Peer Hultberg

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Peer Hultberg (born November 8, 1935 in Vangede , Gentofte Kommune , Denmark , † December 20, 2007 in Hamburg ) was a Danish writer , Slavist and psychoanalyst .

Life

Born in Vangede north of Copenhagen, Peer Hultberg grew up in Horsens and from 1947 to 1953 in Viborg , where his father was a judge . He studied Romance Studies , Musicology and Slavic Studies (with Czech as the main language) at the University of Copenhagen and the University of London . In 1967 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the style of the Polish author Wacław Berent .

From 1963 to 1968 he taught Polish literature in London and from 1968 to 1973 as a professor in Copenhagen. At times he lived in Skopje and Warsaw . From 1973 he trained as a psychoanalyst at the CG Jung Institute in Zurich , among others ; then he opened a practice in Frankfurt am Main . In 1984 Hultberg settled in Hamburg as an author and analyst.

For more than twenty years he lived in a life and artist community with the Swiss painter, photographer and conceptual artist Alfred Wäspi, who illustrated several of his books . Hultberg died in December 2007 of cancer .

plant

Peer Hultberg's literary work is part of European modernism . His breakthrough came in 1985 with the voluminous novel "Requiem", which contains 537 chapters and had a length of 611 pages in the original edition. A new voice is assigned to each of these short chapters, a person with individual pain points and strokes of fate. The different biographies show no immediately recognizable connection to the other chapters and people.

The city of Viborg forms the backdrop for Hultberg's novel Die Stadt und die Welt

Hultberg varied this principle in 1992 in his so-called “novel in a hundred texts” called “The City and the World”. The book is made up of short portraits of a hundred fictional people who lived in the Jutian city ​​of Viborg in the 20th century . An authorial narrator reports distantly and unaffected by their lives, which gradually become more and more interlinked. Turning points in biographies are described with a keen sense of life-critical situations, almost all of which end tragically. Seen in this way, the title of the book, which alludes to the Pope's traditional blessing Urbi et Orbi , should be understood as deeply ironic. The individual, often archetypically contoured figures each briefly emerge with their characteristics and color the narrative speech, which in turn establishes itself as a "voice" that lifts, quickly falls silent and at the end of the chorus of Viborg's singing is hardly perceived as a separate expression becomes. The fragmentary individual texts condense into a fabric that ultimately only the readers can give structure and context. The Danish literary history Litteraturens Veje notes that Hultberg mocks his characters and their failures.

“Preludes”, which appeared in 1989, is an untraditional biographical story about the childhood years of the Polish composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin . The novel consists of an abundance of small sections in which the feelings and thoughts of the artist-to-be are reproduced using impressionistic technology. This structure not least reflects the œuvre of Chopin, who also mainly created smaller, unfinished compositions - preludes , improvisations , waltzes, etc.

Grave of Peer Hultberg in Viborg

After a break of 15 years, during which Hultberg mainly wrote several dramas and radio plays , another major prose work was published in autumn 2007, the novel "One Night" about the decline of a family. The manuscript was written in the mid-1970s, but was rejected by the Danish publisher Hultbergs. The German translation of the book, which was received very positively ("an amazing, big, moving book") appeared six months before the Danish original, which was delivered in spring 2008 under the title Vredens nat (Night of Wrath).

Hultberg translated from German, English, French and Polish, including works by Witold Gombrowicz .

In an obituary, the Copenhagen daily Politiken praised him as a “great writer with roots in continental Europe”. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung described him as "one of the most idiosyncratic voices in Scandinavian literature".

Works

  • Mytologisk landskab med Daphnes forvandling, 1966
  • Desmond !, 1968
  • Requiem (Requiem) , 1985
  • Slagne veje (gauges) , 1988
  • Præludier (Preludes) , 1989
  • Byen og Verden (The City and the World) , 1992
  • Vredens nat (One Night) , 2008
  • Selvbiografi (autobiography) , 2009
  • Brev (letters) , 2009

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Einsam im Schwarm ( Memento from December 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) - Obituary by Jürgen Verdofsky, Frankfurter Rundschau , December 24, 2007
  2. ^ "Lights in the night" - review by Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit , December 13, 2007
  3. ^ Author Peer Hultberg died in Hamburg - "Danish European" - report in the online edition of the literary magazine Die Berliner Literaturkritik , December 23, 2007
  4. ↑ Between the worlds. On the death of the Danish writer Peer Hultberg - obituary by Aldo Keel in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , December 24, 2007
  5. ↑ Review by Brigitte Schwens-Harrant ( memento of March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) in Die Presse, December 1, 2007, accessed July 20, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Hultberg, Peer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish author
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Vangede
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 2007
Place of death Hamburg