Heinz Kamnitzer

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Heinz Kamnitzer (2nd from left) on Erich Honecker's 70th birthday

Heinz Kamnitzer (born May 10, 1917 in Berlin ; † May 21, 2001 in Berlin ) was a German writer and historian .

Life

Kamnitzer was born in 1917 as the son of a Jewish chemist. In the autumn of 1933, the high school student Kamnitzer was arrested for illegal political work. After his release he emigrated to England, where he continued to attend high school. Here he joined the Communist Party of Germany . In 1935 he left England and worked as a laborer in Palestine for two years . From 1936 he lived again in England and wrote for English-language anti-fascist magazines. In 1939/40 he was editor-in-chief of Inside Nazi Germany magazine . In 1940, like many German emigrants in Great Britain, he was interned as an Enemy Alien in Canada . In 1942 he was able to return to London and became an editor for the business newspaper Petroleum Press Services . He began to study political science and was also a member of the management of the Free German Cultural Association .

In 1946 Kamnitzer returned to Berlin from exile. He studied philosophy at the Humboldt University and received his doctorate in 1950 on "The Economic Structure of Germany at the Time of the Revolution in 1848" with Alfred Meusel . As early as 1947 he had accepted a teaching position for history at the Humboldt University and in 1949/50 taught as a professor at the Brandenburg State University in Potsdam. He married the actress Irene Eisermann in 1950 ; the marriage lasted until Irene's death in 1997.

From 1950 to 1954 Kamnitzer was full professor for “History of the German People” at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 1952 he was director of the Institute for the History of the German People and from 1953 to 1955 he was co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft . For some time he lived in the so-called intelligence settlement in Berlin-Schönholz , to which Straße 201 belongs. His academic career ended because of a plagiarism scandal . A review of the historical journal published in West Germany had revealed that Kamnitzer had taken most of the historical documents on the peasant war from a publication by the Nazi-burdened agricultural historian Günther Franz from 1926 for a publication on Thomas Müntzer, which was produced together with Alfred Meusel , without recognizing this close. Since Franz had edited the original documents at the time, this was to be regarded as plagiarism. Kamnitzer was dismissed as director of the institute in 1955, gave up his professorship and became a freelance writer. He wrote numerous non-fiction books, volumes of poetry and fiction. His book about the death of Arnold Zweig , “The Death of the Poet”, is best known . Kamnitzer was also the editor of Arnold Zweig's works .

Kamnitzer also worked for the GDR film studio, DEFA . So he was a screenwriter a. a. from “Mord an Rathenau” (1961, with Alexander Stenbock-Fermor ), “Young Woman from 1914”, (1969, with Egon Günther ) and “Education before Verdun” (1973, with Egon Günther ). Kamnitzer had been a member of the PEN Center Germany East and West since 1958 . In 1967 he became Vice President and in 1970, as successor to Arnold Zweig, President of the PEN Center GDR. From 1978 to 1989 Kamnitzer was registered as an unofficial employee "Georg" by the Ministry for State Security . Kamnitzer's work, which was guided politically and ideologically and coordinated with the Culture Department in the Central Committee of the SED , was valued by the state because Kamnitzer also enjoyed an international reputation. The writer Fritz Rudolf Fries characterized the GDR PEN in 1982 to the Ministry for State Security:

“The work of the PEN Center GDR is basically limited to the activities of Kamnitzer and Keisch , two old gentlemen who also judge current phenomena from the revolutionary point of view of the 1950s. The PEN center does exist and strives for an international presence, but hardly appears to be present to the public. "

Kamnitzer, Lin Jaldati , the association president of the Jewish communities Helmut Aris , the chairman of the East Berlin community Heinz Schenk as well as the writers Peter Edel and above all Arnold Zweig refused to sign a public statement against Israel on the occasion of the Six Day War in 1967 . In 1988, two state-compliant comments by Kamnitzer triggered a conflict with the West German PEN center. After protests by opposition activists on the occasion of the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration , Kamnitzer spoke of “blasphemy” in the SED central organ Neues Deutschland and justified the repression of state power. The PEN Center in the Federal Republic of Germany then sharply criticized Kamnitzer and the PEN Center GDR in an open resolution. Kamnitzer responded with an injunction. With his uncompromising, state-conformist attitude, he was already lonely at the PEN Center GDR.

Awards in the GDR

Works

  • Alfred Meusel : Thomas Müntzer and his time: With a selection of the documents of the Great German Peasant War. Edited by Heinz Kamnitzer, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1952
  • On the prehistory of the German Peasant War . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1953
  • The last citizen's will. Essays and polemics . Berlin and Weimar, construction. Berlin 1973
  • The poet's death . Book publisher der Morgen, Berlin 1981
  • Swan song with pain . Spotless, Berlin 1993
  • The great conspiracy: Germany 1914–1918 . GNN, Schkeuditz 1999
  • A man is looking for his way: Via Arnold Zweig . GNN, Schkeuditz 2001

Filmography

literature

  • Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Kamnitzer, Heinz . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Dorothée Bores: The East German PEN Center 1951 to 1998. A tool of dictatorship? De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-023385-8 .
  • Günther Buch: Names and dates of important people in the GDR. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin (West) / Bonn 1979, ISBN 3-8012-0034-5 .
  • Gottfried Hamacher . With the assistance of André Lohmar: Against Hitler - Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement: short biographies . Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin. Volume 53. ISBN 3-320-02941-X ( PDF )
  • Gerhard Hirschfeld Ed .: Exile in Great Britain. On emigration from National Socialist Germany. Klett-Cotta Stuttgart 1983. ISBN 3-608-91142-1 .
  • Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X .
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol.1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur 1980, p. 346 f.

Web links

Commons : Heinz Kamnitzer  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.max-lingner-stiftung.de/intellektivensiedlung
  2. ↑ Cf. Barth: Kamnitzer, Heinz .
  3. ^ Dorothée Bores: In the sphere of power of the SED dictatorship. In: Dorothée Bores u. Sven Hanuschek (Ed.): Manual PEN. History and present of the German centers . De Gruyter / Oldenbourg, Berlin 2014, p. 268f.
  4. ↑ Dorothée Bores: The East German PEN Center 1951 to 1998. A tool of dictatorship? De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, p. 696.
  5. ↑ Mario Keßler: The SED and the Jews - between repression and tolerance. Political developments until 1967 . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1995, pp. 141f.
  6. ↑ Neues Deutschland, January 28, 1988, p. 2
  7. ↑ Dorothée Bores: The East German PEN Center 1951 to 1998. A tool of dictatorship? De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, pp. 809-811.
personal data
SURNAME Kamnitzer, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 21, 2001
Place of death Berlin