Johann Spratte

Johann Spratte (born March 14, 1901 in Hagen aTW ; † September 1, 1991 in Osnabrück ) was a German poet , writer , caricaturist and graphic artist .

Life

Johann Spratte was born on March 14, 1901 as the tenth child of a boiler maker from the Sauerland in Hagen near Osnabrück. After attending primary school in Hagen, I trained as a bookbinder .

A scholarship enabled him to attend the arts and crafts school in Munich from 1921 . This was followed by jobs as a trainee in a graphic company in Dortmund and as a bookbinder and graphic artist in Emsdetten, Lingen and Osnabrück. The years after the global economic crisis were characterized by unemployment, only briefly interrupted by employment as unskilled workers at the Reichsbahn . In 1936 he found a job as a graphic designer in an Osnabrück newspaper publisher. In 1941 he switched to the Reich Office for Regional Planning in Hanover as a draftsman, and in April 1944 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He turned down an offer to become a member of the “ Reichsschrifttumskammer ”.

Johann Spratte experienced the end of the war in American captivity in the Wiesenlager Wickrathberg prisoner-of-war camp near Wickrath . After the war, he headed the archive of the Osnabrücker Tagespost (later Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung ) until the end of his professional activity and also took on some editorial tasks (reviews, travel reports).

Johann Spratte maintained close contacts with Ludwig Bäte , the poets Albert and Karl Hiemer and the cartoonist Fritz Wolf . He was a member of the German Association of Authors and was one of the founding members of the Osnabrück literary group. Since 1973 his name can be found in Kürschner's German Literature Calendar .

In 1994 a street in the municipality of Hagen was named after him.

plant

Spratte's first lyrical works, folk song-like poems and small prose pieces, were created during his time as a bookbinder. His first poems were published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in 1936 and 1937 the broadcasters in Luxembourg and Cologne regularly broadcast his works.

Johann Spratte's literary work spanned a period of over seven decades. The poems show a variety of forms, stylistic devices and themes.

The poems before 1945 are often characterized by a song-like tone, sometimes by "youthful enthusiasm" and by a more traditional form, and in terms of atmosphere and theme they mostly arise from the background of an experienced rural background. Post-war poetry is formally much freer. It is characterized by short verses with a strong atmospheric density, by new content and a changed relationship to nature. Most of his poems are based on everyday experiences and personal concern. They can be assigned to the literary trend of “existential explorations”, in which the literary confrontation with history and society takes place from the perspective of the consequences for human existence.

Criticism is not articulated directly, but always through the medium of the individual being affected. The prose publications are mostly collections of very short and sketchy stories that look for their subjects in the rural world of bygone times in concise and atmospherically dense descriptions in a simple and clear language. But Johann Spratte does not deny that the idyll of this still protected village community also had its downsides. Many of the stories have autobiographical traits.

The Low German plays an important role in all phases of his literary work.

Publications

• Driftwood. Collected poems. Lechte, Emsdetten 1969
• Time of the swallows. Poems. Lechte, Emsdetten 1975
• Small Low German Dictionary. Reprint from the home yearbook Osnabrücker Land 1976
• Childhood in wooden shoes. Country stories. Lechte, Emsdetten 1977
• Dat Kiärkenjoahr. Viewed up Plattdütsk. Lechte, Emsdetten 1978
• Time has no place to stay. Memories of an old village. Lechte, Emsdetten 1978
• Yellow meadow moon. Selected poems. Lechte, Emsdetten 1980
• Platt in the Osnabrück region. Lechte, Emsdetten 1985
• How was that then? Leeden Verlag, Tecklenburg 1985
• Aside. Essays. Leeden Verlag, Tecklenburg 1985
• The old picture. Poems in Platt. Lechte, Emsdetten 1988
• After all this years. Prose and poems from seven decades. Wenner, Osnabrück, 2001, ISBN 978-3878983750

Publications in anthologies

• Osnabrück authors. Poetry and prose. Wilfried Th.Sieber, Bünde 1975
• Freedom of writing. Poetry and prose. Edition Literature, Osnabrück 1979
• Signatures. Poetry anthology of the German Association of Authors. Gauke, Hann. Münden 1981
• Matters of opinion. Poetry anthology of the German Association of Authors. Bläschke, St. Michael 1983
• In the shade of the almond tree. Westphalian poetry from two centuries. Heckmann, Münster 1985
• Meeting point. Poetry and prose. Anthology of the literary group Osnabrück. Leeden-Verlag, Tecklenburg 1986
• Word fields. An anthology by the German Association of Authors. Series of Manuscripts 116. Gauke, Munich 1986

literature

• Winfried Freund : The literature of Westphalia. From its beginnings to the present . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993

Web links

• About Johann Spratte Heimatverein Hagen aTW
• Johann Spratte in the Low German Bibliography and Biography (PBuB)