Joachim Walther

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Joachim Walther (born October 6, 1943 in Chemnitz ; † May 18, 2020 in Berlin ) was a German writer .

Life

Joachim Walther was the son of an infant sister and an official. He attended high school in Karl-Marx-Stadt and passed his Abitur there in 1962 . He then worked for a year as a locksmith and stage worker . From 1963 to 1967 he studied literature and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin . After a year as a teacher for German and art education , he went to the book publisher Der Morgen in 1968 , where he worked as a lecturer and editor . In addition, he wrote articles for the world stage .

1974/1975 he stayed in Warsaw to study. From 1976 until the entire editorial team was replaced for political reasons in 1978, he was editor of the literary magazine Temperamente . From 1983 Walther was a freelance writer ; In 1984 he withdrew to the Mecklenburg province out of disappointment about the development of the situation in the GDR . In 1989 he returned to Berlin and in 1990 was the last deputy chairman of the GDR writers' association , for whose renewal he campaigned.

Walther wrote novels , short stories , children's books and radio plays . Early on in his works he showed contradictions in GDR society, which he increasingly viewed as a perversion of socialist ideals. He often resorted to the means of satire and polemics . After the fall of the Wall in 1989, one of his main concerns was to document the disastrous influence of the SED policy on GDR literature and to expose the practices with which the Ministry for State Security had monitored the GDR literature business. Walther's book Safety Area Literature (1996) is a standard work on this subject. In 2001, together with Ines Geipel , he initiated the project of an “ archive of suppressed literature in the GDR ”. Together they collected texts that were written here in the GDR but not published there, from which they then published the ten-volume series “Die Verschwiegene Bibliothek” in the Edition Büchergilde . For this they were awarded the Antiquaria Prize for Book Culture in 2011 .

Walther had been a member of the GDR Writers' Association since 1972, of the Association of German Writers since 1990 and of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1991 . From 1997 to 2002 he was chairman of the Federal Republic of Germany's group of authors . He died in May 2020 at the age of 76.

Awards

Works

Editing:

Radio plays

  • 1974: Randbewohner - Director: Werner Grunow (radio play - Broadcasting of the GDR)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ines Geipel : The responsible person - on the death of Joachim Walther. In: Berliner Zeitung. 19th May 2020.
  2. ↑ Cornelia Geissler: Archive "Suppressed Literature in the GDR" presents his work: The world is a box. In: berliner-zeitung.de . July 7, 2001, Retrieved March 19, 2019 .
  3. ^ Michael Bienert: The archive of suppressed literature . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . January 11, 2011 ( full text on text-der-stadt.de [accessed on March 18, 2019]).
  4. ↑ Publications of the series Archive suppressed literature in the GDR - The silent library. Retrieved June 1, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Walther, Joachim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and editor
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 2020
Place of death Berlin