Paul Nizan

Paul Nizan (around 1940)

Paul-Yves Nizan (born February 7, 1905 in Tours , † May 23, 1940 died in Audruicq near Dunkirk ) was a French writer .

Life

Paul Nizan was a politically active journalist , critic, and novelist . He came from a Breton family of railway workers and studied philosophy at the École normal supérieure , made the acquaintance of Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre , agrégation in philosophy, became a tutor in Aden in 1926/27 , joined the Communist Party in 1927 , worked with Sartre in 1928 together: translation of General Psychopathology by Jaspers .

He worked on numerous left-wing magazines such as La Revue marxiste , Europe , Commune , La Littérature internationale and worked as a journalist for L'Humanité and Ce Soir . In 1934 he stayed in the USSR , took an active part in the fight against Franquism , wrote reports on the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and worked in 1938 on the Cahiers du Bolchévisme .

The Prix ​​Interallié was awarded to him for his last novel La Conspiration (German The Conspiracy ). In 1939 he resigned from the KP in protest against the German-Soviet non-aggression pact . In 1940 he fell at the front.

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As a staunch Marxist , Nizan was unacceptable to the right and has been suspect for the left, which believes in Stalin, since he left the Communist Party . Since the new editions of the youth essays Aden Arabie and Les Chiens de garde, there has been increased interest in Nizan again.

In his youth writings in particular, Nizan appears as a young bourgeois who was in conflict with the society of his epoch and wanted to escape its repressive mechanism - a committed, angry intellectual who rebelled against state authority and was thus a forerunner of the May events of 1968 .

In addition to the two youth publications, Nizan wrote three novels, which were strongly influenced by his own biography and which already hinted at the socialist existentialism of French post-war literature. Antoine Bloyé describes the life of Nizan's father, adapted and worn down by the world of work, Le cheval de Troie (German The Trojan Horse ) describes the life of communist teachers in the hostile environment of a small-town high school, La conspiration has the artificial and purely verbal "conspiracies" the subject of an upper-class youth who cannot do anything with their lives.

Works

• Aden Arabia . Rieder, Paris 1931 (transl. Traugott König: Aden. Die Wachhunde. Two pamphlets foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. Reinbek, Rowohlt 1969) ibid. 1993 ISBN 3-499-40096-0
• Les Chiens de garde . Rieder, Paris 1932 (Translated from the same. In the West German edition attached to the previous title. Separately: Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 1981)
• Antoine Bloyé . Grasset, Paris 1933 (Translated from Gerda Scheffel: Das Leben des Antoine B. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1974 and others; construction, Berlin 1977; Dumont, Cologne 2005)
• Le Cheval de Troie . Gallimard, Paris 1935 (Transl. Wolfgang Klein: The Trojan Horse were attached: Transl. Lothar Baier: The Conspiracy and Transl. Delf Schmidt & W. Klein: Essays 1932-1938 Aufbau, Berlin 1979)
• La Conspiration . Gallimard, Paris 1938 (for translation see previous: The Conspiracy at Rogner & Bernhard, Munich 1975; as well as in the aforementioned edition; also: Europa, Vienna 1994)
• Chronique de septembre . Gallimard, Paris 1939
• Pour a nouvelle culture . Articles de Nizan, réunis et présentés par Susan Suleiman. Grasset, Paris 1971 (Translated by Delf Schmidt: For a new culture. Essays on literature and politics in France Reinbek near Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1973)

Machining

• Philippe Madral: Die Demonstration Übers. Elke Kummer (French: La manifestation after Le cheval de Troie manuscript, Verlag Bloch, Berlin 1979, 72 p., Not in trade)

Web links

Commons : Paul Nizan  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Paul Nizan in the catalog of the German National Library
• [1] In the OPAC of the BNF ⇒ Nizan, Paul
• La nature et l'anthropologie dans Antoine Bloyé de Paul Nizan