Kuno Raeber

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Kuno Raeber (born May 20, 1922 in Klingnau , † January 28, 1992 in Basel ) was a Swiss writer .

Life

Kuno Raeber grew up in Lucerne . He studied philosophy, history and literature at the universities in Zurich, Geneva, Paris and Basel and obtained his doctorate in 1950 on Sebastian Franck's "History Bible" . Initially very religious and briefly a novice in a Jesuit monastery, he soon lost his Christian faith and devoted himself intensively to the old myths. From 1951 to 1952 he was the director of the Swiss school in Rome, then worked at the Leibniz College in Tübingen and at the Europa-Kolleg in Hamburg, and then from 1958 he lived as a freelance writer. He was a member of Group 47 , spent an extended period in the United States and was accepted as a member of the PEN Center in 1978 . Raeber had his residence in Munich, lived temporarily in Rome and died in 1992 during a visit to Basel of the consequences of his AIDS illness.

Literary creation and literary importance

Raeber's literary work is shaped by religion and early history. Like Jorge Luis Borges , he inserts religious, mythical and past historical worlds into his present-day narrative pieces : In his work, myth and reality intermingle and mix. His prose is therefore not easy to read, it is encrypted, powerfully eloquent, full of leaps in time and, to the extreme, equipped with sexuality, violence and murder.

Raeber's reference to ancient Rome can be seen in most of his works.
Image: Circus Maximus on the Palatine Hill
The novel The Egg is about the figure of the perpetrator who wanted to destroy Michelangelo's Pietà in 1972.

Its relation to ancient Rome is very often recognizable; he felt at home in the city, not only are many novels set here, such as Sacco di Roma , but here he also interviewed Max Frisch , Uwe Johnson and his girlfriend Ingeborg Bachmann , who encouraged him to do his writing experiments.

prose

Raeber wrote essays , reviews , radio plays , plays, travel books and short stories . His novels are very different. His extensive and award-winning novel Alexius Under the Stairs or Confessions in Front of a Cat , for example, consists of seventy-nine prose pieces framed by the confessions of a cat , episodes of a confession by that rich Roman Alexius , who, according to legend, left his wife and children for many years Beggar and hermit lived and later returned and lived under the stairs undetected and only revealed himself shortly before death. But at the same time this Alexius is also the leader of a New York rock band, and so the author imaginatively stages ever more historical and mythical events in this novel. Beat Mazenauer describes the author as an “idiosyncratic spirit”, he would have been “an awake traditionalist”, “who did not hide in nostalgia, but celebrated the great, vital tradition of history with all its varieties. Rome, in spite of everything, represented this tradition for him ».

The novel "The Egg"

The only setting for the novel The Egg is Rome, which is controversial because of its pornographic and blasphemous passages . In 1972, a Hungarian who thought he was Christ, with a hammer had Pietà by Michelangelo taken. The author thinks his way into this figure and suggests depth psychological interpretations of the uprising of the sons against the mother or Mother of God. The often very drastic events, sometimes reminiscent of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs by Jean Genet , have a disturbing effect on the reader: The author lets the perpetrator let off steam in his delusions of identity as Christ, as Emperor Joseph II or as a homosexual Pope. The end of his furious reckoning with Church and Christianity is a bomb in the form of an egg - the egg is a Christian resurrection symbol - which completely destroys St. Peter's Basilica . The work stands out due to its unusual force of words and drasticness as well as its strange imagination.

Poetry

Raeber initially devoted himself to poetry. His early verses were influenced by authors such as Hölderlin, Rilke, George. Since the poetry collection Die Verwandelteften , published in 1957, Raebers Lyrik die Welt has been available as an inexhaustible arsenal of materials ("the greatest syncretism", as the blurb says). This is explored in the two further volumes Poems (1960) and Riverside (1963). The contrast program, after an 18-year break, is formed by the reductions (1981): 101 poems, mostly comprising only a few lines and "characterized by concise, laconic speech that focuses entirely on the weight of word and verse". Raebers last book of poems Turned away Facing (1985) represents the High German poems department Alemannische poems against whose experimental character by an accompanying epilogue on the Swiss language dilemma is commented.

The lyrical estate comprises around 1,000 poems in over 5,000 writings (drafts of notebooks, manuscript sheets, typescripts), which Raeber's poetry can be understood as a coherent, “processually” developing “work of metamorphosis”.

Awards

Quote

Cicada
«Once only the voice remains of me. / You will look for me in all / rooms, / on the stairs, in the long / corridors, in the gardens, / you will look for me in the basement, / you will look for me under the stairs. / One day you will look for me. / And everywhere you will only hear my voice /, my highly monotonous / singing voice. Everywhere will / she will meet you, everywhere ... »

Works

  • Studies on Sebastian Franck's history bible . Helbing & Lichtenhahn, Basel 1952 (= Diss. Univ. Basel).
  • The transformed ships. Poems. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1957.
  • Poems. Claassen, Hamburg 1960.
  • The liars are honest. Novel. Claassen, Hamburg 1960.
  • Calabria. Travel sketches. Biederstein, Munich 1961.
  • The conversion of Salvador Dalí . Radio essay. 1961.
  • River bank. Poems. Claassen, Hamburg 1963.
  • The fire. A volcanic catastrophe. Radio play. 1965.
  • Misunderstandings. 33 chapters. Biederstein, Munich 1968.
  • Alexius under the stairs or confessions in front of a cat. Novel. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1973, ISBN 3-472-86336-6 .
  • The egg. Novel. Erb, Düsseldorf 1981, ISBN 3-88458-027-2 .
  • Reductions. Poems. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-38529-X .
  • Turned away to face. New poems. Standard German and Lucerne Alemannic . With an afterword on the Swiss language dilemma. Ammann, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-250-10032-3 .
  • Bocksweg. A mystery in 12 pictures. With illustrations by Fabius von Gugel . Scaneg, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-89235-305-0 .
  • Sacco di Roma. Novel. Ammann, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-250-10117-6 .
  • At anchor. A civil tragedy in nineteen appearances. With illustrations by Fabius von Gugel. scaneg, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-89235-307-7 .
  • Pictures pictures. From the estate, ed. by Jörg Trobitius. Ammann, Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-250-10242-3 .
  • Works in 7 volumes. Edited by Christiane Wyrwa and Matthias Klein:

Translations

Movie

  • Kuno Raeber. A production by Saarländischen Rundfunks / Fernsehen, Doc. 12 ', 1974. Written and directed by Klaus Peter Dencker.

literature

  • Gerhard J. Bellinger , Brigitte Regulator-Bellinger : Schwabings Ainmillerstrasse and its most important residents. A representative example of Munich's city history from 1888 to today. Norderstedt 2003, ISBN 3-8330-0747-8 , pp. 118-119.
  • Heinrich Detering (Ed.): Kuno Raeber. (= Text + Criticism Zeitschrift für Literatur. Heft 209). edition text + criticism in Richard Boorberg Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-86916-464-9 .
  • Jürgen Egyptien: One big world poem. In: literaturkritik.de , No. 7/2002.
  • Jürgen Egyptien: Metamorphoses of storytelling. In: literaturkritik.de , No. 8/2003.
  • Jürgen Egyptien: (Post-) modern language vortex in the service of an aesthetic of redemption. In: literaturkritik.de , No. 7/2005.
  • Jürgen Egyptien: The artist as a martyr and the cathedral of art. To the prose work by Kuno Raeber. In: Flight and Dissidence. Outsiders and neurotics in Swiss German literature. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-35666-8 , pp. 69-91.
  • Christoph Gellner: Kuno Raebers literary Catholicism. In: Voices of the Time. Vol. 138, 2013, pp. 784-787.
  • Ulrich Hohoff: Raeber, Kuno. In: Handbook of contemporary German literature since 1945. Nymphenburger, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-485-03550-5 .
  • Richard A. Klein (ed.): The poet Kuno Raeber. Interpretations and encounters. scaneg, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-89235-777-3 .
  • Franz Lennartz: Raeber, Kuno. In: German writers of the 20th century in the mirror of criticism. Volume 3, Kröner, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-520-82101-X .
  • Walter Morgenthaler: Paper for the archive? To Kuno Raeber's poetry estate. In: Irmgard M. Wirtz, Magnus Wieland (eds.): Paperworks: Literary and cultural practices with scissors, glue, paper. Chronos, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-0340-1391-8 , pp. 209-225.
  • Christiane Wyrwa: Kuno Raeber - his work and his literary legacy. In: Quarto. Journal of the Swiss Literary Archives. No. 12. 1999, pp. 70-74, ISSN  1023-6341 .
  • Christiane Wyrwa:  Raeber, Kuno. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 104 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kuno Raeber: Encounters with Ingeborg Bachmann. In: The most beautiful. Monthly magazine for all friends of the fine arts. Munich. Vol. 9, issue 1, January 1963, pp. 52-54.
  2. ↑ Beat Mazenauer: Catholic, but not a Christian. In: The Bund . February 7, 2005.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Hohoff in: Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur since 1945. Munich 1990, p. 507.
  4. ^ Walter Morgenthaler: Lyrical Metamorphoses. Kuno Raeber's poems online . In: Heinrich Detering (Ed.): Kuno Raeber. (=  Text + Criticism Zeitschrift für Literatur. Heft 209). Richard Boorberg Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-86916-464-9 , pp. 95 .
  5. ↑ Works in 5 volumes . Volume 1: Poetry. Munich 2002.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Raeber, Kuno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Klingnau
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1992
Place of death Basel