Horst Bienek

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memorial plaque in Polish on the house where Horst Bienek was born ...
... as well as one in German

Horst Bienek (born May 7, 1930 in Gleiwitz-Stadtwald , Upper Silesia , † December 7, 1990 in Munich ) was a German writer .

Live and act

The Bienek family lived in Gleiwitz-Stadtwald . The father Hermann Bienek, married to Valerie, nee Piontek, was employed as a locomotive heater for the Deutsche Reichsbahn . Horst Bienek was the youngest of the six children. After the attack on Poland in 1939, the father was transferred and lived in Salzgitter . When the mother, a piano teacher, died in 1941, Horst remained under the care of the older sisters and attended the local elementary school.

On January 23, 1945, Gleiwitz was captured by the Red Army. After the war , Gleiwitz became part of Poland and has been called Gliwice ever since . Horst Bienek was forced to dismantle the machine tools that were transported to the Soviet Union.

On 11 October 1945, he went to the reporting station at the local train station, was inspired by the Polish People's Republic identify , was traveling with a backpack in the Soviet Occupation Zone and first lived in Köthen ( Anhalt 11) and later in the house no. Alexandrowka in Potsdam . In 1949 he worked as a trainee in the editorial department of the newspaper Die Tagespost in Potsdam and in 1950 took part in the course for young writers in Bad Saarow . In mid-1951 Bienek published lyrical poems in the magazine Sinn und Form , which Peter Huchel directed, and in September 1951 he was accepted into Bertolt Brecht's master class at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin .

On 8 November 1951, the arrested state security service Bienek in custody in Potsdam Lindenstraße and the Soviet military tribunal of the Red Army sentenced him on 12 April 1952 along with other by corresponding interrogations in a show trial because of "anti-Soviet agitation" and alleged espionage for the United States to 20 years of forced labor . He worked underground in coal mining in the Vorkuta labor camp on the other side of the Arctic Circle , part of the infamous Gulag . After four years he was released as part of an amnesty and traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany in October 1955 . Bertolt Brecht did not stand up for his pupil either before or during the trial.

Bienek worked, among other things, from 1957 to 1961 as a culture editor at Hessischer Rundfunk and from 1959 to 1961 with Hans Platschek as editor of the magazine Blätter + Bilder , from 1961 as a publisher's editor at Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv) and from 1968 as a freelance writer in Ottobrunn and Munich where he settled. In addition to his own literary work, he was in charge of the new series at dtv, in which primarily hard-to-sell texts appeared. With a large number of forewords and afterwords, he was very committed to accompanying the work of many, not yet established, fellow writers. Since 1970 he was a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . In May 1987 he traveled to Silesia on a Polish visa and in 1988 published the autobiography Journey to Childhood with Carl Hanser Verlag . Until 1990 he was also head of the literature department at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts .

Friends and colleagues asked Bienek in 1990 why he hadn't written about his experiences in Vorkuta. Thereupon he started this work, but it remained unfinished because of his death. Nevertheless, his publisher Michael Krüger put the fragments together and published them with an afterword in the Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen in 2013 .

Horst Bienek died in December 1990 in Munich of complications from AIDS . He is said to have known about the disease since 1987. The grave is located in the park cemetery in Ottobrunn .

In general, Bienek's works are written in a cool, disciplined language and are strongly influenced by the war and post-war era. They revolve around the inner and outer self-assertion of humans against an overpowering state. Horst Bienek has received numerous international literary prizes, especially for his Gliwice tetralogy of novels, which has been translated into numerous languages . His literary estate is in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hanover. He bequeathed the rights to his works to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, which now awards the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry every two years from the Horst Bienek Foundation .

Awards

Selection of works

  • A prisoner's dream book (1957)
  • Night pieces (1959)
  • Gliwice Childhood (1965)
  • Workshop discussions with writers (1962)
  • The Cell (1968)
  • Bakunin. An invention , Carl Hanser, Munich, 1970
  • Solzhenitsyn and other essays (1972)
  • The Time After (1974)
  • Gliwice. An Upper Silesian chronicle in four novels
    • The First Polka (1975)
    • September light (1977)
    • Time Without Bells (1979)
    • Earth and Fire (1982).
  • Gliwice childhood. Poems from 20 Years (1976).
  • Description of a province. Records, materials, documents (1983).
  • Königswald or the last story . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-446-14135-9 .
    • as a dtv paperback with the title: Königswald. A novella , Munich 1987, ISBN 3-423-10801-0 .
  • The Blind Man in the Library (1986).
  • as editor: with Ursula Ebell-Schwager (illustrator): Schlesischer Bilderbogen . Siedler Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-88680-248-5 .
  • The Gradual Choking of Screams (1987)
  • Journey to childhood. Reunion with Silesia. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-446-15288-1 .
  • Birch trees and blast furnaces. A childhood in Upper Silesia (1990)
  • Vorkuta . With an afterword by Michael Krüger . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1230-2

Selected poems

  • Report (The Purga destroys the peacock, the rose, the sun)
  • The myth of time (the myth of time breaks into pieces)

Radio plays

  • Six Gramm Caratillo ( HR 1960), radio play with Klaus Kinski
  • Single cell ( DLF 1966)
  • The face that holds my face captive ( WDR 1982)

Film adaptations

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Horst Bienek. Literaturportal Bayern, accessed on May 16, 2015 .
  2. ^ The Tagespost was a Brandenburg regional newspaper based in Potsdam. Founded in 1946, publishing company: Franz Steiner (also editor-in-chief) and Willi Linke. License no. 69. (Brief description in: Dietrich Oppenberg : Handbuch Deutsche Presse 1947. Reprint of the newspaper section , ECON, Düsseldorf 1969. p. 279)
  3. ↑ Kai Agthe : The soul was made of lead. Bienek's memories of Vorkuta . Thuringian newspaper, March 9, 2013.
  4. ↑ Winner of the Jean Paul Prize ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2015 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. , Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.km.bayern.de
  5. ↑ Review (p. 23) ( Memento from November 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 3.6 MB)
  6. ↑ Purga = polar snow storm.
  7. ↑ The two poems are from: Hans Bender (Ed.), Gegenpiel. German poetry since 1945 , Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1962, without ISBN.
personal data
SURNAME Bienek, Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Gleiwitz-Stadtwald , Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH 7th December 1990
Place of death Munich