Naked among wolves

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Bruno Apitz (right) while filming “ Nackt unter Wölfen ” from 1963

Naked Among Wolves is a novel of the GDR literature of Bruno Apitz , in 1958 the Central German publishing house appeared. It has now been filmed three times: in 1960 by Georg Leopold for German television , in 1963 by Frank Beyer for DEFA and in 2015 by Philipp Kadelbach for MDR .

content

The novel is set in the Buchenwald concentration camp from February to April 1945 . A Jewish prisoner smuggled a three-year-old child into the camp in a suitcase. The illegal International Camp Committee (ILK), a resistance group made up of communists of different nationalities, decides to transport the child to another camp. The inmates Höfel and Kropinski, who work in the effects room, do not carry out this decision and hide the child. Its discovery by the SS would inevitably result in the murder of the child and those who want to save his life. First it is hidden in the clothes closet, then in an epidemic barracks. Later it is placed in a pig pen.

The child puts the entire resistance movement in danger. However, several inmates take great personal risks to save the child. Höfel and Kropinski are severely tortured for weeks without betraying the child and their comrades. The inmate Pippig is also silent. He dies of severe torture by the Gestapo . The prisoner Rose becomes a traitor out of fear, the prisoner Wurach allows himself to be abused by the SS for spying.

In addition, the character of the SS guards is shown: Camp leader Schwahl wants to send all prisoners on a death march to Dachau and cover up the traces of the crimes in the camp, Kluttig wants to have all prisoners killed, Reineboth wants to go into hiding and adapt to the new political circumstances, Mandrak , called Mandrill, a brutal torturer, wants to kill his prisoners locked in the block before the end, and Zweiling vacillates between the fear of the prisoners' revenge and his own comrades.

When the informant Wurach compiles a death list with 46 names who allegedly run the secret resistance organization, the ILK decides to hide those who are wanted. The camp elder Kramer is not one of the heads of the ILK, but is believed to be one by the camp management. Many prisoners respect him because of his personality. In the unclear about the proximity of the front, the ILK has to weigh up again and again between contradicting duties, the protection of the individual and the responsibility for the entirety of the 50,000 prisoners. The first death marches cannot be prevented.

When the front is near, the prisoners liberate the camp with weapons they built or smuggled into the camp. They get Höfel and Kropinski out of the bunker. The child is also taken out of hiding.

background

The fictional characters that appear in Apitz's book sometimes bear the names of former fellow prisoners of the author, whom the author wanted to honor. With the choice of names, Apitz also clarified the character of the respective person (for example "Hauptscharführer Zweiling").

The boy described in the novel is Stefan Jerzy Zweig , who was brought to Buchenwald at the age of three. Another important person is Walter Krämer .

Bruno Apitz has revised his text several times in cooperation with the committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters and its editor. The story of how it came about is documented in a new edition of the novel in 2012. The publication of the final version of the novel coincided with the opening of the Buchenwald Memorial . According to the journalist Ines Geipel , the novel, which all GDR schoolchildren had to read since 1960, served "the new state as an emotional basis". According to Geipel, the novel went through several "censorship loops" before it was published. Apitz himself named Walter Ulbricht his "sharpest censor" in an interview . “The entanglement of the communist resistance in the camp with the SS” does not appear in the novel. The presentation in the novel that Stefan Jerzy Zweig owes his survival to the communists in the camp rather than to his Jewish father, who is not even mentioned in the novel, is wrong. The solidarity of Jewish and Communist prisoners highlighted in the novel by no means affected all Jewish prisoners, which the novel withholds. The Jewish Buchenwald survivor Marko Feingold , who was not a communist, reports that a communist block elder decided who could become a bricklayer and thus avoid deportation. The block elder saved communist prisoners from deportation and "sacrificed" non-communist Jewish prisoners.

expenditure

  • First edition: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 1958.
  • Extended new edition based on the first edition, with documentation of the multiple editing and revision of the original text by Bruno Apitz and an afterword by Susanne Hantke and Angela Drescher. Edited by Susanne Hantke and Angela Drescher. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-351-03390-3 .
Translations
  • Danish: Nøgen blandt ulve,
  • English: Naked among wolves, translated by Edith Anderson. Berlin 1960.
  • Esperanto: Nuda inter lupoj, translated by Karl Schulze. Leipzig 1974.
  • Finnish: Alastomana susien parissa. 1961.
  • French: Nu parmi les loups, translated by Y.-P. Loreilhe. Paris 1961.
  • Italian: Nudo tra i lupi, translated by Agnese Silvestri Giorgi. Milan 1961.
  • Lithuanian: Nuogas tarp vilkų , Vilnius 1965.
  • Portuguese: Nu entre lobos. Lisbon 1982.
  • Russian: Golye sredi volkov, Moskva, 1976
  • Swedish: Naken bland vargar, translated by Ture Nerman. Stockholm 1960.
  • Turkish: Kurtlar arasında çıplak, translated from English by Alaattin Bilgi. Ankara 1986.
  • Hungarian: Farkasok közt védtelen, translated by István Nagy Kristó in 1960.
  • Spanish: Desnudo entre lobos, translated by Ernesto Kroch . Montevideo 1966.

Nackt unter Wölfen was published in 30 languages ​​and had a total circulation of more than two million.

Film adaptations

1960
The novel was made into a film for German TV radio , directed by Georg Leopold . Actors: Fred Delmare , Hans-Peter Minetti , Peter Sturm .
1963
The DEFA filmed the novel titled Naked Among Wolves in 1963, u. a. with Erwin Geschonneck , Fred Delmare , Armin Mueller-Stahl and Gerry Wolff in leading roles, directed by Frank Beyer .
2015
Under the leadership of Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk , the material was filmed in the Czech Vojna Lešetice memorial . The unedited manuscript by Apitz, which was not published during the GDR era, was to serve as the basis for this. The screenplay was written by Stefan Kolditz , the director was Philipp Kadelbach , the producer was u. a. Nico Hofmann . The film premiered on April 1, 2015, close to the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sabine Adler: Buchenwald-Gedenken: Myths and Lies of GDR Antifascism , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, February 3, 2016, accessed on March 6, 2020
  2. ↑ IMDB entry with little data, accessed on April 2, 2015.
  3. ^ GDR classic "Nackt unter Wölfen" is being filmed again ( memento from February 23, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), on mdr.de from February 21, 2014.