Herbert Henke

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Herbert Henke (born November 14, 1913 in Anette (Ukrainian / Russian: Aneta), Russia , today Ukraine ; † March 4, 1999 in Almaty , Kazakhstan ) was a German-speaking poet and narrator. He was a citizen of Russia and the USSR .

Life and work

Henke's birthplace, Anette, is a village (or part of the double village Annette-Josephine) in the then Russian, now Ukrainian part of Volhynia , which was founded in 1816 by Germans from the Danzig area and by settlers from Galicia . The village is located six kilometers from Nowohrad-Wolynskyj (then Russian: Novograd-Wolynskij). Herbert Henke's father Gustav Henke was a farmer, miller and beekeeper.

Even as a schoolboy Herbert thought up little comedies and cabaret verses and performed them with students. Because of his skills, he was allowed to take on administrative tasks as a youth in the village Soviet (municipal council). From 1931 he attended high school in Nowograd-Wolinsk and the workers' faculty in Saratov . In 1937/38, under difficult living conditions - at times there was hunger - he graduated from the Pedagogical University in the town of Engels in the Volga German Republic , an autonomous Soviet republic. One of his teachers was the writer and poet Dominik Hollmann , who fought for the rehabilitation of the Volga Germans in the 1950s.

Henke got his first job with the literary magazine "Der Kämper". He then worked in the republic newspaper "Nachrichten". In 1938 he became director of a German school in the Volga region. In 1939 he was accepted into the Writers' Union of the Soviet Union.

In view of the war with Germany, Stalin banished the Germans to Siberia. Henke's first stop in September 1941 was Oraki, 130 km east of Novosibirsk . The second exile station was a labor camp for men on the Pojna River , some 300 km east of Krasnoyarsk . His wife Elvira was allowed to stay in Oraki with their daughter Nelly. As a result of illness, Henke was released in June 1942 and, after his recovery, was employed in the collective farm (agricultural production cooperative ) in Sharypowo , 400 km east of Novosibirsk.

After the war, in September 1946, he was offered a job as a teacher and headmaster in Moshar in the same area. As a result of an intrigue he lost this position and then worked again in the kolkhoz. Since he was not allowed to publish in German, he wrote Russian texts for the magazine "Jennissej".

After Stalin's death (March 1953), the government allowed the German language again and Henke was allowed to teach German at the school in Parnaya . In the meantime his family had grown by two sons (Edi and Herrmann), and Henke switched to school in Tambor in Kemerovo Oblast , 200 km east of Novosibirsk. He was also able to publish again in the German regional newspaper "Arbeit", which had appeared in Barnaul since December 1955 , and in the new German central newspaper "Neues Leben" (published since 1957), and published works that had been suppressed until then.

In 1959, Henke joined the magazine "Soviet Literature". Since 1966 he was a party member. In 1968 the family decided to move to the warmer Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in Kazakhstan. There Henke became the German-speaking editor of the station Kasachradio . A few years later his wife died. There is no evidence of his alleged move to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg ). He died in Almaty in 1999.

Henke mainly wrote natural poetry. He published hundreds of poems in newspapers, almanacs, anthologies and his own books.

Works

  • Free Volga , poems, 1938
  • Spring , anthology of the first works, 1940
  • Prasdnik mjoda [ honey festival ], 1967
  • The peaches , short stories, 1973
  • The green echo , poems, 1977
  • The pulse of my time , 1980
  • The Manna Does Not Fall From Heaven , Stories & Poems, 1983
  • Lestnitsa [ The Staircase ], Russian Poems for Children, 1985
  • Reader , short stories and poems, 1988
  • Krugoworot [ The Cycle ], Russian Poems, 1990
  • The Third Wish , Fairy Tales and Poems for Children, 1990
  • Autobiographical sketches , in Feniks [ Phönix ], Almanac of the Russian Germans for aesthetic literature and journalism, politics and history, Christ and the world, No. 11 (September 1995), 12 (December 1995), 13 (March 1996)
  • Heimat Wolhynien (excerpt from a German-language newspaper of the CIS countries, 1993) in Wolhynische Hefte , volume 11, p. 104.

literature

  • Hedda Zinner on Herbert Henke, in Internationale Literatur , 1939.
  • Wendelin Mangold: Russian-German writers , Stuttgart, 1999, ISBN 3-923553-19-6 .
  • Volhyn Books , published by the Volhyn Historical Society, No. 12, 2001.
  • German Biographical General Register, publisher Willi Gorzny, 2008.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Description of the place and historical map
  2. ↑ The first German magazine of the post-war period , on rusdeutsch.eu, January 26, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Henke, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet writer and poet
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Aneta, Volhynia , Russia
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 1999
Place of death Almaty , Kazakhstan