John Berger (writer)

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John Berger (2009)

John Berger (born November 5, 1926 in Stoke Newington , County of London , † January 2, 2017 in Antony , Hauts-de-Seine ) was a British writer , painter and art critic and Booker Prize winner.

Life

Berger was born as the eldest son of the lawyer Stanley Berger and his wife Miriam Berger. He had a brother. His ancestors were partly of Jewish descent and came from Italy, Galicia and Bohemia. From 1944 to 1946 Berger was in the British Army.

After studying art at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London , Berger began a career as a painter. In the late 1940s to the 1950s Berger gave private painting and drawing lessons and worked as an art lecturer at St Mary's teacher training college , a training seminar for teachers south-west of London, as he was denied commercial success as a painter. At the same time he exhibited his own work in various English galleries.

From the beginning of the 1950s, Berger found his way to art criticism via radio. In addition to art reviews, he wrote artist biographies and essays on art. He was also involved in the Artists For Peace movement . Especially with his articles for the New Statesman , he quickly became one of the leading Marxist art and literary critics in Great Britain, but without joining the Communist Party . Under the theoretical influence of Frederick Antal , one of the friends of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci , he campaigned for socialist realism in his work Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, first published in 1960 . However, he quickly broke away from its orthodox elements, developed a more socio-historical understanding of culture and art and finally set himself apart from socialist cultural policy.

In 1958 his first literary text was his autobiographical novel A Painter of Our Time ; In 1962 the socio-critical novels The Foot of Clive and 1964 Corker's Freedom followed as cross-sections of English post-war society . Already at the end of the 1950s, Berger left England under the influence of the Cold War and then toured Europe. After he settled in a French Alpine village in the 1970s, the experience of rural culture aroused his interest in rural lifestyles as a counterpoint and alternative to urban mass society. This found its literary embodiment in Berger's trilogy Into Their Labor (1979–90).

At the same time, John Berger worked with director Alain Tanner in the 1970s and wrote the scripts for several films, including Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976). With his development novel G. , on which he had worked for five years, he surprisingly won the Booker Prize in 1972 . When Berger donated half of the prize money to the Black Panther Party , a scandal arose.

In addition to his literary work, Berger wrote a number of art-historical and political texts or reviews. a. published in Le Monde diplomatique . In the 1980s to 1990s, Berger u. a. in close cooperation with the Ukrainian-French writer and actress Nella Bielski, mainly experimental dramatic forms. In the last years of his life he devoted himself increasingly to the philosophical questions of modern man, whereby he increasingly absorbed mystical- speculative moments.

In his diverse literary work, Berger dealt with a wide range of topics such as sexuality, alternative forms of life and emigration. In his art theoretical treatises there are reflections on photography as well as on the relationship between seeing and telling. He also wrote numerous socially and culturally critical articles on urbanity , everyday working life and consumer society. Together with the photographer Jean Mohr , Berger increasingly examined visual forms of expression. On the background of this work, socio-critical picture-text studies were created about an English country doctor ( A Fortunate Man , 1967) as well as the fate of guest workers in Europe ( A Fortunate Man , 1967) and the experimental book of narrative pictures Another Way of Telling (1982).

Although Berger is regarded as one of the most important cross-border crossers of contemporary European literature and culture, his work has been received very differently in Europe and the USA.

In December 2006, Berger went public with a boycott (in the field of culture and science) against Israel's occupation policy . He wanted the boycott to be understood "tactically"; that is, for himself he refused to be published by a major mainstream publisher in Israel. With this he had hit the State of Israel, but did not want to cut off contact with the individual people in Israel.

Berger was married three times. His first wife was the artist Pat Marriott. His second marriage to the Russian Anya Bostock (born Anna Sisserman) had two children: Katya Berger (born 1962) and Jacob Berger (born 1963), a Swiss director. In his third marriage, Berger was married to the American Beverly Bancroft, who died in 2013. The two have a son named Yves (born 1976). He is a painter. In 2010 a joint exhibition by father and son was shown in the Neue Galerie Landshut.

Berger had already lived temporarily in western Switzerland for research in the 1960s. In 1973/1974 Berger left England for good and moved to the mountain village of Quincy in the Haute-Savoie department in France, where he lived with his family for several decades. Berger spent the last years of his life in the Paris suburb of Antony ( Département Hauts-de-Seine ).

Prices (selection)

Works (selection)

Novels

German: The games. Translated by Peter Meier. Leipzig: Reclam 1991. (Reclam Library. 1408.) ISBN 978-3-37900711-5
German: G. From the English by Peter Meier. Munich: Hanser
  • SauErde. Country stories. Translated by Jörg Trobitius. Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer paperback 1982. ISBN 978-3-596-14295-8
  • Play me a song Stories of love. Translated by Jörg Trobitius. Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer Taschenbuch 1988. 978-3-596-14647-5
  • Lilac and flag. From the English by Jörg Trobitius. Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer Taschenbuch 1991. ISBN 978-3-596-14648-2
  • On the way to the wedding. From the English by Jörg Trobitius. 1996.
  • King. A Street Book . Pantheon 1999.
German: King . Translated by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Munich: Hanser 1999.
  • A and X. A love story in letters. From the English by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Hanser, Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-446-23395-9

Essays

  • Encounters and farewells. About pictures and people . Munich: Hanser 1991. ISBN 978-3-44617406-1
  • And our faces, my heart, ephemeral like photos. 1992.
  • with Jean Mohr : story of a country doctor. 1998.
  • Why do we look at animals? 1981. Published in The Life of Images or the Art of Seeing .
  • with Jean Mohr: Another way of telling. Munich: Hanser 1982. New edition, Frankfurt: Fischer-Taschenbuch 2000.
  • Against the devaluation of the world. From the English by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Munich: Hanser 2001.
  • With hope between your teeth. Reports of survival and resistance. From the English by Rita Seuss. Berlin: Wgenbach 2007. ISBN 978-3-8031-3626-8
  • Bento's sketchbook . From the English by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Munich: Hanser 2013.
  • The moment of photography. Essays. Preface by Geoff Dyer , translation by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Hanser, Munich 2016. ISBN 3-44625283-5 .
  • A gift for pink. Essays. Translation by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Hanser, Munich 2018. ISBN 978-3-446-25829-7 .

stories

  • Once in Europe. Translated from the English by Jörg Trobitius. Carl Hanser, Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-446-19818-0 .
  • Here where we meet. Translated from the English by Hans Jürgen Balmes. Carl Hanser, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-446-20655-7 .

Art historical writings

Socially critical literature

  • with Jean Mohr: migrant workers. Experiences, pictures, analyzes. Reinbek 1976.

Plays

  • Francisco Goya - the last portrait. Ostfildern 1995.
  • The three lives of Lucie Cabrol.

Scripts

literature

  • Ralf Hertel, David Malcolm (Eds.): On John Berger: Telling Stories. Brill, Leiden 2015, ISBN 978-9-00430612-7 .
  • Geoff Dyer (Ed.): John Berger: Selected Essays. Bloomsbury, ISBN 0-375-71318-2 .
  • Geoff Dyer: Ways of Telling. The Work of John Berger. London 1986, ISBN 0-7453-0097-9 (with overview of works).
  • Charity Scribner: John Berger, Leslie Kaplan and the Western Fixation on the "Other Europe". In: Moritz Csáky, Klaus Zeyringer (Hrsg.): Staging of collective memory. Self-images, external images. Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2002, ISBN 3-7065-1772-8 , pp. 236–246.
  • Achim Engelberg : About villages and towns. The European narrator John Berger. VanBremen, ISBN 978-3-9805534-3-8 .
  • Jochen Krautz: John Berger's Aesthetics and Ethics as an Impulse for Art Education using the Example of Photography. Kovac, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-8300-1287-X .
  • Joshua Sperling: A writer of our time: the life and work of John Berger. Verso, London / New York 2018, ISBN 978-1-78663-742-0 .
  • Stefan Welz: Ways of Seeing - Limits of Telling: Seeing and telling in the novels of John Berger . Edition Isele , Eggingen 1996, ISBN 978-3-8614-2074-3 .

documentary

The four-part documentary essay film The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special section at the 66th Berlinale (February 2016) . The collaboratively produced film by Tilda Swinton , Colin MacCabe , Christopher Roth , Bartek Dziadosz and the Derek Jarman Lab deals with individual aspects of Berger's work and his life in the alpine mountain village of Quincy ( Haute-Savoie ).

Web links

Commons : John Berger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Javier Rodríguez Marcos: Muere John Berger, escritor, pintor y crítico de arte británico . ElPais.com , January 2, 2017, accessed January 3, 2017 (Spanish).
  2. ↑ "Berger, John" in Munzinger Online / Personen - Internationales Biographisches Archiv, URL: http://www.munzinger.de/document/00000020041 (accessed from the Association of Public Libraries Berlin on January 14, 2017)
  3. ↑ Cf. the biographical information in the obituary by Michael McNay: John Berger obituary . In: The Guardian , January 2, 2017. Retrieved October 12, 2019.
  4. ↑ See Stefan Welz: John Berger . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), pp. 45–47.
  5. ↑ See Michael McNay: Berger turns tables on Booker . In: The Guardian , November 24, 1972. Retrieved October 14, 2019. See also the information in the British Broadcasting Corporation news item of January 2, 2017: John Berger, art critic and author of Ways of Seeing, dies . Retrieved October 14, 2019.
  6. ↑ See Stefan Welz: John Berger . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X . (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), pp. 45ff. See also the obituary by Kate Kellaway on the collaboration between Berger and Bielski and on the critical appreciation of Berger's life's work: John Berger 1926-2017: an appreciation . In: The Observer, January 8, 2017. Retrieved October 14, 2019. See also Sean O'Hagan: A radical returns . In: The Observer , April 3, 2005. Retrieved October 14, 2019.
  7. ↑ See John Berger rallies artists for cultural boycott of Israel . In: The Guardian , December 15, 2006. Retrieved October 12, 2019.
  8. ↑ Cf. the biographical information in the obituary by Michael McNay: John Berger obituary . In: The Guardian , January 2, 2017. Retrieved October 12, 2019. See also Yves Berger on ivorypress.com . Retrieved October 12, 2019.
  9. ↑ See the announcement of the exhibition on the website of the Neue Galerie Landshut John Berger | Yves Berger - Great Town Hall Gallery . Retrieved October 12, 2019.
  10. ↑ Cf. the biographical information in the obituary by Michael McNay: John Berger obituary . In: The Guardian , January 2, 2017. Retrieved October 12, 2019.
  11. ↑ John Berger: We-narrators and first-person narrators , Zeit online, November 15, 1991, accessed October 13, 2019
  12. ↑ Kaleidoscopic novel, which dissolves time and space relationships and addresses the misery of people who fall out of the social order. It remains to be seen whether the first-person narrator King is really a dog or a shabby person.
  13. ↑ Excerpt Why do we look at animals? in Akzente , H. 2, 1981; again in: Akzente. A reader from 50 years. Hanser, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-44620409-1 , pp. 301-318. Transl. Lida von Mengden
  14. ↑ Roman Tschiedl: The Seasons in Quincy , Radio OE1 Leporello , February 15 2016th
  15. ^ The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger. 66th Berlin International Film Festival (PDF)
  16. ↑ film website
personal data
SURNAME Berger, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter, writer and art critic
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH London Borough of Hackney
DATE OF DEATH 2nd January 2017
Place of death Antony , Hauts-de-Seine department