Ivan Ivanji

Ivan Ivanji (around 1958)

Ivan Ivanji (born January 24, 1929 in Veliki Bečkerek , Kingdom of Yugoslavia ) is a Yugoslav or Serbian writer , translator , diplomat and journalist .

Life

Ivan Ivanji was born into a secularized Jewish family of doctors in the Serbian Banat and learned Serbo-Croatian , Hungarian and German as a child . Ivanji was deported to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald in 1944 and was used as forced labor in the Buchenwald satellite camps Niederorschel and Langenstein-Zwieberge .

In post-war Yugoslavia, he studied architecture and German at the University of Belgrade . Among other things, he was a teacher, theater director, interpreter for Josip Broz Tito , from 1974 to 1978 worked as a Yugoslav cultural attaché in Bonn and from 1982 to 1988 general secretary of the Yugoslav writers' association. He is best known as a novelist, but he also wrote articles on political topics for German newspapers and magazines, etc. a. for the mirror and the Rhenish Mercury .
His novel My beautiful life in hell is shaped by autobiography . He reports on his time as an interpreter for the Yugoslav president in his memoirs entitled Tito's interpreter .

Ivan Ivanji writes in Serbo-Croatian and German. He translates his own novels as well as those of Danilo Kiš and other Yugoslav authors into German as well as works by German and Hungarian-speaking authors into Serbo-Croatian. He lives in Vienna and Belgrade .

Ivan Ivanji is a signatory of the 2017 declaration on the common language of Croats , Serbs , Bosniaks and Montenegrins .

His son Andrej Ivanji writes as a journalist for the daily newspaper , Standard and Vreme, among others .

On January 26, 2019, Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow awarded him the Thuringian Order of Merit in Belgrade.

On April 11, 2020, the city of Weimar made Ivan Ivanji an honorary citizen.

Works

Novels

• Dioklecijan . Belgrade 1973
  German edition: Emperor Diocletian . [East] Berlin 1976; Munich 1978, ISBN 3-471-77834-9
• Smrt za Zmajevoj steni . 1982
  German edition: Death on the Drachenfels . Dorsten 1984, ISBN 3-924593-02-7
• Constantine . Belgrade 1988
  German edition: Kaiser Konstantin . Translation by Barbara Antkowiak , Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-353-00326-6
• Shadow jumping . Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-85452-251-7
• A Hungarian Autumn , Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-85452-280-0
• Barbarossas Jude , Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-85452-299-1
• The ash man from Buchenwald . Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-85452-429-3
• The dancer and the war . Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-85452-456-0
  Serbo-Croatian edition: Balerina i rat , 2003
• Ghosts from a small town , Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-85452-633-9
• Letters from Fire , Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-85452-672-8
• My beautiful life in hell , Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-7117-2008-5
• Stalin's saber , Klagenfurt 2016, ISBN 978-3-99029-178-8
• Closing line , Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-7117-2051-1

Children's books

• The good-hearted shark . Illustrations by Birgitta Heiskel , Picus Verlag, Vienna 1991,  ISBN 3-85452-037-9

Newspaper articles, essays, non-fiction books (selection)

• Nemačke teme. 9 eseja . Belgrade 1975 (= German topics. 9 essays)
• Religious war or genocide. The role of the church in the post-Yugoslav war. In: Neue Gesellschaft / Frankfurter Hefte , Vol. 40.1993, pp. 710–717
• The souls of the children of Auschwitz. Concentration camp memorials in Germany. In: Neue Gesellschaft / Frankfurter Hefte, Vol. 44.1997, pp. 979–982
• The Duden from the Nazi era and the new spelling . A discovery. In: Literature and Criticism , 1998, Issue 329/330, pp. 8-11
• Indians in Macedonia? With Karl May in the gorges of the Balkans. In: literature and criticism, 2001, issue 359/360, p. 5ff
• Unwanted free. Serbia is a state of its own - against its will. In: the daily newspaper , May 23, 2006, p. 4 (also in the online edition )
• Tito's interpreter . Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-85371-272-6 , Serbo-Croatian edition: Titov prevodilac , 2005

literature

• Suvremeni pisci Yugoslavije , 1966
• J. Janićijević, D. Vlatković, Ivanji, Ivan. In: Leksikon pisaca Jugoslavije , Volume 2, 1979, p. 492ff
• Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century . Volume 1: A-I. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 .
• Marko Martin : "Maybe the apprentice bricklayer saved me from death" , Interview, in: Die Literarisches Welt , January 27, 2018, p. 29
• Felix Jaitner: Beech forest for life. The eventful life of the Yugoslav writer and concentration camp prisoner Ivan Ivanji , New Germany , November 13, 2018. online (fee required)

Web links

• Literature by and about Ivan Ivanji in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Ivan Ivanji in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• “That we was Yugoslavian” , Interview in the Standard from 13./14. October 2007
• Interview with Ivanji about his experiences as an interpreter and writer - published in the intercultural magazine "unique" (issue 63)
• http://die-quellen-rechen.de/Ivan_Ivanji.html
• KenFM interview (2017)
• Ivan Ivanji: Victims of Nazi Germany, communist, writer , Deutsche Welle, June 6, 2018

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Derk, Denis: Declaration on the common language of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins is adopted . In: Večernji list . March 28, 2017, ISSN  0350-5006 , p. 6–7 ( vecernji.hr [accessed on May 9, 2019] Serbo-Croatian: Donosi se Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku Hrvata, Srba, Bošnjaka i Crnogoraca .). (Archived on WebCite ( Memento from May 23, 2017 on WebCite ))
2. ↑ Doris Akrap: Birthday celebration of Ivan Ivanji: Telling against death . In: The daily newspaper: taz . February 9, 2019, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed February 9, 2019]).
3. ↑ Deutscher Tele Markt GmbH internet and advertising agency: Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow travels to Belgrade and awards Ivan Ivanji the Thuringian Order of Merit. Retrieved February 9, 2019 . 
4. ↑ Éva Pusztai and Ivan Ivanji are now Weimar honorary citizens Thüringer Allgemeine , April 13, 2020
5. ↑ Stefan Berkholz: Review of My Beautiful Life in Hell ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (MP3, 8.2 MB, 8:34 min), SWR2 , May 4, 2014