Henryk Keisch

Henryk Keisch during a speech in Berlin in 1952

Henryk Keisch (born February 24, 1913 in Moers , North Rhine-Westphalia , † July 2, 1986 in Berlin ) was a German writer , screenwriter and translator from French.

Life

After graduating from high school, Keisch began studying literature and theater studies. But when the National Socialists seized power , he emigrated to Paris in 1933 because of his socialist sentiments. There he moved around the also emigrated writers Rudolf Leonhard and Anna Seghers and took part in the Monday evenings organized by the exile group Schutzverband Deutscher Writers (SDS) in the Cafe Mephisto on Boulevard Saint-Germain . The SDS was founded in 1908 to represent the interests of the writers and was brought into line by the Nazis in 1933 . A new establishment followed in 1933 in exile. In 1938 Keisch received the Heinrich Heine Prize awarded by the SDS for his volume of poetry "Das Leben kein Traum". During the war he was a volunteer in the French army and belonged to the Resistance under the code name Claude Chaillet . In 1944 he was arrested and imprisoned in France.

After the war he worked as a journalist and moved to the GDR. There he worked as a writer and screenwriter. His four-line epigrams, a number of which appeared as a calendar, were popular. At the end of the 1970s Keisch, loyal to the line, became General Secretary of the PEN Center in the GDR.

He found his final resting place in a Pankow cemetery .

Works

• The Unknown Neighbor, 1950
• Who loves his wife ... , 1954 (screenplay)
• Ernst Thälmann - son of his class , 1955
• The Captain of Cologne , 1956 (screenplay)
• At French chimneys, 1961/61 (screenplay)
• Opinions, Negations, 1967
• Poetry album 23, 1969
• On it a quatrain, 1970
• Leap to Freedom, 1970 ( The New Adventure No. 300)
• The Annotated Museum, 1976
• Carved and peened, 1981
• The thick Effel book, 2nd edition 1982
• Think paper and move reasons, 1983
• The four lines of muse, 2nd edition 1984
• The carp wanted to be a shark, Eulenspiegel, 2nd edition, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-359-00162-1
• Know yourself, 1989
  • Translator (& afterword) by Henri Barbusse : Der Ziegenhirt , Alfred Holz, Berlin 1973. Illustrations by Max Lingner ; Translated by Georges Perec : The things. A story from the sixties. Verlag Volk und Welt , Berlin 1967 a. ö.
  • Afterwords to André Schwarz-Bart : The Last of the Righteous. (a concentration camp novel); and to Roger Vailland . Strange game. , both people and world, Berlin
  • Notes (& transl.) On Louis Aragon : The Communists , in 6 volumes (about the years 1939/1940), Dietz, Berlin 1953 to 1961

Radio plays

• 1966: The Expert - Director: Peter Krüger ( Broadcasting of the GDR )

literature

• Keisch, Henryk . In: Lexicon of socialist German literature. From the beginning to 1945. Monographic-biographical presentations . Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1964, pp. 282–284.
• Short biography for:  Keisch, Henryk . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Henryk Keisch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Henryk Keisch in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about Henryk Keisch in the catalog of the German National Library