Peter Dane (poet)

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Peter Dane (born May 17, 1921 as Nikolaus ('Klaus') Dschenffzig); † July 29, 2016 in Russell ) was a Berlin- born New Zealand poet , environmentalist and university professor.

Life

Berlin, England and Australia

Peter Dane was born as Nikolaus ('Klaus') Dschenffzig and only later took on his new name in an Australian internment camp . His mother came from an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin ; his father was a lawyer. As the leader of a group of friends in his Berlin " Kiez ", Dane was initially safe from attacks by members of the Hitler Youth , but after the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were introduced , a forward-looking aunt convinced Dane to go to England to escape the terror of the Nazis and continue his English studies. So Dane narrowly escaped the Shoah , in which other family members, such as his grandmother, were murdered. In England Dane met his future wife Gabriele (née Hermann), who had come to London from Germany on one of the last Kindertransportes .

After the outbreak of World War II , Dane worked as a stoker in an Oxford hospital and as a farm hand before he was interned. During the war, Dane spent 999 days in internment camps, first on the Isle of Man and later as ' Dunera Boy ' in Australia. During his Australian internment, Dane organized a private academy with like-minded internees where they taught each other a variety of subjects including math, astronomy , Esperanto, and calligraphy .

East Africa, New Zealand

After the war, Dane studied theology, ancient Greek, English and mathematics at the University of London and Leicester University College . In 1952 he finished his studies. A friend who had also fled Germany, Werner Pelz, who had become an Anglican priest, encouraged Dane to write poetry in English and German. Early influences on Dane's own worldview and writings included the Rabbi Jesus , the English Metaphysical Poets , William Blake , Karl Marx and Martin Buber . After graduating, Dane and his family went to Uganda , where he worked as a university lecturer for eight years.

In 1961, Dane moved to New Zealand , where he became a lecturer in English at the University of Auckland . He quickly developed an interest in New Zealand literature and became a colleague, teacher, and friend of several generations of post-colonial New Zealand writers and scholars. His early dialog partners and correspondents included James K. Baxter , Allen Curnow, and RAK Mason ; to his students and colleagues Carolyn Kelly, Murray Edmonds and Whiti Ihimera. Danes academic research and teaching focused on John Donne , Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad .

Dane also translated poems from German to English and vice versa, including romantic poems by Novalis . As a co-founder of Friends of the Earth, New Zealand, Dane has been actively involved in many biodiversity enhancement and restoration projects in Northland and the Bay of Islands . He was also the organizer of protests against nuclear tests and armaments in the Pacific. Dane tried to incorporate indigenous ideas and practices into the environmental activism of the Friends of the Earth. With the blessing of Gabi Dane, who died in 2005, Dane married Evelyn Heke, a close friend of his first wife. Evelyn Heke is a descendant of the Māori chief Hone Heke . On July 29, 2016, Peter Dane died in Russell; he was buried in a Mores cemetery in Northland.

With advice and editorial support from fellow New Zealand writers Elspeth Sandy, Riemke Ensing and Denys Trussell, Dane published a number of volumes of poetry in the last years of his life. These include The Albatross is Dead (2002), Loving Art (2004), Past Present (2005), Timeless Love (2007) and Undone (2008).

In his poems, Dane used traditional poetic genres and metrics in modern contexts. Above all, the poetic form of the sonnet was reactivated by him to illustrate and discuss topics such as spirituality , personal relationships and environmental politics. For Dane, poetry, art, and education potentially have a spiritual dimension that points beyond instrumental knowledge and social conventions; about the transcendence of art, Dane says:

“Art - and all of poetry in religion, philosophy, and pure mathematics - is a constant reminder that our knowledge, useful as it may be, is deceptive, limited, and misleading. Knowledge shifts our inner movements - emotions, longings, the feeling of unfulfilled needs and desires, our thinking and our highest goals - to what seems achievable: career, success, wealth, control, certainty, power. Art, however, insists on experience and an unfinished learning process that point to the inaccessible perfection that they intend. Experience needs leisure; Art, in the process of experience that it demands, transcends time into its own silence - and towards a deeper stillness that goes beyond that. "

Dane's poetic work, his unusual biography and his humorous dialogical way of communicating also attracted attention from German-speaking cultural scholars. The civil rights activist and writer Freya Klier , who visited him several times in Russell, dedicated a chapter of her New Zealand book to him; An interview film (English, with passages in German) with Dane was made in 2010 under the title Past Present , which was sponsored by the German Embassy in Wellington . Dane corresponded with the writer and lawyer Bernhard Schlink , among others .

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Norman Franke: What lies beyond. Mimesis and transcendence in the portrait poetry and poetic translations of Peter Dane . In: Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies , (5.1 / 2017), pp. 59–74
  • Freya Klier: Promised New Zealand. Escape to the end of the world. Structure, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3746671031 .
  • Freya Klier: End of an Odyssey. In: Die Welt from December 12, 2009,  online

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Past Present. A documentary film about the poet and environmentalist Peter Dane. In: YouTube. Retrieved August 13, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b Norman Franke: What lies beyond. Mimesis and transcendence in the portrait poetry and poetic translations of Peter Dane . In: Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies , (5,1 / 2017), pp. 61–62
  3. ^ Graham Carey: Obituary: The Rev Werner Pelz. August 13, 2006, accessed August 12, 2020 .
  4. ^ Norman Franke: What lies beyond. Mimesis and transcendence in the portrait poetry and poetic translations of Peter Dane . In: Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies , (5,1 / 2017), p. 72
  5. ^ Norman Franke: What lies beyond. Mimesis and transcendence in the portrait poetry and poetic translations of Peter Dane . In: Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies , (5,1 / 2017), p. 69
  6. ↑ Peter Dane: Loving Art . Hudson Cresset, Auckland, New Zealand 2004, ISBN 0-9597894-7-2 , pp. 84 (translation by Norman Franke) .
  7. ↑ Freya Klier: End of an Odyssey . In: THE WORLD . December 12, 2009 ( welt.de [accessed August 13, 2020]).
  8. ^ Klaus Peter Dane: Dane, Klaus Peter, 1921-2016: Papers. January 1, 1921, accessed August 13, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Dane, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dschenffzig, Nikolaus (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand poet, environmentalist and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1921
DATE OF DEATH 29th July 2016