Kurt Prager

Kurt Prager (born January 28, 1901 in Niederzwönitz , † December 24, 1969 in Karl-Marx-Stadt ) was a dialect poet from the Ore Mountains.

Life

Prager was born in Niederzwönitz as the son of the shoemaker Richard Prager. From 1915 he completed an apprenticeship as a businessman and worked at A. Trommler in Zwönitz , the largest children's shoe factory in the German Reich , until he was called up for military service in the First World War . From 1928 he was traveling all over Germany as a traveling salesman for them. During the Second World War , Prager was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941, but was soon released. It was not until 1945 that he was mobilized a second time. On May 10, 1945, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets, from which he was released as an invalid. After his return he initially worked as a forest worker, then from 1947 for the SDAG Wismut . Due to his poor health, Prager went back to the shoe factory in 1949.

He had been married to Susanne Opitz since 1924, from which marriage a son and daughter emerged. They lived in Zwönitz. On Christmas Eve 1969, Prager died of a heart condition. Since 1995 his bones have been resting in the honorary citizen's vault on the St. Trinity cemetery in Zwönitz.

plant

As a 19-year-old, he first appeared in public in 1920 with the swank “Ben Hamsters caught”. In 1926 he self- published for the first time his own songs and poems in the Ore Mountains dialect under the title Die Bergeswelt , for which he had partly composed the wise men himself. In 1938 a considerably expanded second edition of this work followed. Some of his songs were distributed on song postcards , including self-published and from 1945 in the Zwönitzer Verlag Gebrüder Schelzel. Other small theater pieces for club performances were “De Rachenkünstler”, “Vergaß dei Hamit net” and “The prisoner of war's homecoming or 'Harre meine Seele'”.

After he had written almost euphoric poems for the time in the Third Reich , but was nevertheless disappointed, he refused to join the emerging socialist homeland poetry after the end of the World War. True to his motto “Everything I wrote down, I did for the sake of my homeland!” Prager at least took part in the cultural work within the GDR Cultural Association , including the organization of the 1957 school festival in Niederzwönitz. In the same year a small hectographed brochure “For mei Hamit” was published, in which he incorporated old and new work. During this time, some of his works appeared in the Glückauf magazine of the Erzgebirgsverein , which was banned in the GDR and re-established in the Federal Republic of Germany . The Erzgebirgsverein honored him in 1958 with the badge of honor with a gold-plated mallet and iron.

In 2004 the city administration of Zwönitz reissued his songs and poems. In July 2003, a Kurt Prager memorial stone was erected on the Zwönitzer Ziegenberg.

literature

• Horst Henschel : Singendes Land , Leipzig 1939, pp. 153–157.
• Kurt Prager: songs, poems and stories in the Ore Mountains dialect. Zwönitz: Stadtverwaltung, 2004. (Contributions to the history of the city and its villages, no.16)