Napoleon Seyfarth

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Napoleon Seyfarth , also Hans-Joachim Seyfarth-Hermann (born August 31, 1953 in Ludwigshafen - Oggersheim , † December 2, 2000 in Berlin ) was a German writer , author and anti- AIDS activist.

Life

Napoleon Seyfarth was born in the Palatinate town of Oggersheim as the son of a bar owner and a housewife. He grew up with his paternal grandparents in Bad Dürkheim . Seyfarth graduated from high school in Ludwigshafen, studied psychology in Mannheim and became a post office worker in Berlin.

Act

In 1975 he visited Rosa von Praunheim's film "It is not the homosexual that is perverse, but the situation in which he lives ". The Heidelberg gay group "Homo Heidelbergensis" had invited to the cinema. After a short evening visit to the university town on the Neckar, he founded the first gay group in the industrial city, the SchAM (Schwule Aktion Mannheim).

Autograph (1992)

In 1980 Seyfarth moved to (West) Berlin. He earned his living during the semester break of his studies in psychology as an employee of the telephone directory assistance in the Berlin telecommunications office . As an author he worked as a columnist for the Victory Column .

He became part of the gay Berlin subculture. The beginnings of the gay movement and its emancipation in the 1980s were his themes. Groups such as the AHA ( General Homosexual Working Group Berlin ), which was launched a few years after the founding of the HAW ( Homosexual Action Westberlin ) as its competing alternative, stand for this phase. In 1988 he was diagnosed with HIV . He lived with the virus for ten years until he got AIDS.

With his autobiographical novel " Pigs Must Be Naked. A Life with Death ", published in 1991, Seyfarth caused a sensation throughout Germany. The book was one of the first major works of German fiction on AIDS and at the same time a contemporary history of the homosexual movement (s) in the Electoral Palatinate.

In it he describes the odyssey of a gay man as the offspring of a broken marriage, who grew up in the 1950s / 1960s in the middle-class atmosphere of his grandparents' care and was looking for an equal place in society. Seyfarth describes his experiences with the goals and values ​​of the bourgeois world and the anti-bourgeois, revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But he also describes his search for a self-determined, upright life without playing hide-and-seek and without the persecution of § 175 . Again and again he is tormented by his compulsion to take on roles that may earn him the applause of the audience. “And secretly wished that this applause was for one's own person and not for the role,” says Seyfarth in his autobiographical novel. At the end of the book there is death from AIDS, which he first witnessed in other protagonists until he finally becomes affected himself.

Napoleon Seyfarth surprised with a previously unknown openness and directness: listeners in readings, journalists in interviews, health politicians in TV talk shows - everyone was impressed by this self-confidence and the devotion with which he named the topics AIDS, illness and death and for advertised an open discussion about it. But he also loved to provoke his audience, for example by addressing his physical handicap - which also led to an underdeveloped thin arm - and praising its suitability for extreme sexual practices (e.g. BDSM ).

Napoleon (top left) staged his funeral in the chapel of the Old St. Matthew Cemetery for television back in 1995. As a mourning queen: Ovo Maltine .
Napoleon Seyfarth burial site

He described himself as a "writer, videographer, psychologist, bon vivant". Seyfarth was increasingly stylized as a media figure. He liked to surround himself with dark and macabre accessories; his coffin, in which he was to be buried, was set up in his apartment on Motzstrasse in Berlin . This Christmas present from an undertaker friend of mine was varnished in 1994 according to his wishes and painted with drawings of angels with pig faces. He also used it as a champagne cooler at parties. His funeral, which he planned well in advance, became one of the final staging of his personality and unusual lifestyle.

In March 1989 he married a lesbian "so that she could get my widow's pension," as he said. From then on he carried the official name of Hans-Joachim Seyfarth-Hermann . His calling card was in this name; it was supplemented with the inscription "Visit Napoleon while he is still around".

Napoleon Seyfarth died on December 2, 2000 after refusing to undergo targeted drug therapy to the last. He was buried in the Old St. Matthew Cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg. He had given his literary estate to the Schwules Museum * Berlin while he was still alive .

Seyfarth was a member of the worldwide operating order of the sisters of perpetual indulgence .

Works

From Napoleon Seyfarth

About Napoleon Seyfarth

  • 2009: "The end of the pig is the beginning of the sausage" ; Short documentary, directed by John Heys

Reviews

Too pigs have to be naked. A life with death :

"His constant and accurate irony makes the reader a laughing voyeur at the rendezvous with death ... Seyfarth's irony is limitless, and hardly a sentence does not offer at least a brilliant play on words, a shocking allusion or a tasteless comparison."

- Marc Fest : taz

“A kind of sexual Bildungsroman ... a kind of moral history of the FRG: exactly, freely. Hard and amazingly funny "

- Matthias Frings : Sender Free Berlin

"One of the best and most important gay books in German-language literature."

- Thomas Held : Gay Express

Web links

Commons : Napoleon Seyfarth  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Reading sample from the Edition Diá publishing house ( Memento of the original from February 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. editiondia.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.editiondia.de
  2. Say goodbye with a smile . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1995 ( online ).
  3. Ulrich Kraetzer: The life artist as a dying artist . In: Berliner Zeitung , October 26, 2000
  4. ^ The great Oggersheimer: Napoleon Seyfarth in profile . In: Pink Power - Berlin's gay city magazine , 1st year, No. 7, September 1991, p. 17.
  5. ^ 1. Penitent Napoleon Seyfarth on indulgenz.de
  6. Entry ( Memento of the original from April 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at filmportal.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.filmportal.de
  7. ↑ Table of contents on the director's homepage ( Memento of the original from June 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. johnheys.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.johnheys.de