel ), even more so with the newly formed PEN Club in Vienna , which founded its own youth department, which found a short-lived forum in the PLAN magazine . When the latter fell silent, the poet Hermann Hakel, who returned to Vienna from Palestine, founded the magazine Lynkeus , in which Ingeborg Bachmann made his debut and Fritsch became editor. From then on, he regularly published poems in magazines and anthologies ( Diary , The Daily Effort ), short prose in newspapers ( Der Abend ), before his first independent book publication Between Kirkenes and Bari appeared in 1951 , poems and short prose with illustrations by Fritz Fischer , in the series Young Austrian authors (a total of 12 volumes with titles from Ilse Aichinger , Marlen Haushofer , Milo Dor , Reinhard Federmann u. a.). Its editor, Hans Weigel, published the yearbook 'Voices of the Present' beginning in 1952, in which this generation was also represented by artists as illustrators; The last volume was published in 1956. In 1954 he met Thomas Bernhard . Until its breakthrough in the mid-1960s, there was a connection of mutual recognition. The meaning that this six-year-old man must have had for him can be inferred from Bernhard's letters to Fritsch, which are kept in the Vienna Library in the City Hall , where the entire literary estate of Fritsch is located.

“In the beginning, Bernhard met his mentor,” as Thomas Miessgang wrote, “with the utmost respect and kept asking for money quite bluntly. When his fame grew in the sixties, while his esteem for Gerhard Fritsch stagnated, his tone of voice became significantly coarser. "

After Fritsch's debut in 1951, the volume of poetry Lehm und Gestalt appeared in 1954 , the novel Moos auf den Steinen in 1956 , filmed in 1968 by Georg Lhotsky with Erika Pluhar , and in 1958 the volume of poetry Der Geisterkrug .

From 1959, when he became a freelance writer, Fritsch developed a restless activity as an editor (magazines Wort in der Zeit , literature and criticism ), external editor for publishers ( Otto Müller , Salzburg; Stiasny, Graz; Jugend und Volk , Vienna), and popular educator in Films and lectures, publisher and founder, mostly together with Otto Breicha : Finale und Auftakt (1964), an anthology that first took up the art exercises of Vienna around 1900, later the anthology Call for Mistrust (a title by Aichinger varying) in the newly founded Residenz-Verlag, to which Paul Kruntorad , Fritsch's partner in literature and criticism , has served as a consultant since 1965 (the poet Gundl Nagl, married Hradil, was part of the editorial team of Wort in before joining the Residenzverlag worked in Vienna during the time). The same address ( Palais Wilczek ) had and still has the Austrian Society for Literature , founded in 1961 , which accepted the invitation of Eastern European poets to Vienna and the support of emigrated authors. In the course of these efforts z. B. Elias Canetti goes to Vienna regularly.

The novel Fasching , which Fritsch was finally able to publish in 1967 with Rowohlt, bears a motto by Elias Canetti, who was shaken by the death of the poet, who was only 45 years old, as can be seen in his letters. More recently, especially since Mardi Gras and the posthumously published Katzenmusik (first in 1979), when Suhrkamp paperbacks are available (a circumstance that is thanks to the dedication of Robert Menasse), the view of the special achievement of this short life as a writer has become clearer.

For financial reasons, Fritsch was obliged to pursue other activities in addition to working as a freelance writer. The radio play cycle “Die Reise nach Österreich” (1960/61), which Fritsch wrote with Franz Hiebel , his non-fiction book “Pascha und Pest” (1962) and the volume “Feldherr gegen Willen” (1966) seem more like publications of bread work.

Fritsch was one of the oldest friends and earliest supporters of Thomas Bernhard . In 1960/61 Otto Müller Verlag asked for an expert opinion from Fritsch regarding a possible publication of Bernhard's collection of poems Frost (not to be confused with the novel of the same name ). In his report, Fritsch calls Bernhard “a person obsessed with his personal world anger and world suffering”, his poems he calls “great and wild songs” that stand “next to blackest despair”: “Blasphemy from half and whole soul repeatedly hit the inner and outer landscape to which he is chained: the demonized Flachgau ”. The Frost cycle confirms Fritsch's "repeated assertion of Bernhard's talent bordering on genius", from which the "chaotic and consciously lack of discipline, including the mannerism of himself" and at the same time the suggestive power of "his uninterrupted melody, cannot be separated. “ Frost was never published by Otto Müller Verlag. Some poems from this cycle appeared in 1963 in an anthology edited by Gerhard Fritsch.

As a jury member, Fritsch was also involved in awarding the Anton Wildgans Prize to Bernhard in 1968. After the scandal at the award of the Austrian State Prize a few days earlier, the award ceremony had been canceled by the Austrian Federation of Industrialists ; Bernhard received the prize money. Bernhard describes the following events in his book My Prices : “Shortly afterwards I met Gerhard Fritsch, the jury member and until then my friend, in the Café Museum at the very table where Robert Musil used to sit and asked him whether he would now, after this mess by the Federation of Industrialists, protest against their actions and step down from the jury and move back his seat. But Fritsch had no intention of protesting or resigning from the jury. He had three women and a lot of children to look after with these women and could neither afford such a self-evident protest, nor such a self-evident departure from the Wild Goose Prize Jury for me. As the father of many children and the provider of three immensely expensive women, he lamented me and asked me to be considerate of him in a tone that had been repulsive. The poor man, the inconsistent, unfortunate, the pitiful. Not long after this conversation, Fritsch hung himself on the hook of his apartment door, his botched life had grown over his head and wiped him out. "

A connection between this incident and the death of Fritsch is rather unlikely: the award ceremony was scheduled for March 1968; the suicide occurred about a year later.

Awards and honors

  • 1954 Promotion Prize of the City of Vienna
  • 1956 Promotion Prize of the Austrian State Prize for Poetry
  • 1956 Theodor Körner Prize
  • 1957 Promotion Prize of the Austrian State Prize for Novels
  • 1959 Theodor Körner Prize
  • 1975 Name of Gerhard-Fritsch-Gasse in Vienna- Hernals

Works

  • The industrial landscape as represented by German poetry , dissertation, Vienna 1949
  • Between Kirkenes and Bari , Vienna 1952
  • Lehm und Gestalt , Vienna et al. 1954
  • This darkness is called night , Vienna 1955
  • Moos auf Steinen , Salzburg 1956, filmed in 1968 with Erika Pluhar
  • The ghost jug , Salzburg 1958
  • Geographie der Nacht , Graz et al. 1962
  • Paschas and Pest , Graz et al. 1962
  • General against his will , Vienna et al. 1966
  • Fasching , Reinbek near Hamburg 1967, new edition 1995 with afterword by Robert Menasse ; Theater version, staged by Anna Badora at the Vienna Volkstheater in 2015
  • Das Buch vom Burgenland , Vienna 1968 (together with Johannes Zachs and Harald Prickler)
  • Katzenmusik , Salzburg 1974
  • Collected poems , Salzburg 1978
  • Night drive , Baden 1983
  • You can't live as you want: diaries , posthumous publication, edited by Klaus Kastberger , Residenz-Verlag 2019, ISBN 978-3-7017-1705-7

Correspondence

Editing

  • Franz Hiesel : I know the smell of wild chamomile , Graz et al. 1961
  • Wieland Schmied : Left and Right Die Nacht , Graz et al. 1962
  • Question and formula , Salzburg 1963 (together with Wolfgang Kraus)
  • Finale and prelude , Salzburg 1964 (together with Otto Breicha)
  • Miroslva Krleza : European alphabet , Graz et al. 1964
  • Milo Dor : Ballade from the human body , Graz et al. 1966
  • Invitation to distrust , Salzburg 1967 (together with Otto Breicha)
  • New Hungarian Poetry , Salzburg 1971

Translations

  • WH Auden : Here and now , Salzburg 1961

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Susanne Zobl: On the life and work of Gerhard Fritsch , Vienna 2004, on the website erika-mitterer.org
  2. ↑ https://www.onb.ac.at/oe-literaturzeitschriften/Wiener_Buecherbriefe/Wiener_Buecherbriefe.htm
  3. ↑ Klaus Kastberger in the foreword to the edition of Fritsch's diaries in 2019, p. 5f
  4. ^ Review of the diaries in the "Presse", print edition of March 23, 2019
  5. ↑ Gender and Character , in: weekly newspaper Die Zeit , Hamburg, No. 36, September 3, 2015, Austria edition, p. 10
  6. ↑ Hans Höller: Thomas Bernhard. Rowohlt Monograph, Hamburg 1993, p. 66f.
  7. ^ Thomas Bernhard: My prices . Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / aM 2010, p. 91f.

literature

  • Stefan Alker: Don't neglect the other. Work and work of Gerhard Fritsch , ed. by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Braumüller , Vienna 2007 ISBN 978-3-7003-1622-0
  • Gerhard Fritsch. Writer in Austria , ed. v. Stefan Alker. Special number, Vienna 2005 ISBN 3-85449-245-6
  • Karl Schimpl: Continuation and problematization. Investigations into the artistic development of Gerhard Fritsch. Heinz, Stuttgart 1982 (= Stuttgart works on German studies; 118) ISBN 3-88099-122-7

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Fritsch, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1969
Place of death Vienna