Henry Bauchau

Henry Bauchau (born January 22, 1913 in Mechelen , Belgium , † September 21, 2012 in Paris ) was a Belgian author and psychotherapist .

Henry Bauchau was a member of the Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique and has received numerous prizes, including the prestigious Prix ​​de Rome in 2002, the Prix ​​de la Société des hommes de lettres in 2004 and the Prix ​​du Livre Inter in 2008 . In the French-speaking world, he was considered one of the most important contemporary writers, who also made a name for himself in drama and poetry.

Life

Bauchau studied law and was committed to the Christian working-class youth . In 1936 he worked as a lawyer in Brussels. When war broke out in 1939 he was drafted as a reserve officer and witnessed the capitulation of Belgium in 1940. In 1943 he joined the partisans in the Ardennes , was wounded and given medical care in London.

In 1946 he settled in Paris and founded a small publishing house there. At the same time he underwent psychoanalysis by Blanche Reverchon-Jouve , the wife of the French poet Pierre Jean Jouve . She encouraged him to become active as an author and poet himself.

In 1958, his first cycle of poems Géologie , which was honored by Jean Paulhan , appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française . 1959 followed his first play Gengis Khan , 1966 his first novel La Déchirure . In 1972 the second novel Le Régiment noir was published. Only in 1990 did the great old work Œdipe sur la route appear , which was continued in 1997 with the second novel Antigone . In 2004, Bauchau published the novel L'Enfant bleu . In addition, the important series of diaries was created around the Oedipus cycle: Jour après jour (1992) contains the records between 1983 and 1989, Le Journal d'Antigone (1999) reports on the years 1989 to 1992 and Passage de la bonne graine (2002 ) extends to the present of 2001 and the Journal de La Déchirure , published in spring 2005, deals with the years 1960 to 1965 under the title La Grande Muraille .

The preoccupation with the Theban king and his sister-daughter Antigone goes back to poems from the cycle Matière du soir from 1964 and the second drama La Machination (original title and now valid again: La Reine en amont ) from 1967/1968. These early occupations reveal the extent to which the preceding poetry and prose are integrated into the two great narrative works, which break up genres and types of text, which Bauchau himself describes as "novel" and which Belgian literary critics like to attribute to the work of the young Belgium's national literature , with Charles de Coster's epic La Légende et les aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d'Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandre et ailleurs .

In March 2003, the opera Œdipe sur la route with the music of Pierre Barthélémy and staged by Philippe Sireuil was premiered in the La Monnaie opera house in Brussels . The poet himself wrote the libretto. Hubert Nyssen presented a first collection of poems from 1950 to 1986 under the title Poésies in 1986 ; It is to the credit of the Actes Sud publishing house in Arles that the poet Bauchau was honored at an early stage. In 1995 this edition was supplemented and published in the laboratory series of paperbacks under the title Heureux les déliants . Henry Bauchau has gained worldwide recognition as a prose writer and poet. This became visible for the first time in the 2001 congress in Cerisy, which brought together researchers, young scientists, translators, theater people and young students from all over the world.

Nevertheless, to this day, Bauchau's dramatic work is hardly known beyond the borders of the French-speaking area, although he places himself in the European theater tradition in Gengis Khan as in La Reine en amont and especially in his first play, the writing of which began in 1954, the experience with Hitler Germany processed from a Belgian perspective. Gengis Khan offers starting points for a historical reading of the Mongolian storm as well as for a psychoanalytic interpretation as an individual confrontation with power, such as the reply to the barely processed, still very contemporary historical experience with a political, charismatic leader figure, its limits and its possibilities . In this respect, this drama represents an original reappraisal of the German-Belgian relationship from the perspective of a Walloon who follows the political line of Leopold III. and only later, after the Rexist infiltration of the Volontaires du Travail, put on active resistance and went to England in 1944.

After the war, Bauchau settled in Paris before moving to Gstaad in Switzerland for many years . There he received numerous friends for longer, literarily stimulating visits, including Pierre Jean Jouve, Philippe Jaccottet and Ernst Jünger . In 1975, Bauchau returned to Paris, took part in Jacques Lacan's seminars and worked as a psychotherapist for psychotic adolescents. In the end he received hardly any patients and devoted himself largely to the printing and the interpretation of his works as well as the writing of his diaries and poems. The actor Patrick Bauchau (* 1938) is his son.

On September 21, 2012, Bauchau died in Louveciennes at the age of 99 .

literature

• Raphaëlle Leyris: Henry Bauchau . Le Monde , September 26, 2012, p. 28

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary (French)

Web links

• Literature by and about Henry Bauchau in the catalog of the German National Library