Gert Single

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The young Gert Single

Robert Gerhard "Gert" Ledig (born November 4, 1921 in Leipzig ; † June 1, 1999 in Landsberg am Lech ) was a German writer .

Life

Gert Ledig came from a merchant family. He spent his early childhood in Vienna ; from 1929 he lived in Leipzig . After attending primary school, he did various odd jobs from 1936. He then did an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer and also attended a private theater school with the professional goal of being a director . In 1939 he volunteered for the Wehrmacht . He participated as a pioneer in the western campaign, was promoted to NCO and had been on the Eastern Front since 1941 . There he was transferred to a penal company because of a dispute with a superior . Single was then considered "politically unreliable". In the summer of 1942, Ledig was badly wounded outside Leningrad ; he suffered u. a. a severe jaw injury. After his discharge from the Wehrmacht, he trained as a shipbuilding engineer . In the last year of the war he worked in the naval armaments administration.

After the end of the Second World War , Ledig joined the Communist Party of Germany . He carried out various activities, including a. he was a lumberjack and scaffolding worker . In 1948 both the attempt to take over his father's company and the establishment of his own advertising agency failed. Single was an interpreter in the US Army from 1951 to 1953, and from 1953 freelance writer .

His first novel The Stalin Organ met with a relatively positive response at home and abroad. Single was invited to meetings of Group 47 . Because of his war injury and scruples about whether he should see himself as a writer at all, he refused to appear there himself. He said that he could not possibly exist next to a writer like Ilse Aichinger , the Stalin organ was only a martial art; In 1956 Günter Eich took his place and read from Ledig's second novel Retribution .

In the GDR, Ledig's novel Stalinorgel met with a mixed but mostly positive response. Anna Seghers paid tribute to him at the IVth German Writers' Congress in 1956. He was officially invited to the Schiller Ceremony of the German Youth in Weimar in 1955 and received an invitation from Harald Hauser to attend a one-year course at the Literature Institute in Leipzig, which Ledig refused because he was at the moment had just started writing and did not want to interrupt this activity.

Gert Single at the age of 42, 1963

Single worked more often for the GDR radio, and the positive reception of his work in the GDR prompted Ledig to plan to move to the GDR. In the period from February 18, 1958 to August 1958, a file of around 100 pages in total was created at the Ministry for State Security (MfS). The MfS saw Ledig, who was frequently in the GDR, not only as an object of spying, but there was also an active collaboration with Ledig. On April 3, 1958, there was an official discussion between single and a member of the MfS, as a result of which Single's membership in the KPD, which was banned in the FRG at that time, emerged as an obstacle. On July 7, 1958, however, the MfS informed Single that there was no obstacle to cooperation. When Single published an article in the Munich magazine Die Kultur , in which he sympathized with Catholicism , his files were closed and no further contact with Single was established by the MfS, as he was now considered a renegade .

In the restorative climate of the 1950s, single's extremely blatant way of depicting war events met with increasing rejection. He withdrew completely from literature when his manuscript The Cannons of Korčula was rejected by some publishers. He then ran an engineering office and a technical news agency from 1963.

Only in 1998 was single, who was now living in seclusion in Utting am Ammersee , rediscovered - shortly before his death. Volker Hage , culture editor at Spiegel , looked for the missing author in 1999 and found him. It was not until Hage's articles in Spiegel that the author was reissued.

WG Sebald had been referred to , among other things, Ledig's work Retaliation as one of the few examples of the literary processing of the Allied air raids on Germany during the Second World War. He published a chapter on the reactions to his Zurich lectures in 1997 and the resulting discussion in the German-language feature section in his book Luftkrieg und Literatur 1999.

In autumn 1999 experienced retaliation at Suhrkamp a new recording and much more positive response than when it was first published in the fall of 1956. In August 1999, this novel was the literary quartet presented by Marcel Reich-Ranicki discussed and thus known again. On August 26, 2005, Radio Bremen broadcast a radio play adaptation of the novel under the same title. The editing was done by Daniel Berger and directed by Klaus Prangender.

In October 2016, Gert Ledig: Gesammelte Werke and Letters with lost, in some cases previously unknown texts and letters from the 1950s and 1960s was published as an e-book. Gert Ledig: Gesammelte Werke und Letters has been available as a paperback since November 2017 .

In December 2019 the previously unpublished script The Cannons of Korčula was published with the illustrations made by Gert Ledig. The historical novel depicts political conflicts during the French Revolution and the First Coalition War.

Works

  • The Stalin organ . Claassen, Hamburg 1955 - new edition. at Suhrkamp Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1999, 4th edition 2002, ISBN 978-3-518-22333-8 .
    • Translations under the following titles: Les Orgues de Staline , 1956, French | Stalinin urut , 1956, Finnish | Stalin organs , 1956, Swedish | Ve dem, som bo paa jorden , 1956, Danish De naakte heuvel , 1963, Het stalinorgel , 2002, Dutch | The naked Hill , 1956, The Stalin organ , 2004, English | Os órgãos de Estaline , 2005, Portuguese
    • The Stalin organ
  • Retaliation . S. Fischer , Frankfurt am Main 1956 - 3rd new edition. at Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, 224 pages, ISBN 978-3-518-39741-1 .
    • Translations under the following titles: Payback , 2003, English | Odplata , 1958, Czech | Vergelding , 2000, Dutch
      Gert Ledig's work "The Korčula Cannons"
      | Sous les bombes , 2003, French (new edition Éditions Zulma, coll. Z / a, 2013) | Represalia , 2006, Spanish | Odmazda , 2008, Croatian
    • retribution
  • Law of the thumb. Desch, Munich [u. a.] 1957 (translated into English), new edition. at Piper Verlag , Munich 2003, ISBN 3-492-23776-2 .
    • Law of the thumb
  • The duel. Radio play about the Nitribitt case . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1958.
  • The public prosecutor , Fürstenfeldbruck 2 / Bavaria, Steinklopfer-Verl., (With a woodcut cycle "Against the Third World War" by Hermann Landefeld), 1958.
  • Gert Ledig: Collected Works and Letters
  • Korčula Cannons , online edition, 2019, ISBN 978-3000647864 .

Theater adaptation

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Florian Radvan, epilogue, in: Gert Ledig, Stalinorgel, Suhrkamp 2003, p. 217.
  2. ↑ Volker Hage: "Fear must sit in the neck" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 1999, p. 160-164 ( online - Jan. 4, 1999 ).
  3. ↑ Volker Hage: Interview with Marcel Reich-Ranicki: "Literature is there to show people's suffering". In: Spiegel Online. July 24, 2003, accessed March 31, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Mario Alexander Weber: From combat writings, cannon fodder and Croatian islands . In: literaturkritik.de, accessed on March 31, 2019.
  5. ↑ http://www.staatstheater.karlsruhe.de/programm/info/2169/ , accessed on March 21, 2016
  6. ↑ Bettina Henkelmann: Experiences from Destruction and Guilt , accessed on February 15, 2016
  7. ↑ RIGHT FIST | Program | Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe. Retrieved June 17, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Single, Gert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Single, Robert Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH June 1, 1999
Place of death Landsberg am Lech