Hans Christoph book

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Hans Christoph Buch, 2011

Hans Christoph Buch (born April 13, 1944 in Wetzlar ) is a German writer , essayist and reporter .

Life

Hans Christoph Buch is the son of the lawyer and diplomat Friedrich Buch . He grew up in Wetzlar, Wiesbaden , Bonn and Marseille . In 1963 he made his Abitur in Bonn . Then he started at the University of Bonn , a study of German and Slavic Studies , which he in 1964 Berlin continued. In 1967/68 he took part on a scholarship at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa , where he organized protests against the Vietnam War. In 1972 he received his doctorate in philosophy from the Technical University of Berlin under Walter Höllerer .

As early as 1963, Buch had read from his own works at a meeting of Group 47 . His early prose works show a tendency towards the grotesque . In the 1960s, books with literary and critical works were under the influence of the student movement and an undogmatic Marxism . In the 1970s he was an editor at Rowohlt Verlag , where he published the magazine Literaturmagazin , which he founded .

He later taught as a lecturer at various universities in San Diego ( California ), Austin (Texas) , New York , Hong Kong , Buenos Aires , Santiago de Chile , Havana , Hangzhou and Qingdao . Buch is active as a writer, narrator, essayist and reporter. As such, he has reported for Die Zeit and other media from war and crisis areas, including Liberia , Sierra Leone , Burundi , Rwanda , South Sudan and West Sudan (Darfur), Bosnia , Chechnya , Kosovo , Algeria , Cambodia , Korea and East Timor as well always from Haiti . In addition to Central and South America , Buch traveled to almost all of Africa , the People's Republic of China and the Antarctic . He developed a special relationship with the Caribbean region since the 1980s (Buch's grandfather lived as a pharmacist in Haiti, his grandmother was a Haitian), which is often the setting for Buch's works. In the 1990s he came out mainly with reports from African crisis regions.

Hans Christoph Buch was a member of the Association of German Writers from 1972 to 1986 and of the PEN Center Germany from 1972 to 1998 . The author lives in Berlin .

Literary work

The extensive literary work of Hans Christoph Buch eludes a clear genre classification. His prose works stylistically combine the proximity to the magical realism of Latin American literature and a mystically shimmering world view between fantasy and reality. The fact that and how Buch juggles with personal experience reports and fictions in order to track down the subjective truth hidden behind the facts provoked at times critical and contradicting reactions.

Since Buch's literary beginnings, the question of the universality of literature has been the focus of his writing. When he presented a text at a conference of Group 47 in 1963, when he was just 19 years old , Walter Jens and Marcel Reich-Ranicki complained that Buch's description of an archaeological excavation “did not unearth anything”. While the philosopher Ernst Bloch described it as a “relic of late bourgeois decadence”, Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger praised the “intentional idleness” of his texts. The theorists of the 1968 student revolt, on the other hand, missed political commitment in Buch's collection of short stories, Unheard of Events (1966).

In the 1970s he pleaded for the "new sensitivity", that is, a historical-political analysis based on subjective perception. From the mid-1980s, Buch began to write as a journalist about the misery of wars around the world, and published his first report on the overthrow of the bloody dictatorship in Haiti under Baby Doc in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . Since then he has tried to “find out something about the state of the world in a literary experiment” in novels such as Haiti Chérie (1990), Der Burgwart der Wartburg (1994) about denouncing in the GDR or traveling around the world in eight nights (2009). In his story Nolde and I. Ein Südseetraum (2013) book travels in the footsteps of the German painter Emil Nolde to Papua New Guinea and tries to explore Emil Nolde's contradicting soul world in semi-documentary fiction. When new documents appeared at the same time about Nolde's ingratiation to the Nazi movement, he was accused - regardless of the fictional nature of his story - of “falsifying history”, although the text describes the incubation period of modernity before the First World War .

Real cross-references, embedded in often fantastic-looking literary fiction, often lead Buch's readers to hidden detours and astray in documentary historiography. In his 2016 novel Elf Ways to Break the Ice , oscillating between autobiography, imagination and historical chronology, Buch declared reality to be a “tired copy of literature.” The conviction that “superstition is part of everyday life and the wonderful is part of reality” , runs as a red thread through his work, which includes around 50 novels, essay and report books. Hans Christoph Buch, whose novels are circulating in Haiti as reprints of the translations into French by Grasset, has described himself as a "Francophone writer" because non-fiction and novels are not as sharply demarcated in French literature as in German-speaking countries.

Quotes

"When I found myself years later that I was disappointed when no blood was flowing, I returned to my desk because the violence creates a suction that can become addictive," said Buch in 2014 at the conference "Telling War" in the Berlin House of World Cultures about his beginnings as a reporter.

“How much do we have to pay you so that you finally stop writing about Tahiti ?” Asked Siegfried Unseld , who published Hans Christoph Buch's novel The Wedding of Port-au-Prince in 1984 . Buch's grandfather had settled in the Caribbean state of Haiti - and not, as Unseld said, on the island in the South Pacific - as a pharmacist and started a family with a Haitian woman.

Awards

Works

Signature Buchs
  • James Bond - Petty Bourgeois in Arms , essay in the magazine The Month , born in 1965
  • Unheard of events , Frankfurt am Main 1966
  • Bla bla bla! , Berlin 1967 (together with Arno Waldschmidt)
  • The great adventure , Munich [u. a.] 1970
  • Critical Forests , Reinbek near Hamburg 1972
  • Ut pictura poesis , Munich 1972 ( dissertation )
  • From the New World , Berlin 1975
  • The divorce from San Domingo , Berlin 1976
  • The emergence of the ego from the words , Munich [u. a.] 1978
  • Report from inside the unrest , Frankfurt am Main 1979
  • Zumwald's complaints , Munich [u. a.] 1980
  • Jammerschoner , Frankfurt am Main 1982
  • The wedding of Port-au-Prince , Frankfurt am Main 1984
  • Caribbean cold air , Frankfurt am Main 1985
  • On the Antilles , Frankfurt / Main 1986 (together with Maren Heyne)
  • The autumn of the great communicator , Frankfurt am Main 1986
  • Forest walk , Frankfurt am Main 1987
  • New notes of a madman , Pfaffenweiler 1988
  • Haïti Chérie , Frankfurt am Main 1990
  • The near and the far , Frankfurt am Main 1991
  • Speech of the dead Columbus on judgment day , Frankfurt am Main 1992
  • Tropical fruits , Frankfurt am Main 1993
  • To all! , Frankfurt am Main 1994
  • The keeper of the Wartburg , Frankfurt am Main 1994
  • Black and blue , Frankfurt am Main 1995
  • The new world disorder , Frankfurt am Main 1996
  • James Bond or The Petty Bourgeois in Arms
  • Dream in the early morning , Berlin 1996
  • Exercise with masters , Berlin 1996
  • In Kafka's castle , Berlin 1998
  • Blood in the Shoe , Frankfurt am Main 2001
  • Cain and Abel in Africa , Berlin 2001
  • Monrovia, mon amour - a journey into the heart of darkness . Novel fragment. Edition Mariannenpresse , Berlin 2002. ISBN 3-926433-30-2 .
  • How Karl May met Adolf Hitler and other true stories , Frankfurt am Main 2003
  • Location Banana Republic , to Klampen Verlag, Springe 2004, ISBN 978-3-934920-42-2 .
  • Dancing shadows or I'm the zombie , Frankfurt am Main 2004
  • Black box Africa . zu Klampen Verlag, Springe 2006, ISBN 3-934920-94-2 .
  • Death in Habana . Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verl.-Anst., 2007. ISBN 978-3-627-00144-5 .
  • Sansibar Blues or as I found Livingstone , Frankfurt 2008, Eichborn Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8218-6218-7 .
  • The rolling R of the revolution. Latin American litany , zu Klampen Verlag, Springe 2008, ISBN 978-3-86674-025-9 .
  • Travel around the world in eight nights. An adventure novel , Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 2009 ISBN 978-3-627-00164-3 .
  • Apocalypse Africa or shipwreck with spectators , Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-8218-6236-1
  • Baron Saturday or the afterlife. Roman , Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-627-00189-6 .
  • Nolde and I - A South Sea Dream . (Die Other Library Kometen, Volume 4) Verlag Die Andere Bibliothek Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-8477-3003-3 .
  • Boat People. Literature as a ghost ship , essays from the poetics lecture of the same name, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-627-00207-7 .
  • Eleven ways to break the ice. Roman , Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-627-00230-5 . (“Book of the month” by the Darmstadt jury for September 2016).
  • Still life with a skull . Roman, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-627-00252-7 .
  • Tunnel over the Spree. Dream paths of literature. Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt a. M. 2019, ISBN 978-3-627-00262-6 .
  • Culture shock China or: How I climbed the great wall. Stories and essays. Bacopa Verlag, Schiedlberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-903-07170-4 .

Editing

  • Partiality of literature or party literature? , Reinbek near Hamburg 1972.
  • For a new literature - against the late bourgeois literature industry , Reinbek near Hamburg 1973.
  • Learn from Goethe? , Reinbek near Hamburg 1974.
  • The literature after the death of literature , Reinbek near Hamburg 1975.
  • Subject of nature or why talking about trees is no longer a crime today , Berlin 1977.
  • Author Germany , Berlin 1978.
  • Tatanka Yotanka or What Really Happened in Wounded Knee? , Berlin 1979.
  • Johann Wolfgang Goethe : The Sorrows of Young Werther , Berlin 1982.
  • A dream of Europe , Reinbek near Hamburg 1988.
  • John Reed, Mexico 1914 - a revolutionary ballad , Frankfurt 2005, Die Andere Bibliothek ISBN 978-3-8218-4560-9 .
  • Magnus Hirschfeld : A sex researcher's world tour in 1931/32 , presented and provided with a foreword by Hans Christoph Buch, Frankfurt 2006.

Translations

  • Lu Hsün : The collapse of the Lei-feng Pagoda , Reinbek near Hamburg 1973.

literature

  • Carl Paschek (Ed.): Hans Christoph Buch . Booklet accompanying the exhibition in the City and University Library, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-88131-067-3
  • Stefanie Rübbert: Can the stranger still be saved? Does their monotonization mean trivializing the homecoming? , in: Helge Baumann, Maria Rossdal, Michael Weise, Stephanie Zehnle (eds.): Have you already flown tired? Travel and homecoming as cultural anthropological phenomena. Tectum, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2184-2 , pp. 175-187

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Christoph Buch: “As if a new book were expected”, Frankfurter Rundschau, June 12, 2011
  2. ↑ ibid.
  3. ^ "Hans Christoph Buch: Nolde and me. A South Sea Dream ”, reading and discussion in the Literaturhaus Berlin, December 4, 2013
  4. ↑ Hans Christoph Buch: "Eleven ways to break the ice", Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2013, p. 102
  5. ↑ Tell war. Theme days. 20.-22. February 2014, HKW Berlin. http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/tagung-krieg-erzaehlen-den-schrecken-erklaeren-und.1148.de.html?dram:article_id=278733
  6. ↑ Hans Christoph Buch: “Who am I, where do I come from, where do I go? Building blocks for a poetics of non-identity. ”Lecture Cornell University, September 2011, in: German Culture News, Vol. XXI, no. 1, Fall 2011, p. 4-7
  7. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur from April 20, 2011: Review Apocalypse Africa
personal data
SURNAME Book, Hans Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Wetzlar