Kalju Kirde

Kalju Kirde , originally Kalju Frisch , (born December 2, 1923 in Lelle , Raplamaa , † June 29, 2008 in Klein Lengden ) was an Estonian physicist and editor.

Life

Kalju Kirde was the son of the Estonian professor of geophysics Karl August Frisch ( Kaarel Kirde , 1892–1953) and was called Kalju Frisch until the German names were Estonian in the mid-1930s . He attended the Hugo-Treffner-Gymnasium in Tartu and, during the German occupation of Estonia in World War II, a few months after graduating from high school in 1942 , he was drafted into the Air Force , where he served as a radio operator. In 1944 he fled to Göttingen before the Red Army marched into Estonia and studied physics at the Georg-August University from 1945 to 1949 . Because his parents, who had also fled to the West, moved to the United States without him in 1950 , he initially did various odd jobs and was only able to get his diploma in 1958. He then worked at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen for thirty years and retired in 1988.

He had already discovered his love for eerie and fantastic stories in Estonia, especially those from HP Lovecraft , and began collecting such weird tales . In 1966 he published the essay Comments on Weird Fiction in three issues of Quarber Merkur (which was added to and revised in 1999 in the Lexicon of Horror Literature published by Hans Joachim Alpers ).

He also wrote numerous afterwords to new editions and appeared from 1969 to 1975 as the editor of the renowned library of the House of Usher at Insel Verlag , where he published, in addition to Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson and made a significant contribution to the success of these authors in Germany. Later he also advised Franz Rottensteiner when he was in charge of the Fantastic Library at Suhrkamp Verlag .

Publications (selection)

• The invisible eye. A collection of phantoms and other eerie apparitions , 1979
• In Laurin's eyes. The book of German dreamers , 1982
• The horror in the museum and other stories , 1984
• Dino Buzzati : Aldo Christofari's machine and other fantastic stories (Ed.), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt (Main) 1985. ISBN 3-518-37675-6
• Guide through the classic "weird fiction" , edited by Signe Kirde and Robert N. Bloch, with a foreword by Franz Rottensteiner, 2008. ISBN 978-3-934273-88-7

literature

• Rein A. Zondergeld and Holger F. Wierenstried (eds.): Lexicon of Fantastic Literature , Weitbrecht Verlag, Stuttgart a. a. 1998, p. 194. ISBN 3-522-72175-6 .
• Robert N. Bloch : Library of the House of Usher - Kalju Kirde as editor. A picture documentation , Lindenstruth Verlag, Gießen 2009. ISBN 978-3-934273-87-0 .
• Franz Rottensteiner : My friend Kalju Kirde , in: Franz Rottensteiner: In the laboratory of visions. Notes on the fantastic literature. 19 essays and lectures from 2000–2012 , Verlag Dieter van Reeken, Lüneburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-940679-72-7 , pp. 251–256.

Web links

• TLÜAR väliseesti isikud (Estonian, accessed September 26, 2012)