Karl Veken

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Karl Veken on May 7, 1952 in East Berlin

Karl Veken (born July 22, 1904 in Essen , † July 21, 1971 in Karl-Marx-Stadt ) was a resistance fighter against National Socialism and a German writer in the GDR .

Life

The teacher trained at a Jesuit seminar came to the labor movement during the contradictions of the Weimar Republic, first to the SPD, then to the KPD. He took his literary material from life, the social crisis, the resistance struggle against the Nazis, the experiences in prison, emigration in Prague and France .

From 1929 Veken worked as a journalist. In 1933/34 he was in the resistance against National Socialism. In 1934 he was sentenced to prison for " high treason " . After his release from prison in 1936, he emigrated to the ČSR and later to Paris .

In 1940 he was commissioned to go back to Germany for illegal work, where he soon fell into the hands of the Gestapo again and was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944 - until the end of the war.

Immediately after the liberation from National Socialism , he worked as a teacher and headmaster in Berlin. Working with the youth was his element of life. This is how the »Four Berlin Ranges« came about, his first children's book. With his song "We go ahead over rubble and broken pieces ..." the youth tackled the reconstruction. But as much as he liked being a teacher, his passion for writing, he never came next to school and so he decided to go the insecure path of a writer. In 1956 he married the writer Katharina Kammer . In 1969 he received the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze. Most recently he lived in Augustusburg .

He placed the young heroes of his adventurous stories in the middle of the struggles of time. His »Stories from Stormy Days«, collected in the volume »Der Kellerschüssel«, are full of humor, fantasy and warmth for ordinary people and their children. Personal experiences as a resistance fighter and prisoner are also the real background for the fables in his two novels "On Death and Life" and "Hunt Without Mercy" (1961 and 1969).

Honors

  • The school in Augustusburg was called "Karl Veken Oberschule" from 1976 to 1992.

Works

  • The cellar key , 1955
  • Adventure with Viktor , 1956
  • Bang and a box , 1956
  • The Rei-Nopis or Das are beautiful stories! , 1958
  • To death and life , 1961
  • Micki Lean. The adventures of a German boy. , together with his wife Katharina Kammer, Verlag Neues Leben Berlin, 1966
  • Hunt without mercy , 1969
  • The unromantic Annerose. Diary of an eighteen-year-old , together with his wife Katharina Kammer, 1964

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neues Deutschland , August 28, 1969, p. 4
personal data
SURNAME Veken, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1971
Place of death Karl Marx City