Johanna Moosdorf

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Johanna Moosdorf (born July 12, 1911 in Leipzig , † June 21, 2000 in Berlin ) was a German writer . At the center of her literary work were unconventional women as well as fascism, which has not yet been dealt with much in everyday life .

Live and act

Life

Memorial plaque Johanna Moosdorf in Berlin
Memorial plaque on the library named after her, Westendallee 45, in Berlin-Westend

Johanna Moosdorf grew up in a book printer family, attended the secondary girls' school in Leipzig and moved to Berlin after graduating from high school. There she dealt with literature and art history and decided to become a writer. In 1932 she married Paul Bernstein (1897–1944), a political scientist close to the SPD , who was employed as a lecturer in youth and adult education. With him she ran a union hall in Berlin-Kreuzberg until it was closed in spring 1933. Since her husband was a Jew and she was not a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer , a publisher withdrew the publication of her first volume of poetry in 1933. Her husband, with whom she had two children, was banned from working. In order to find work and to be able to look after her two children, she got a pro forma divorce. Together they planned to emigrate , but this did not materialize after the outbreak of war . In 1944 Paul Bernstein was deported to Theresienstadt ; He was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. She fled to the Sudetenland with her children.

After the war, Johanna Moosdorf worked as a culture editor at the Leipziger Volkszeitung and became editor-in-chief of the literary newspaper “März”, which was banned in 1948 due to western tendencies. She worked in a lignite combine and moved to West Berlin in 1950 because of an indication of the threat of political persecution. Since then she has lived as a freelance writer. Scholarship stays took her to the Villa Massimo in 1963 and to the Worpswede studio in 1972 . Some books were successful, for example her novel Nebenan , published by Suhrkamp , was also published in New York and London and was also translated into Polish, Swedish, Serbo-Croatian and Ukrainian. In 1963 she received the renowned Nelly Sachs Prize .

Moosdorf was married twice, her second husband died in 1988. In the last years of her life, due to an incurable eye condition, she could no longer leave the house alone and only work and read with the help of a highly magnifying reader. Forgotten by the literature business and lonely - her children had emigrated to the USA - she died of cancer in June 2000 at the age of almost 89.

Grave of Johanna Moosdorf in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

Her grave is in the state-owned cemetery Heerstraße in Berlin-Westend (grave location: 18-L-137). An application to dedicate the last resting place of Johanna Moosdorf as the grave of honor of the State of Berlin was rejected in 2005 by the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development on the grounds that “u. a. the memory no longer lives on in public ”.

In the house in which she lived from 1959 until her death, a memorial plaque was unveiled in a ceremony in 2006, referring to her work and its importance: “The focus of her work was the unprocessed fascism in everyday life and its continuity in Germany . Her unconventional female figures attracted particular attention. ” Most recently, she worked on a manuscript entitled The Disappeared House ; the unfinished text and her literary estate are in the German Literature Archive in Marbach .

Literary work

An important book is Moosdorf's old work Century Dreams , in which she has processed large parts of her life story into a novel. The writer Meininger withdraws to a Berlin attic apartment and wants to write down the events of her life there. It is the story of her love for her husband, the Jewish political scientist Meerstern, who was persecuted by the racial policy of the “ Third Reich ” and murdered in Auschwitz. She writes about her nightmares caused by the constant threat and violence during National Socialism and the fascism that still exists today. At one point the protagonist says : “The terrible cannot really be communicated.” With the figure of the intellectual sea star, the author has created a moving portrait of her husband. It “commemorates the victims of the Holocaust and at the same time relentlessly asks about guilt […]. With the novel Century Dreams Moosdorf presented an exemplary autobiography about the experience of the Nazi era [...]. ” The novel “ fascinates through its narrative form, its language and its images. A disturbing and moving mourning work of great credibility ” was the characterization of her late work in the commemorative speech on the occasion of the unveiling of her memorial plaque.

Moosdorf had worked on her novel Die Freundinnen for seven years, Suhrkamp-Verlag had already published two of her books, but the publisher's director Siegfried Unseld rejected this book in 1970 because Djuna Barnes ' Nachtgewächs was "once and for all the valid standard for depicting female lovers" be written. It was too early for a “positive, self-evident portrayal of a lesbian love affair”. The women's and lesbian movement had not really started yet. The book did not appear until 1977 at the height of this movement and is now in its 7th edition. His theme is a love affair between two women. The story is told from the perspective of the lesbian protagonist. The critical lexicon for contemporary German literature sums up the author's meaning as follows: “Johanna Moosdorf's work, which in its stylistics is interwoven with poetological , philosophical, through a very unique way of writing the montage of present and past, reality and dream, imagined, dreamed and real , political, patriarchal- critical and utopian elements, is primarily devoted to two major complexes of topics: the examination of fascism and its continuity in the Federal Republic as well as the acquisition and establishment of a female perspective. Both subject areas have more or less inevitably become theirs for biographical reasons; both are increasingly interwoven with one another in terms of content. "

Her many-translated novel Nebenan (1961), for which Moosdorf received the “Nelly Sachs Prize”, deals with the recent German past. A concentration camp doctor injected hundreds of children to death in medical experiments, sent his wife, who turned away from him, to a mental hospital, was given a different name after the war, but was later exposed. It is unusual that Moosdorf often tells the novel from the perspective of the mentally disturbed woman who survived the war. The subject complexes of racism , nationalism and male chauvinism can also be found in other books by the author . Moosdorf's poems went relatively unnoticed.

Prizes and awards

  • 1950: Literature Prize of the City of Leipzig
  • 1950: Thomas Mann Prize
  • 1952: Carl-Zuckmayer-Förderpreis
  • 1963: Nelly Sachs Prize
  • 2006: Memorial plaque in Berlin

Quote

  • "For me, being involved is a given, I don't get involved, and I am not involved: I am involved - but in a broad sense, committed to people."

Works

  • Escape from time . Narrative. Achilla-Presse, Bremen, Hamburg 1997. ISBN 3-928398-41-5 .
  • Franziska to Sophie . Narrative. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1993. ISBN 3-596-11861-1 .
  • The daughter. Stories from four decades . Epilogue: Regula Venske . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1991. ISBN 3-596-10506-4 .
  • Go out into the night sea . Poems. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1990. ISBN 3-596-10217-0 .
  • Dreams of the century . Novel. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1989. ISBN 3-596-24739-X .
  • New poems . Bläschke, St. Michael 1983. ISBN 3-7053-1827-6 .
  • Seven years ', seven days' . Poems 1950 - 1979. Limes, Wiesbaden, Munich 1979. ISBN 3-8090-2153-9 .
  • The girlfriends . Novel. Nymphenburg. Munich 1977. ISBN 3-485-00326-3 (most recently: Fischer-Tb., Frankfurt / M. 1994. ISBN 3-596-24712-8 )
  • The Andermanns . Novel. Goverts, Stuttgart 1969 (most recently: Fischer-Tb., Frankfurt / M. 1992. ISBN 3-596-11191-9 )
  • The blind mirror . Radio play. West German Radio 1963.
  • Johanna Moosdorf. Nelly Sachs Prize winner Dortmund 1963 . Dortmund City Library 1965.
  • The long night . Narrative. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1963 (most recently: Achilla-Presse, Oldenburg 1991. ISBN 3-928398-02-4 )
  • Next door . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1961 (English: London 1963, New York 1964; Polish: Warsaw 1964; Swedish: Stockholm 1964; Serbo-Croatian: Belgrade 1966; Ukrainian: Kiev 1967)
  • Snow storm in Vorotschau . Novella. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1957.
  • The sky is on fire . Novel. Schröder, Hamburg 1955.
  • The nightingales beat in the snow . Novel. Book guild Gutenberg , Frankfurt / M. 1963 (most recently: Achilla-Presse, Bremen 1995. ISBN 3-928398-09-1 ); French: Paris 1959.
  • Escape to Africa . Novel. Klemm, Freiburg i. Br. 1952 (English: New York 1954, London 1955; French 1955; Swedish 1956)
  • Aftermath . A novella. Song of Time, Berlin 1948.
  • Between two worlds . 4 novellas. New life, Berlin 1948.
  • The portrait . Novel. Dietz, Berlin 1947.
  • Burning life . Poems. JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1947.

Secondary literature and sources

Web links

Commons : Johanna Moosdorf  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 492.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Ruth Ellerbrock's speech on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial plaque for Johanna Moosdorf on July 12, 2006 . On: Website of the district office of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
  3. ↑ From the text of the memorial plaque dated July 12, 2006 at Kastanienallee 27 in Berlin-Westend
  4. ↑ Quote from the Critical Lexicon for Contemporary German Literature (KLG)
  5. ^ Ingeborg Mues on July 12, 2006 in Berlin
  6. ^ Lecture by the Zurich Germanist Madeleine Marti in Berlin on July 12, 2006
  7. ↑ Susanne Kraft and Regula Venske in: Critical Lexicon for contemporary German literature
  8. ↑ Quoted from: On the commitment of the writer . In: Johanna Moosdorf. Nelly Sachs Prize winner Dortmund 1963 . Dortmund 1965. p. 15
personal data
SURNAME Moosdorf, Johanna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 2000
Place of death Berlin