Gisela Elsner

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Gisela Irmgard Elsner (born May 2, 1937 in Nuremberg ; † May 13, 1992 in Munich ) was a German writer .

Life

Gisela Elsner came from a middle-class family and grew up with a sister and a brother in Nuremberg- Erlenstegen ; her father Richard Elsner (1905–1994) was a director at Siemens . She attended a secondary school in Nuremberg, where she graduated from high school in 1957 .

Until 1959 she studied philosophy , German and theater studies in Vienna . She then lived as a freelance writer in various places: on Lake Starnberg , in Frankfurt am Main , 1963 to 1964 in Rome , 1964 to 1970 in London , then in Paris , Hamburg , New York and finally in Munich .

On August 30, 1958, she married the writer and editor Klaus Roehler in Planegg near Munich ; the marriage ended in divorce after Gisela Elsner left her husband and her three-year-old son Oskar . Her son said she told a reporter "with a smile of triumph" that she tried to have an abortion while pregnant. Elsner was married to the painter, art critic and writer Hans Platschek until 1976 .

Gisela Elsner took part in meetings of Group 47 in 1958, 1962 and 1963 , from 1962 she worked in the Dortmund Group 61 and from 1971 she was a member of the PEN Center Germany .

A mixture of economic problems, literary unsuccessfulness and political lack of prospects led to complete isolation in her Schwabing apartment at Elisabethstrasse 8 and, on May 13, 1992, to her suicide by jumping out of a window on the 4th floor of the Josephinum private clinic in Munich. There she had been admitted the day before after a collapse on the street.

Literary work

Gisela Elsner became well known with her first novel Die Riesenzwerge (1964), for which she received the renowned "Prix Formentor". Her satirical view of the hypocritical world of West German post-war society caused a stir at the time. In Austria the book was temporarily classified as harmful to young people.

Elsner published a total of nine novels during his lifetime, two volumes of stories, one volume of essays, three radio plays and the opera libretto Friedenssaison. The reception of her work was overshadowed by the success of her debut, which is widely regarded as her most important book. In 1991 Elsner publicly accused the Rowohlt Verlag ofjunking ” their work. She saw herself "literarily ghettoized" within the Federal Republic of Germany. At the same time, she rejected the label “women's literature” as discriminatory.

Meanwhile, Hamburg Germanist Christine Künzel is trying to rediscover the author and satirist Gisela Elsner by publishing a complete edition in Berlin's Verbrecher Verlag . In May 2012 the International Gisela Elsner Society was founded in the Sulzbach-Rosenberg Literature Archive .

Political position

Gisela Elsner suffered all her life from the conflict between her bourgeois origin and her radical opposition to everything bourgeois. She expressed this as drastically as possible in a conversation with the playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz in the DKP's party newspaper in February 1978 :

"Basically, I get sick of writers who can't get away from the idea of ​​being an outsider or a prophet, and who try to play off what they call their individual freedom against the collective freedom that abuses the community."

She sympathized strongly with the GDR - socialism , was elected a member of the DKP and the beginning of 1989 to the board of the party. Elsner resigned from the DKP in June 1989 due to pro- Gorbachev tendencies. In October 1989 she again became a member of the DKP for a short time and held on to her communist convictions even after the fall of the SED dictatorship in the GDR .

filming

About the final phase of her life, Elsner's son Oskar Roehler made the film Die Unberührbare with Hannelore Elsner  - who has no family relationship to Gisela Elsner - in the lead role. In Roehler's autobiographical film Sources of Life , Gisela Elsner is portrayed by the actress Lavinia Wilson .

Theatrical documentary

Gisela Elsner - Blickwinkel 2017

On December 6, 2017, the world premiere of the play Gisela Elsner - Blickwinkel 2017 by the theater group Art and Drama by and with Friederike Pöhlmann-Grießinger and Roland Eugen Beiküfner in the Literature Center North in Nuremberg. Richard Elsner, Gisela Elsner's brother, supported the theater documentary as patron. This performance was musically framed by jazz musician James Michel from Oxford. After "William Becher - Life and Work in Lindau", it is the second part of the art and drama - literature series Trilogy of the forgotten writers .

Works

  • Triboll. Olten [u. a.] 1956 (together with Klaus Roehler)
  • The giant dwarves. Reinbek near Hamburg 1964
  • The off spring. Reinbek near Hamburg 1968
  • The ban on contact. Reinbek near Hamburg 1970, new edition of Verbrecher Verlag , Berlin, 2006, ISBN 978-3-935843-67-6
  • Mr. Leiselheimer and further attempts to cope with reality. Munich [u. a.] 1973
  • The point win. Reinbek near Hamburg 1977
  • The ultimate test. Reinbek near Hamburg 1980
  • Offside. Reinbek near Hamburg 1982
  • The taming. Reinbek near Hamburg 1984, new edition of Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 978-3-935843-09-6
  • The diaper. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987
  • Peace season. Hannover 1988 (Libretto; Music: Christof Herzog )
  • Spheres of danger. Vienna [u. a.] 1988
  • Air raid. Vienna [u. a.] 1989, 2009 a corrected version was published, checked on the manuscript, as part of the work edition of the Verbrecher Verlag Berlin, ISBN 978-3-940426-23-9
  • Wasps in the snow. Berlin 2001 (together with Klaus Roehler)
  • Holy blood. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2007 (German first publication on the occasion of his 70th birthday). ISBN 978-3-935843-82-9 . First published in Russian in the USSR (Raduga Verlag, Moscow 1987).
  • Otto, the major shareholder. Verbrecher Verlag , Berlin 2008 (based on an unpublished manuscript) ISBN 978-3-940426-09-3
  • Curses of a cursed - Critical writings I. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940426-62-8
  • In the literary ghetto - Critical writings II. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940426-63-5
  • Try to face reality. Collected stories Volume 1. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-943167-04-7
  • Ordeal. Collected stories Volume 2. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-943167-05-4
  • The diabolical comedy. Verbrecher Verlag , Berlin 2016 (based on an unpublished and unfinished manuscript) ISBN 978-3-957321-18-3

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Christine Flitner: Women in literary criticism. Elfriede Jelinek and Gisela Elsner in the features pages of the Federal Republic of Germany. (= Women in the History of Literature, Vol. 3) Pfaffenweiler 1995.
  • Oskar Roehler : The untouchable. The original script as well as reviews and materials. With a foreword by Hannelore Elsner. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-462-03039-6 .
  • Dorothe Cremer: "Your gestures are huge, your expressions are tiny". To Gisela Elsner's Die Riesenzwerge; Spelling and social reality of the Adenauer period. Centaurus Verlag, Herbolzheim 2003.
  • Martina Süess: When Otto eats himself up . In: WOZ , July 3, 2008, online version .
  • Christine Künzel (ed.): The last communist. Texts on Gisela Elsner. (= concrete texts 49) concrete literature publishing house, Hamburg 2009. ISBN 978-3-930786-56-5
  • Christine Künzel: I am a dirty satirist: on the work of Gisela Elsner (1937–1992). Helmer, Sulzbach 2012, ISBN 978-3-89741-344-3
  • Thomas Blum: Words like knives and axes . For Gisela Elsner's 75th birthday. In: Neues Deutschland , May 2, 2012. Online version [1]
  • Evelyne Polt-Heinzl : Born too early, died too early. Gisela Elsner's literary work in the context of her time. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 29, 2003. Online version [2]
  • Jens Uthoff: The poetry mannequin : stories by Gisela Elsner. The entire work of the author is being reissued. In: taz.de , June 17, 2013. Online version [3]
  • Tanja Röckemann: The "reunification patchwork ". On the reception of Gisela Elsner's novel Fliegeralarm in German conditions from 1989/2009 . In: undercurrents - Forum for Left Literary Studies, October 12, 2013. [4]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. "We are poor pigs and always driven" , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin , May 4, 2018, p. 32.
  2. ^ Ivo Kranzfelder:  Platschek, Hans Philipp. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 515 f. ( Digitized version ). P. 515.
  3. ^ Gisela Elsner: Authors in the literary ghetto. In: Kürbiskern 1983, no. 2, pp. 136-144.
  4. Katrin Schuster: Curses of a Cursed. About a Gisela Elsner conference in Sulzbach-Rosenberg ; Literaturportal Bayern , May 15, 2012
  5. Georg Fülberth: KPD and DKP 1945–1990. Two communist parties in the fourth period of capitalist development. Distel-Verlag, Heilbronn 1990 p. 131.