Klaus Frühauf

Klaus Frühauf (born October 12, 1933 in Halle (Saale) ; † November 11, 2005 in Rostock ) was a German author and one of the most important science fiction authors in the GDR .

Life

Klaus Frühauf grew up in Halle an der Saale and learned the trade of a machine fitter after high school . He studied mechanical engineering in Chemnitz from 1952 to 1955 and obtained the academic degree of a graduate engineer for mechanical engineering . In 1972 he moved to Rostock, where he made it to the position of chief designer .

In addition to his job, he worked as a writer and made his debut in 1974 with his first novel . In 1980 he then became a freelance writer, primarily for science fiction novels and stories. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall he was chairman of the Writers' Association in the Rostock district . He received several cultural prizes from the city and the Rostock district.

In his science fiction works he increasingly criticized social conditions, including the GDR, which meant that his novel The City of a Thousand Eyes could not appear in 1988, but only in 2000.

After the fall of the Wall in 1990, Klaus Frühauf worked as an advertising officer in charities and as a journalist in addition to his literary work. He also temporarily held the office of mayor of the community of Ziesendorf near Rostock, in whose district of Buchholz he lived. His last works were published by BS-Verlag in Rostock.

Klaus Frühauf died on November 11, 2005 after a brief serious illness in a Rostock hospice of the consequences of a brain tumor .

plant

In his SF texts, Frühauf repeatedly dealt with the topic of biological and genetic research and its possible consequences. He debuted in 1974 with the space adventure mutants on Andromeda , in which an underground expedition is confronted on an alien planet with numerous confusing and often set hostile, strange crippled life forms before it turns out that one has to deal with the survivors of a civilization, who have mutated and degenerated because of the careless use of atomic energy. In Living on the Edge of the Wild , Frühauf then reversed the usual narrative perspective and reported on a similar encounter from the point of view of the strangers visiting humanity, who have great difficulty not seeing the species Homo sapiens as a retarded, dangerous form of life, because they all have biological ones Dangers eliminated down to the tiniest microorganism. In turn, insect-like aliens, organized in the manner of an ant colony , visit humanity in Stern on a zero course , while in The Fateful Experiment the genetically modified, highly bred superhumans rebel on a space expedition . Frühauf takes up the theme of the modified superhero again in Genion : a human-ape hybrid with fantastic abilities perishes because of its otherness.

In the novel The City of a Thousand Eyes , Frühauf dealt with the subject of the surveillance state and freedom. The manuscript was rejected by the Neues Leben publishing house in 1988 because of "obvious and dangerous social proximity" and was only published in 2000 by H&F Verlag Scheibenberg in a small edition (5000).

bibliography

Novels

Some of his novels have appeared as preprints in continuations in various newspapers. In the GDR they operated under the genre name "scientific-fantastic novel".

• 1974 mutants on Andromeda
• 1976 The savages live on the edge
• 1979 star on zero course
• 1981 Genion
• 1983 The trees of Eden
• 1984 The fateful experiment
• 1988 Silent in orbit
• 1996 final
• 2000 The City of a Thousand Eyes (already completed in 1988, could not be published in the GDR)
• 2003 Mortal Rebellion

Short stories

• 1977 The waters of Mars , 1977
• 1979 Der Flug in die Sonne , (abridged edition of Das Wasser des Mars ), 1979
• 1982 The strange brain , 1982
• 2001 The Llahna Monster , 2001

stories

Frühauf's stories were featured in several anthologies ( Das Raumschiff (1977), Paths to Impossibility (1983), Zeitreisen (1986), Die Zeit-Insel (1991)) and in various periodicals and series of the GDR ( Neues Leben , Das neue Abenteuer , Jugend und Technik , Junge Welt und Tribüne ) published.

Selection:

• 1974 At the Koarnalen (preprint from mutants on Andromeda )
• 1975 Course to Earth (in the booklet series The New Adventure )
• 1980 The earth is a strange star
• 1983 The ultimate truth
• 1986 The mothers of the cosmonauts
• 1990 Parade Reposte

Autobiographical novel

• Weltenspringer (was completed by the author in 2005 shortly before his death and has not yet been published)

literature

• Hans Joachim Alpers , Werner Fuchs , Ronald M. Hahn : Reclam's science fiction guide. Reclam, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-010312-6 , p. 163.
• Hans Joachim Alpers, Werner Fuchs, Ronald M. Hahn, Wolfgang Jeschke : Lexicon of Science Fiction Literature. Heyne, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-453-02453-2 , p. 460.
• Karsten Kruschel : Klaus Frühauf. In: Erik Simon , Olaf R. Spittel (ed.): The science fiction of the GDR. Authors and works. A lexicon. Verlag Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-360-00185-0 , pp. 134-139.
• Hans-Peter Neumann: Klaus Frühauf ( Memento from November 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) In: Alien Contact 67 (November 16, 2005).
• Aysche Wesche: Early on, Klaus . In: Lexicon of science fiction literature since 1900. With a look at Eastern Europe , edited by Christoph F. Lorenz, Peter Lang, Frankfurt / Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-63167-236-5 , pp. 287–294.

Web links

• Literature by and about Klaus Frühauf in the catalog of the German National Library
• Klaus Frühauf in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
• Works by and about Klaus Frühauf at Open Library
• Klaus Frühauf (1933-2005)
• Klaus Frühauf on phantastik-couch.de
• Klaus Frühauf , books and short biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus Frühauf: The city of a thousand eyes . Scheibenberg, 2000, afterword, p. 239.