Heinrich oaks

Heinrich Eichen (born August 15, 1905 in Bonn , † May 30, 1986 in Odendorf near Bonn) was a German writer . He lived in Elbing and later in Berlin .

Life

Eichen grew up in Elbing in West Prussia (today Elbląg / Poland ). He initially worked in the local city ​​administration , later became a bookseller and published his first poems as a teenager . After the expulsion of the German population from Elbing, Eichen lived in Berlin from 1945 until his death , where he again worked in the book trade and journalistic .

Throughout his life he was close to both the youth movement and the Prussian home organizations, which he also supported journalistically as an employee of various newspapers and magazines (such as the Ostpreußenblatt ). As a homosexual , Eichen was subjected to police interrogations and other harassment in the Third Reich . After the Second World War at the latest, he wrote under various pseudonyms , especially as Heinz Birken, in homosexual friendship sheets. He died during a trip in Odendorf near Bonn.

Work and effect

Eichen's extensive literary work took place in two spheres which he kept strictly separate from one another. Since around 1925 he has published poems and short stories under his real name on a regular basis, and in 1930 a first volume of poems was published under the title Die Stille Straße . Eichen's homeland and journey poems enjoyed great popularity, especially among the Bündische Jugend , for whom he wrote a number of amateur plays after the Second World War . Until 1987, a total of six other books of poetry, most recently followed singing of plastic , a cycle of sonnets to the work of the Berlin sculptor Georg Kolbe . He also published the novella Reise in den Frühling (1934) and various youth stories. The poem In the evening, Elche stepping out of the dunes , composed in the early 1930s, was set to music by Gerhard Lascheit and found in numerous folk song collections .

As Heinz Birken and under a number of other pseudonyms, Eichen developed a second extensive oeuvre parallel to this after 1945 with homoerotic poems and stories as well as essayistic contributions on the cultural history of homosexuals . In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the most active authors of the international Swiss gay magazine Der Kreis . In the 1970s and 1980s he published his short stories in papers such as Ben and Philius , which were specifically aimed at pedophiles . Some of the Birken texts were also published in book form, such as the novel Every Love Is Love (1981), in the book of poems, Junge an mein Wegen (1977), illustrated by Richard Steen , and the prose collection Knabenträume (1980, 1988), their first edition 1987 was confiscated by the Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor's office as dangerous to minors.

Books

• 1930 The quiet street. Poems
• 1932 The flag blows in the wind. Poems from the journey and the camp
• 1932 New banks. Poems
• 1934 Little trip into spring
• 1949 The trapper seaman. A boy story
• 1951 The bald princess. A pretty modern fairy tale, not just for boys
• 1973 Home in verse
• 1977 Boys on my ways (as Heinz Birken)
• 1980 Boy's dreams. The most beautiful love stories (as Heinz Birken, 2nd edition 1988)
• 1981 Every love is love. Roman (as Heinz Birken)
• 1982 happiness of light
• 1982 songs by Heinrich Eichen. (Song sheets of German youth. Issue 25)
• 1985 The Elk Bride. A story about the Curonian Spit
• 1985 Across the streets. Travel poems
• 1987 Singing Plastic. Sonnets to works by Georg Kolbe

literature

• Joachim S. Hohmann : poet and worshiper of male friendship. In: Birken: Knabenträume (1980, 1988)
• Hubert C. Kennedy: The Ideal Gay Man. The Story of The Circle , Haworth, Binghamton / New York 1999; German: The circle. A magazine and its program , Verlag Rosa Winkel, Berlin 1999 (Rosa Winkel library; vol. 39), ISBN 3861490846

Web links

• Literature by and about Heinrich Eichen in the catalog of the German National Library