Konrad Bänninger

Konrad Bänninger (born September 15, 1890 in Zurich ; † August 25, 1981 in Bülach ) was a Swiss writer, poet and essayist.

Life

Konrad Bänninger was born in Zurich-Enge in 1890 as the third of seven children and grew up in Zurich District 7. Teachers' seminar in Küsnacht, Sanskrit studies at the University of Zurich. Teacher in Uster. Border soldier during the First World War. From 1925 he lived as a freelance writer in Zurich with stays in Vienna and Scotland. His lyrical work and his philosophical and literary essays quickly found widespread attention.

You fickle people, you house coffins,
your twilight lanterns lined up dead,
your empty toys for the foggy dwarfs!

These are three lines from an early poem by Konrad Bänninger, written in the flaming style of that time (“Dolorosa”, Weltgarten 1918). In 1917 his first work, Silent Soldiers , was published and caused quite a stir. Further volumes of poetry followed. The right life (1923), which he himself describes as one of his most important works, was poorly understood because of its coded statements.

His older brother Walter, a talented painter, and the younger one, Hans, who had started his career as an actor but soon started working at Radio Zurich, also belonged to the cultural scene at the time. The encounter with the lyric poet Karl Stamm , who died prematurely , a schoolmate from the years at the Küsnacht seminary, as well as the friendships with the sculptor Eduard Bick and the graphic artist and painter Fritz Pauli , were of great importance.

Prose works emerged. Albin Zollinger commented on the essay book Geist des Werdens (1932) :

“This philosophy of a poet lacks the continuity of the system; its correctness is visionary, risked in the most extreme formulations, but infallible as a nightwalker, one might say. His intuitive ratio moves less in line than in space, one looks at a three-dimensional thought with many seemingly random triangulation points, on which one knows the invisible "everything else" is suspended. Bänninger is, also as a poet, also as a person, the type of an enigmatic phenomenon. Like his Fridericus eye, his word also flashes of mystery, immanent symbol. It derives its wide-ranging meaning from a comprehensive view. Whoever owns the world says nothing about it without saying everything about it in nuce ... "

Konrad Bänninger was connected to the smallest with the greatest and vice versa. His essay entitled: “What are world powers? - A contribution to language criticism "(Die Zeit, 1936) closes with the words:

“... But we see this, that there are beings, and we sense beings that shine from dark and light colors of flowers and all creatures. This difference and separation of all beings is true and comprehensible, and the attempt to balance and understand this conflict is eternally old. From being to being, however, hate and love seem equally difficult to grasp. "

The connoisseur of ancient Indian philosophy, the reader of Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, the older and newer literature, the fighter for marginalized contemporaries (On Nuances and Details by Ludwig Hohl , NZZ 1939) married in 1934, after ten years of free writing, the 21- year old Helma an Haack from Wuppertal, and started a family with her. Five children were born between 1935 and 1947. Konrad Bänninger took up his job as a secondary teacher again, which he did not lightly, but full of responsibility.

During this time he also devoted himself to his studies. He was often seen sitting on a bench at the edge of the forest, absorbed in his reading and writing. After 1945 he withdrew more and more from the public literature business. However, numerous of his essays continued to appear, first in the features section of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

During 20 years working on what he himself said was a strange book about The Riddle of Violence , in the course of his long life he was gradually gripped by lonely grief, anger and pain: not the slightest existence of any life is possible without violence. Only love in its unintentional, creative form would still make sense in this world of annihilation. A world that for Konrad Bänninger extends from the smallest stone to the most distant star. His later poems, which are still to be discovered, bear witness to this way of seeing.

The moon reflects in the empty window
and mosquitoes dance in front of your room in the evening.
Forget the image of the
brightness of all beings, the quiet clarity of your twilight eyes -
before the moon fills up, before
the tulips bloom on the tree , the red and pale striped ones. Small
is the number of people and animals, and each one sinks, playfully,
onto the barren camp in the shade.

You soul of my days, but
I still want to wait for you at the white fence, whether
your shimmering picture still appears to the distant, the silent,
refreshed friend who wins nothing but
what a tired star sends to the wanderer.

Astronomy

But now one thing is true:
the most distant star passes and is
alone and without a friend - there is
no light that helps where it goes but
his - and there is nothing
but night to rest,
and to whom it shines, he doesn't know.

(Poems from the estate)

Works

• Silent soldiers. Poems. Rascher, Zurich 1917
• World garden. Poems. Rascher, Zurich 1918
• The right life. Poems. Rascher, Zurich 1921
• Words of the soul. Poems. Rascher, Zurich 1923
• Wandering rune. Poems. Rascher, Zurich 1932
• Spirit of becoming. Outlines, records. Rascher, Zurich 1932
• Man never perishes. New poems. Oprecht, Zurich 1938
• Small philosophy of literature. Paul Haupt, Bern 1940
• Between thinking and acting. New outlines and records. Paul Haupt, Bern 1940
• The four brothers. Fairy tale poems. Oprecht, Zurich 1943
• Lyric sheets. Swiss Writers' Association 1945
• The corn. Poems. Tschudy, St. Gallen 1950
• Swiss ballad. New year's newspaper Zürcher Unterland 1956

literature

• The writer in our time. Swiss authors determine their role in society. A documentation on contemporary language and literature. Francke Verlag, Bern 1972
• Faces of Swiss literature . 150 short portraits from Melinda Nadj Abonji to Albin Zollinger. Charles Linsmayer, eighteen, Zurich 2015

Web links

• Charles Linsmayer: Konrad Bänninger. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .