Herbert Eisenreich

Herbert Eisenreich (born February 7, 1925 in Linz , Upper Austria ; † June 6, 1986 in Vienna ) was an Austrian writer .

Life

Herbert Eisenreich was the son of the bank employee Josef Eisenreich (born 1892 in Linz) and his wife Elisabeth (born Wurz, 1885 in Kaltern near Bozen). The sisters Mechthilde and Brigitta were born in 1927 and 1928. He spent his earliest childhood in the countryside around Linz. In 1929 the family moved to Enns. In 1931 the father died. His mother and an aunt took great care to bring him up. After attending primary school in Enns and Pregarten, he received a free place for gifted students at the Federal Educational Institute in Vienna-Breitensee. The school was converted into a National Political Educational Institution in 1938 , which is why his strictly Catholic mother, old Austrian and anti-National Socialist, took him out of school. He switched to the Khevenhüllerschule at the Realgymnasium in Linz. There he met his German teacher, the poet Ernst Jirgal, who encouraged him to write and who remained Eisenreich's mentor until his untimely death in 1956. None of the early attempts at writing - an unfinished novel about the Hungarian general Zrinyi, an unfinished drama "Socrates" and poems - have survived.

Even during school he had to earn his own living. He worked part-time in an agricultural laboratory, in a fruit wholesaler and gave tutoring lessons. Without finishing school, he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in Mondsee in 1943, and then went to Galicia for basic training. In 1944 he came to France, where he took part in the fighting on the invasion front and the retreat to Germany as a private in a tank force. In January 1945 he survived a serious wound to the shoulder near Saarbrücken, the consequences of which he suffered for a lifetime. He experienced the end of the war in the hospital and returned home in October 1945 after being a short prisoner of war.

In 1946 he graduated from secondary school in Linz with distinction and from the autumn of the same year studied a few semesters of German and classical philology at the University of Vienna. In order to make a living, he worked as a porter, as an errand boy, as an office assistant at the American ISB and in the Enns sugar factory. Since 1952 he lived as a freelance writer.

1952 met Eisenreich in Niendorf in Lübeck at the meeting of Group 47 with Paul Celan together and asked him shortly afterwards in Paris his sister, who later ethnologist Brigitta (Rupp-) Eisenreich (born 1928 in Linz, † 2017 in Paris), before , who had a secret love affair with Celan from 1953 to 1962, and published the autobiographical book Celan's Chalk Star, a report in 2010 .

Eisenreich was the author of short stories , short stories , poems , essays , fiction books and radio plays . From 1952 to 1956 he worked for the NWDR in Hamburg. In his essay “The creative distrust or Is Austria's literature an Austrian literature?” He dealt with the question of an Austrian national literature . Incidentally, he drew an original parallel between football and literature in his country: "What Austrian football is missing recently, however, is not the talent, but that is the national consciousness, the critical self-confidence."

As a controversial author, he presented a biography of Adalbert Stifter with Das kleine Stifterbuch in 1967 , which at the time was not well received by the Vienna Stifter Society or the Upper Austrian Stifter Institute because of its critical portrayal of his human weaknesses. The Prague State Library, which holds a large part of the donor's estate, did not release images for Eisenreich's book, as Der Spiegel reported.

His private passion for model railways was documented in 1963 in the book “ Big World on Small Rails ”.

reception

Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote about him in 1964 that Eisenreich's often extreme statements and theses had earned him an inaccurate reputation in Germany as an “Austrian nationalist, stubborn regionalist and ultimately even a regular monarchist”. In reality, this author, whether as an essayist or narrator, is merely a writer “who enjoys provocation and who always loves the game”.

In November 2000 there was about him under the title “Herbert Eisenreich. Life and Work ”an exhibition of the Upper Austrian State Library in Linz.

tomb

He received an honorary grave in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 40, number 129).

Awards and honors

• 1946 Narrator Prize from the Linzer Volksblatt
• 1954 Narrator Award of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk
• 1955 Radio Play Prize from Radio Bremen
• 1957 Prix Italia for what we live on and what we die of
• 1957 Literature Prize of the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft (sponsorship prize)
• 1958 Austrian Promotion Prize for Literature
• 1965 Grand Art Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia
• 1969 Anton Wildgans Prize
• 1971 Georg Mackensen Literature Prize
• 1984 Peter Altenberg Prize
• 1985 Franz Theodor Csokor Prize
• 1985 Franz Kafka Prize
• 1985 Gold Medal for Services to the State of Vienna

Works (selection)

• Invitation to live clearly. Story n.d. (1952)
• Even in their sin. Roman, 1953
• What we live on and what we die of. Radio play, 1955
• Evil beautiful world . Stories, 1957
• Carnuntum. Spirit and flesh. 1960 (1978)
• with Otto Basil and Ivar Ivask : The great legacy: Essays on Austrian literature. Panorama of the sinking of Kakania . Verlag Stiasny, Graz / Vienna 1962 ( Stiasny library , vol. 100)
• Big world on small rails. The creation of a model layout. 1963
• Reactions. Essays on literature. 1964
• The great grandfather. Story, 1964
• Love stories, so to speak. 1965
• Sebastian. The heretics. Two dialogues. 1966
• My wife's friends. 1966 (1978)
• Me in the car - a cheerful etiquette for drivers. 1966
• The little donor book. 1967
• A nice win and 21 other misunderstandings. 1973
• Life as leisure. Essay, 1976
• Lost finds. Poems 1946–1952. 1976
• The Blue Thistle of Romanticism , 1976
• Penny wisdom. From a sophist's slip of paper. 1985
• The discarded time. A fragment. 1985
• Old Adam. From a sophist's slip of paper. 1985
• Memoirs of the head. From a sophist's slip of paper. 1986
• Every rise a fall at the same time. The lyric work. Edited by Christine Fritsch, Helmuth A. Niederle and Karl Dieter Dessin. edition pen published by Löcker Verlag. Vienna 2014. ISBN 978-3-85409-651-1 .
• So and different. Stories 1950–1964. Edited by Christine Fritsch, Helmuth A. Niederle and Karl Dieter Dessin. edition pen published by Löcker Verlag. Vienna 2014. ISBN 978-3-85409-689-4 .
• A couple of decades and ages. Stories 1965–1971. Edited by Christine Fritsch, Helmuth A. Niederle and Karl Dieter Dessin. edition pen published by Löcker Verlag. Vienna 2014. ISBN 978-3-85409-689-4 .
• Even in their sin. Novel. Edited by Christine Fritsch and Helmuth A. Niederle. edition pen published by Löcker Verlag. Vienna 2015. ISBN 978-3-85409-771-6 .

Editor / co-editor

• Heimito von Doderer : ways and detours. Edited by Herbert Eisenreich, Graz 1960, (Introduction Eisenreich).
• Friedrich Torberg : With the times - against the times. Edited by Herbert Eisenreich, Graz, Vienna 1965, (Introduction Eisenreich).
• Friedrich Torberg: Speaking of which. What is left behind - what is critical - what remains. Edited by Herbert Eisenreich and Marietta Torberg, Munich, Vienna 1981.
• The most beautiful love stories from Austria. Selected by Maria and Herbert Eisenreich, Zurich 1978.

Quotes

• Extremes have a meaning and only serve a purpose as temporary arrangements in the mind to be erased, only as auxiliary positions for thinking ...
• The great disappointment of a life is never anyone other than yourself.

literature

• Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler : Herbert Eisenreich . In: Dietrich Weber (ed.): German literature since 1945 in individual representations . Stuttgart 1968, pp. 329-346
• Wilfried Wagner: Herbert Eisenreich. An attempt at an overview . Master's thesis University of Salzburg, 1987
• Juliane Köhler: Janus-headed world. The short stories of Herbert Eisenreich. Ludwig, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-7787-2108-9 . (= Literature from Bavaria and Austria; 1)
• Slawomir Piontek: The Myth of the Austrian Identity. Reflections on aspects of the myth of reality in novels by Albert Paris Gütersloh, Heimito von Doderer and Herbert Eisenreich. Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1999. (= European university publications; series 1, German language and literature; 1713) ISBN 3-631-33437-0
• Sylvia Maria Zwettler: The ambiguity in Herbert Eisenreich's early work. 1946-1957. Univ. Dipl.-Arb. Vienna 2003.

Web links

Holdings in the catalog of the Austrian National Library
http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AL00039797

• Literature by and about Herbert Eisenreich in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entries about Eisenreich in the database of "lyrikwelt.de" ( Memento of the original from December 4, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
2. ^ Obituary by Nélia Dias on histanthro.org, accessed on March 2, 2018
3. ↑ Iris Radisch : The Poet's Beloved . In: Die Zeit , No. 16/2010, p. 47.
4. ↑ with letters and other unpublished documents, with the assistance of Bertrand Badiou ; Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010.
5. ↑ Entry on Herbert Eisenreich in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
6. ↑ ^{a b c} The time of July 10, 1964: What we live from and what we die of . In: Die Zeit , No. 28/1964. Marcel Reich-Ranicki's examination of Eisenreich's work.
7. ↑ clouded image . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1967, p. 100 ( online ).
8. ↑ "Herbert Eisenreich. Life and work"
9. ↑ http://zitatelebenalle.com/3861/