Natascha Wodin

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Natascha Wodin at the Leipzig Book Fair 2017

Natascha Wodin (* December 8, 1945 in Fürth as Natalja Nikolajewna Wdowina ) is a German writer and translator of Ukrainian-Russian descent.

Life

Natascha Wodin was born as a child of Soviet forced laborers and grew up in camps for displaced persons , first in the Valka camp in Nuremberg, then in a settlement in Forchheim . When she was eleven years old, her mother took her own life. Subsequently, the father, who worked as a singer in a Cossack choir, sent her with her younger sister to a Catholic children's home. When her father later worked in a local factory and they lived with him again, she fled his violence into homelessness. Then she worked as a telephone operator and stenographer. At the beginning of the seventies she graduated from a language school and was one of the first interpreters to travel to the Soviet Union for West German companies and cultural institutions after signing the Eastern agreements. In the 1980s she lived temporarily in Moscow, where she met numerous renowned writers.

After giving up the profession of interpreter, she began to translate literature from Russian (including Wenedikt Erofejew , Evgenia Ginsburg , Andrej Bitow , Pawel Sanajew ). She has been a freelance writer since 1980 . She has lived in Berlin and Mecklenburg since 1994 . From 1994 to 2002 she was married to the writer Wolfgang Hilbig . She dedicated her novel Nachtgeschwister (2009) to coming to terms with this relationship experience. Both were strict night workers during these years, hence the title.

Create

In her works, Wodin primarily deals with the topic of uprooting, strangeness and placelessness, with outsiders and border crossers, with the discrepancy between inner and outer reality. In her first work Die Gläserne Stadt , the author describes the first-person narrator's stays in Moscow and her relationship with a Russian writer with autobiographical references and, looking back on her childhood in post-war Germany, the difficult family situation and identity search of the daughter of Russian emigrants in a "Walka" - Camp, a housing estate and a Catholic boarding school. In her novel Nachtgeschwister , she describes a complicated German-German artist relationship. Her novel Age, Foreign Land deals with the disturbing aging process of women. Her novel She came from Mariupol , which deals with the fate of her mother as the daughter of a persecuted aristocratic family in the Soviet Union and as a forced laborer in Germany, was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2017 in the "Fiction" category. The book reached a large audience, it was on the SWR best list and reached 3rd place on the Spiegel bestseller list . The great success of the book freed her from the fear of possible old-age poverty .

"Natascha Wodin has succeeded in creating a valuable piece of literature, a book that is worth reading and instructive, which brings up the unseen and the lost and makes you think about uprooting, foreignness and homelessness," said Birgit Hoyer in the theological online feuilleton feinschwarz.net about the novel . In the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , Helmut Böttiger wrote : "The catastrophic breaches in history of the 20th century are dealt with in miniature in this family research, without great rhetorical effort, but with existential impact". And Uli Hufen expressed hope on Deutschlandfunk :

"Natascha Wodin could succeed what historians do not seem to succeed: to anchor the history of the forced laborers and prisoners of war in the consciousness of a broad public."

Natascha Wodin's works have been translated into numerous languages.

Works

Scholarships / Awards

Wodin in June 2016

literature

  • Petra Thore: "who are you here in this city, in this country, in this new world". The identity balance in foreign countries in selected works of German-language migrant literature (= Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis / Studia Germanistica Upsaliensia , Volume 45), University of Uppsala 2004, ISBN 91-554-5907-2 (Dissertation University of Uppsala 2004, 174 pages, 25 cm full text online PDF, free of charge, accessed on March 23, 2017. Among other things, Natascha Wodin's novel Die Gläserne Stadt ).
  • Katja Suren: "I prefer to have stories with people who eat or are cooked". On the supposedly unifying power of eating with Natascha Wodin and Aglaja Veteranyi . In: Claudia Lillge, Anne-Rose Meyer (Ed.): Intercultural meals. Culinary encounters and communication in literature. Transcript, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-881-0 . Pp. 171-184.
  • Katja Suren: An angel disguised himself as an angel and remained unrecognized: Childlike rhetoric in Natascha Wodin, Herta Müller and Aglaja Veteranyi (= gender studies in cultural studies , volume 5). Helmer , Sulzbach 2011, ISBN 978-3-89741-316-0 , OCLC 920329947 (dissertation, University of Paderborn 2010, 340 pages).)
  • Boris Hoge: "I was my own Nazi" - Natascha Wodin's novel and the problem of racism. In: Ders .: Writing about Russia. The construction of space, history and cultural identity in German narrative texts since 1989 (= contributions to recent literary history , Volume 314). Winter, Heidelberg 2012, pp. 305–346, ISBN 978-3-8253-6133-4 (dissertation University of Münster (Westphalia) 2011, 478 pages, 21 cm).

Web links

Commons : Natascha Wodin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Uli Hufen: What can a person endure? In: deutschlandfunk.de . February 26, 2017, accessed September 9, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Nürnberger Nachrichten of August 9, 2018, p. 7
  3. ↑ Fled from Stalin, ended up with Hitler. In: welt.de . March 23, 2017. Retrieved September 8, 2018 .
  4. Jump up ↑ Long interview program Zwischentonöne with Natascha Wodin from August 4, 2019 , Deutschlandfunk , accessed August 4, 2019
  5. ↑ Birgit Hoyer: Review: She came from Mariupol. In: feinschwarz.net. January 25, 2018, accessed September 8, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Helmut Böttiger : Then the mother plays Chopin . In: The time . No. 11/2017 , March 9, 2017 ( zeit.de ).
  7. ↑ Book info ( Memento of 6 November 2011 at the Internet Archive ) the transcript Verlag . Retrieved December 21, 2010.
  8. ^ List of doctorates at the University of Paderborn . Retrieved December 21, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Wodin, Natascha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Fuerth