Harry Thürk

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Harry Thürk, standing in the middle, 1967

Harry Thürk (* as Lothar Rudolf Thürk on March 8, 1927 in Zülz , Upper Silesia ; † November 24, 2005 in Weimar ) was a German writer . In the GDR he was one of the most widely read German authors.

Life

In 1934 he moved with his family to Neustadt / OS . After attending the Albert Leo Schlageter elementary school (1934–40) and the Neustadt / OS commercial school (1940–42) in Upper Silesia, Thürk became a worker at the Deutsche Reichsbahn . During the Second World War he was drafted into the Hermann Göring Parachute Panzer Corps in 1944 and received the Iron Cross . After the end of the war he returned to his homeland from the front, but from there finally fled from the Poles to the west and found his second home in Weimar.

From 1946 to 1948 he was a full-time functionary of the Free German Youth and joined the SED . After various odd jobs, Thürk worked as a journalist for various newspapers and was a reporter during the wars in Korea and Vietnam . In Vietnam, he contracted severe poisoning with the herbicide Agent Orange used by the US military , which later tied him to bed. Between 1956 and 1958 Thürk worked at the publishing house for foreign language literature and was a consultant for the Chinese illustrated magazine China im Bild in Beijing . After further trips to East Asia between 1964 and 1980 (including Laos , Cambodia , Vietnam , Korea, China), Thürk returned to Weimar. From 1971 to 1983 he was chairman of the Erfurt district organization of the Writers' Association . In 1974 he married Renate Stumpf. In 1995 Thürk left the German PEN Center (East). After a long illness, Harry Thürk died on November 24, 2005 at the age of 78 in Weimar. He has a grave in the main cemetery.

Artistic creation

With his book Treffpunkt Truth , published at the end of 2004, Thürk has published a total of 60 books ( novels , documentaries , reports , thrillers , children's books, etc.) and written 15 scripts . His subjects and exciting narrative style made him particularly popular in the GDR - with a total circulation of 9 million copies in 13 languages ​​(3 million in Germany alone) Thürk was one of the most widely read and most popular German post-war authors. In the west, however, he remained largely unknown.

His best-known works include the anti-war novel The Hour of the Dead Eyes, the novels Amok and The Juggler and the documentary Pearl Harbor . Most of his novels and documentaries are either in Southeast Asia (during the struggle against colonial rule ), in which Thürk stayed for many years, or in his home region of Upper Silesia (shortly before or during the Second World War). Especially in the last years of his life, Thürk also dealt with current political events in the unified Germany and the European Community.

In his works he drew from his experiences in four wars and from his time as a journalist in various crisis areas and criticized social and political aspects of the present. To prepare and tell political and historical contexts in an exciting way, that was his main concern:

My role model is a storyteller in the oriental bazaar. When his stories are good, there is a whole bunch of people around him. When he's bad, nobody listens to him. I want to entertain. (Interview with Christine Brühl in: Die Zeit , October 17, 1997)

Thürk was always a controversial writer. While the Spiegel (issue 29/1995) accused him of “pubertal gusto and political pathos” and dubbed him - due to the sex scenes in his novels - “ Konsalik des Ostens”, New Germany certified him “unmistakable sense of reality” and called him one of the best writer of his genre (sic!). Thürk came into the criticism of the western press mainly because of the novel Der Gaukler , which criticized Soviet dissidentism and portrayed Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a puppet of the CIA . But Thürk also had difficulties with the GDR authorities in several novels. His anti-war bestseller The Hour of the Dead Eyes (1957), which describes in a strongly autobiographical way the fight of a German paratrooper unit against the Red Army in East Prussia at the end of 1944, was accused of playing down the National Socialist Wehrmacht in the GDR . (See also the ND article below.) The publication of the typhoon trilogy , which takes place in China during the period from the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution and describes the work of an American secret service agent who influences the political development of the People's Republic of China seeks was delayed until 1988 because such a negative portrayal of the building of Chinese socialism at a time when relations between the USSR and the PRC were normalizing was no longer desirable. Further books, including the documentaries The Rice and the Blood, Midway and The Long Marsch, as well as the novel The Summer of Dead Dreams and the crime series Lim Tok, could only appear after the fall of the Wall.

Awards and honors (selection)

Fonts (in selection)

Reports / documentations

  • Pearl Harbor - The Story of a Raid , 1965 ( excerpt )
  • Singapore - The Fall of a Bastion , 1970
  • Indonesia '65 - Anatomy of a Coup , 1975
  • Road to Hell - events, facts, connections , military publishing house of the GDR, 1976
  • The Sampaguita weeps at night - the fight and defeat of the Huk in the Philippines , 1980
  • Saigon - About the end of the American war in Indochina , 1985
  • Dien Bien Phu - events, facts, connections , military publishing house of the GDR, 1988
  • The Rice and the Blood - Cambodia under Pol Pot , 1990
  • Midway - Turning the Pacific War 1942 , 1991
  • Iwo Jima, Island of No Return - The Leap to Japan , 1996
  • The Long March - Mao-tse Tung's Road to Power , 1998

Novels

  • The Hour of the Dead Eyes , 1957
  • The Valley of the Seven Moons , 1960
  • The wind dies before the jungle , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1961
  • Lotus on burning ponds , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1962
  • Death and the Rain , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1967
  • The Tiger by Shangri-La , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1970
  • Amok , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1974
  • The Juggler (2 vols.), Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1978
  • The dragon's gray breath , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1979
  • The black monsoon , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1986
  • Operation Mekong , Verlag Das neue Leben Berlin, 1988
  • Taifun (3 vol.), Mitteldeutscher Verlag , 1988
  • Summer of Dead Dreams , Mitteldeutscher Verlag , 1993
  • Pirate Games , Mitteldeutscher Verlag , 1995
  • 10 detective novels in the crime-circumstantial investigation series , 1991–2000

stories

  • Night and Morning , 1950
  • The Great Freedom Meeting Point , 1954
  • Golden Dream Youth , 1996
  • There is also sky over the Yangtze , 2001

Children's books

  • Journeys and adventures by Pitt and Ursula , Knabe Verlag Weimar , 1955/56
  • Su-su from the Sky Bridge , 1960

literature

Web links

Commons : Harry Thürk  - Collection of Images
personal data
SURNAME Thürk, Harry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Zülz ( Upper Silesia )
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 2005
Place of death Weimar