Manfred Künne
Manfred Künne (born August 6, 1931 in Leipzig ; † January 17, 1990 there ) was a German writer . Künne's novels differ from those of other authors mainly in the detailed research of the historical background against which he creates his stories. In 1969 he was awarded the Leipzig City Art Prize for this .
Career and work
Manfred Künne published his first literary works and stories from 1950 in newspapers and magazines. In 1952 he published his first book, Stein auf Stein , in which he processed experiences that he had gathered in construction during his youth. After the end of the war, the hero of the story, Horst Märker, tries to gain a foothold in a Germany that is reorganizing itself. Through the development work he finally succeeds in integrating himself into society and finding his way. The writer Arthur Koetz praised the first work of the then twenty-two-year-old and emphasized that Künne had a good observation of nature and people and knew how to make them accessible to the story as an element of mood , and he also attested that he had an "individual natural talent".
However, Künne only gained national recognition in the GDR with his novel trilogy "Kautschuk", "Gummi", "Buna".
In the first part, Kautschuk (1959), he tells the adventurous story of the raw material rubber . The story begins in the age of discovery and conquest of America and accompanies a Spanish division in search of the legendary gold country Eldorado .
The work was continued in the novel Gummi (1968). Using the example of the large US tire group Firestone , Künne describes how the raw material rubber is processed into rubber and makes the connections between high finance and the rubber industry transparent.
The final volume of the trilogy is the novel Buna (1985). Buna is short for synthetic rubber. The novel is about Erich Stamm, a Saxon construction worker who had to move to Auschwitz during the Second World War in order to set up a second plant for the Buna plant in Schkopau .
In 1974 Künne's autobiographical youth novel Jugendträume was published . Using the example of the young Roland Könner, he describes his own childhood and youth in Leipzig , which was destroyed by the war, and describes the contradicting development of an adolescent in a contradicting time.
The follow-up novel Reifejahre (1976), which deals with the first years of adulthood and his path to becoming a writer, was unable to build on the success of its predecessor.
Künne's novels and many of his short stories were published by Paul List Verlag Leipzig and later by Mitteldeutscher Verlag . His rubber and rubber plants were also relocated to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Italy and Croatia. After the fall of the Wall, the Mitteldeutsche Verlag took Künnes texts off the market because of the one-sided and pro-Soviet view of its late publications.
bibliography
- Stone on stone. Narrative (1952)
- Rubber - Novel of a Raw Material (1959)
- The Transformed Lover (1960)
- Rubber - Novel of a Material (1968)
- Youthful dreams. Novel (1974)
- Maturity years. Novel (1976)
- Buna - Novel of a Plastic (1985)
Individual evidence
Web links
- Literature by and about Manfred Künne in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Künne, Manfred |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 6, 1931 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Leipzig |
| DATE OF DEATH | 17th January 1990 |
| Place of death | Leipzig |