Hans Gerke (writer)

Hans Gerke , also Jan Gerke , (born November 24, 1895 in Prague , † May 18, 1968 in London ) was a German-Czechoslovakian author and Czechoslovak diplomat .

Life

Gerke was born the son of a technical officer. However, his father died early. Even as a high school student he was in contact with the Arco group around Ernst Polak . Johannes Urzidil ​​was one of his friends and classmates . In March 1913 Gerke published his German-language short story The Brick Worker . Gerke was considered a literary child prodigy, but did not publish any other major works. During the First World War , he joined the military in 1915 and gave up his writing ambitions. During the war he defected to the Czechoslovak legions in Russia . It was not until 1920 that he returned from Siberia via Japan and America .

He began studying law and at the same time embarked on a career as a diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia. From 1921 to 1925 he was an attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Berlin , where the writers Camill Hoffmann and Hermann Ungar also worked. In 1926/1927 he worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Athens before he was reinstated in the Foreign Ministry in Prague. In 1931 he became the first secretary of the Czechoslovak Embassy in London and was the confidante of the ambassador Jan Masaryk .

After the invasion of the Wehrmacht and the formation of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the National Socialist German Reich in 1939, Gerke took on British citizenship . He worked successfully as a businessman for the London department store Marks & Spencer .

After the end of the Second World War he wrote a few poems in English .

Works

• The brickworker. Emotions in Five Parts , 1913

literature

• Dieter Sudhoff , Michael M. Schardt (Hrsg.): Prague German stories. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-15-008771-6 , p. 463 f.