Jan Koplowitz

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Jan Koplowitz (actually Adolf Abraham Koplowitz ; born December 1, 1909 in Kudowa , Glatz district , Silesia ; † September 19, 2001 in Berlin ) was a German-Jewish writer , journalist and communist functionary.

Jan Koplowitz at the 1st annual DSV conference in 1966

Life

His parents were the businessman Benno Benjamin Koplowitz (born June 27, 1883 in Scharley , district of Beuthen ) and Ida Pollak (Polák) (born May 1, 1885 in Náchod , Bohemia ). They got married on February 10, 1909 in Cherbeney , the then town hall of Kudowa. Jan's grandparents Philipp Pollak ( Filip Polák ; * May 11, 1854, presumably in Náchod) and his wife Josefine, nee. Fleischer, acquired a property as early as 1897, on which they opened the Jewish lodging house "Friedrichsruh". It was later renamed "Hotel und Restaurant Austria" ( today at ul. 1 Maja 6 ). Jan Koplowitz calls it “Hotel Bohemia” in his works. After a renovation in 1913, the lodging house consisted of 16 guest rooms and a hall. Jan's father died on October 12, 1919 in Kudowa. He was buried in the cemetery of the Glatz synagogue community. Jan's widowed mother, Ida, married Eugen Salomon a second time, but he died after a few years. In 1938 Ida Koplowitz-Salomon had to sell the “Salomon hostel” (= formerly the hotel and restaurant “Austria”) to the Kudowa community. After that she lived in the Jewish "Logierhaus Löwy"; in April 1939 she moved to Berlin, where she sublet at Prenzlauer Str. 16. On February 3, 1943, she was deported on a transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and murdered there.

Jan Koplowitz, who was born as Adolf Abraham Koplowitz , attended the Cheder in the Bohemian Náchod, which is not far across the Prussian border, and then the private and higher boys and girls school Sackisch , which borders directly on Kudowa. From 1923 he attended the Eichendorff secondary school in Breslau , which he graduated from high school in 1926.

After he supported a strike of the spa employees at the age of 16, he was expelled from his middle-class parents. In 1928 he joined the communist movement, wrote for workers' newspapers, agitprop groups and joined the league of proletarian revolutionary writers . Egon Erwin Kisch and Ilja Ehrenburg became his teachers, in whose tradition he saw his later work. In 1931 he became editor of the Breslauer Arbeiterzeitung and head of the agitprop group “Roter Knüppel”, whose texts he wrote.

After the National Socialists came to power , he began illegal work for the KPD in northern Bohemia . In Prague he lived a. a. in the bear house with Egon Erwin Kisch. In the Prague district of Žižkov he became an illegal party organizer in 1938 after the party leadership emigrated to England in 1938 as a result of the Munich Agreement . After the German occupation of Prague in March 1939, Koplowitz fled via Poland to Sweden and from there to Great Britain . There he lived in exile from 1939 to 1945 and married an Austrian émigré with whom he had three children. He worked in the Free German League of Culture in Great Britain and in amateur theater groups.

After the Second World War he lived with his second wife Babette (Betty) in East Berlin . Johannes R. Becher brought him into the college of the Ministry of Culture , where he headed the concert and guest performance director . In the Maxhütte Unterwellenborn he founded a circle of writing workers . The experiences there flowed into his book Our buddy Max the giant . He also used his experiences with the construction of Neustadt in the Taktstraße , an open report about the construction of prefabricated buildings .

In the novel Bohemia - my fate , completed in 1979 and later filmed , Koplowitz tells the story of his family, most of which fell victim to the Holocaust .

tomb

Koplowitz's son Daniel was imprisoned in Turkey from 1977 to 1989 for drug possession. In his efforts to get him free, he was urged by the Ministry of State Security to work as an unofficial employee (IM), as Koplowitz stated in his novel funeral expenses . As IM "Pollak" he had passed on information at least about Joachim Seyppel . In Joachim Walther's investigation of the security area of ​​literature , however, Koplowitz's IM activity is proven much earlier. In 1973, for example, he reported Polish youths to his command officer who had sung “Zionist songs” on Alexanderplatz in Berlin , and complained that the contact telephone number at the Ministry for State Security had been occupied for a long time.

Koplowitz (front left) in a youth lesson in the GDR in 1986

He was buried in the cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder communities in Berlin-Mitte.

Works

Books, novels, stories

  • 1948: On the trail of culture . 14-part report in Neues Deutschland
  • 1954: Our buddy Max, the giant (worker reading book)
  • 1956: It doesn't work without love (story)
  • 1960: Glück auf, Piddl (novel)
  • 1963: Heart station (novel)
  • 1965: business flourishes (novel)
  • 1968: the taktstrasse (open report)
  • 1971: Stories from Oil Paper (autobiographical stories)
  • 1972: The struggle for Bohemia
  • 1977: The Moorhens (novel)
  • 1979: Bohemia - mein Schicksal (novel), Mitteldeutscher Verlag, ISBN 3-88680-025-3
  • 1986: The Unfortunate Blue Artist (novel)
  • 1988: Carbuncle and the Pickpocket (Stories)
  • 1989: The bread of foreign countries (descriptions of the time after 1933)
  • 1994: Funeral expenses (stories, ballads, letters)
  • 2001: Daniel in the lions' den (father-son novel).

Filmography

  • 1952/1953: jacket like pants (script, lyrics)
  • 1963: suitcase with dynamite (script)
  • 1963: It doesn't work without love (screenplay)
  • 1963–1965: Three Wars (TV series 1963–1965)
  • 1966: The eyewitness [vol. 1966 / No. 046] (participation)
  • 1968: Under the sign of the oil lamp (Commentary)
  • 1980–1982: Hotel Polan and its guests (screenplay)

He worked for other films, television and radio plays; composed songs , songs and chansons

Translations from Czech

Six poems by Jiří Suchý / Jiří Šlitr on cover pages , German by Jan Koplowitz: Stille und Ruh ' (Ticho a klid) , Kiki, Hochzeit (Svatba) , Weis attracted me to my mother in the morning (Bíle mě matička oblékala) , Why people shy away dear ones… Once upon a time there was a king (Byl jednou every král) .

Honors

literature

Web links

Commons : Jan Koplowitz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Patschovsky: Guide through Bad Kudowa and the surrounding area ... , published by Georg Brieger, Schweidnitz 1906, p. 24 digitized
  2. ↑ digitized version
  3. ↑ From the spa hotel “Bohemia” to the Maxhütte . In: Berliner Zeitung , September 22, 2001
  4. ^ A b Jan Koplowitz: Funeral expenses . Dietz, ISBN 3-320-01853-1
  5. ↑ Joachim Walther: Security area literature. Writer and State Security in the German Democratic Republic . Ullstein, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-548-26553-7 , p. 408
  6. ↑ Three stories by Jan Koplowitz. Hardcover, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, ISBN 3-354-00319-7
  7. ↑ Mitteldeutscher Verlag, ISBN 3-354-00515-7
  8. ↑ hagalil online , accessed July 15, 2009.
  9. ↑ fernsehserien.de accessed July 14, 2009
  10. ^ Meyers Universallexikon Volume 2 , VEB Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig, 1st edition 1979, license number 433 130/96/79 - LSV 9807, p. 591
  11. ^ New Germany , 29./30. September 1979, p. 4
  12. ^ AdK online , accessed July 22, 2009
  13. ↑ Neues Deutschland, October 3, 1984, p. 4
  14. ↑ Kudowa-Zdrój Homepage , accessed July 20, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Koplowitz, Jan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Koplowitz, Adolf Abraham (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and communist functionary
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Kudowa , Glatz district , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 2001
Place of death Berlin