Peter Jokostra

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Peter Jokostra (1992)

Peter Jokostra (born May 5, 1912 in Dresden - Trachau ; † January 21, 2007 in Berlin ; actually Heinrich Ernst Knolle ) was a writer and literary critic .

Life

Jokostra grew up in Spremberg / Niederlausitz as the son of the city pharmacist. His artistic and literary interest, intensively promoted by his teachers at the Spremberg high school, met with little understanding at home. After graduating from high school, he studied psychology , literature and art history in Munich , Frankfurt am Main , and most recently in Berlin . Here he published his first poems under the pseudonym Peter Berg.

At the beginning of 1933 he broke off his studies and turned - in a radical departure from his previous life - to agriculture. The young Jokostra was first in the Masurian Przytullen as Gutseleve active and operational in 1935 as a farmer a private courtyard. He dealt with his time as a farmer in Mecklenburg, among other things, in the novel Damals in Mecklenburg . The farm was in Liepen (today part of Hohen Wangelin in the Mecklenburg Lake District ). His activity as a farm owner was marked by economic setbacks and legal disputes over the question of whether Jokostra could work as an hereditary farm farmer within the meaning of the Reich Hereditary Farm Act . As a result, he was denied the status of “hereditary farmer” and the associated legal advantages. This and a devastating farm fire led Jokostra to sell the farm in 1940. In 1941 he was drafted into military service.

In the winter battle off Moscow he experienced the bloody inferno of the war, after which his decision to desertion matured. At first he evaded the front line by simulating and was taken to a sanatorium in Allenstein . In January 1945 he traveled as a deserter from Olsztyn to Malga where him the village teacher Janusz Ochlast got a hiding. In East Prussia he was denounced before a court martial, but was saved from conviction by the arrival of Soviet tanks. In his autobiographical novel The Great Laughter (1974), Jokostra reported on his time as a deserter.

As a personal consequence of the Nazi dictatorship , he joined the KPD after his release from British captivity and returned to Spremberg. There he was a teacher and worked as a cultural advisor in the newly founded Kulturbund . Against his will, he was appointed as a school councilor by the Soviet occupying forces.

His friendship with Erwin Strittmatter (1912–1994), who - also from Spremberg - was later to become the first secretary of the writers' association and writer close to the state, was to become a multiple national prize winner of the GDR during this time. Both authors have incorporated episodes from this time together in their works, Strittmatter, for example, intensively in his miracle worker trilogy .

Jokostra's urn in the columbarium at the Wilmersdorf cemetery in Berlin

In 1953 Jokostra went to Chemnitz / Karl-Marx-Stadt as a lecturer and lecturer , and received the culture award from the Ministry of Culture for poetry publications. After the publication of his volume of poems On the sunny wall, he was branded as a “decadent author” and before the imminent arrest he fled with Annemarie Cibulka, Hanns Cibulka's first wife , via southern France to the Federal Republic . There he worked in the press and radio in Munich and from 1962 freelance writer.

Jokostra subsequently campaigned against the publication of GDR authors loyal to the regime in the Federal Republic. In an open letter published in the newspaper Die Welt in 1962 he asked the Luchterhand publishing house to give up the planned complete edition of the works of Anna Seghers (a “communist functionary”). Jokostra also protested against publications by Stephan Hermlin in the Federal Republic of Germany under the (false) claim that Hermlin was a leading functionary of the FDJ . According to his own information, Jokostra prevented the publication of works by Erwin Strittmatter in S. Fischer Verlag by intervening with the publishing director Rudolf Hirsch .

In Jokostra's novel Homesickness for Masuria , several contemporaries from his time as Gutseleve in Masuria recognized themselves and felt offended by the portrayal, which resulted in a controversy about the limits of artistic freedom and a criminal case against Jokostra. Jokostras Verlag Langen Müller then withdrew the second edition of the novel and was prompted to make a "loyalty donation" of DM 30,000  to the East Prussian Landsmannschaft as reparation. In contrast, well-known personalities, such as Ingeborg Drewitz , publicly sided with Jokostra

Member of the PEN since 1972 , Jokostra received for his work a. a. the Andreas Gryphius Prize and the Art Prize of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate .

plant

Jokostra's poetry is influenced by legends in his Wendish homeland on the Spree , the vast Lusatian forest and heathland, as well as by encounters in the former German east beyond the Oder and Lusatian Neisse .

His poetry, including his prose , remains suspicious of all political and social constraints, especially of politicized poetry in the service of a particular power group. Passionately taking sides for outsiders and the humiliated, he countered the taboo and repression of the past in the affluent society with something else: the power of memory.

In the stories Kossack and others , Matheis Ende and Brandheide , Jokostra is a companion and contemporary witness of his Lusatian homeland, as the essay The Spreewald - Vision of a Landscape shows him as a first fiery fighter against the threat of environmental damage as early as 1964, a topic that others only later discovered for themselves.

Also to be mentioned are Jokostra's radio documentaries, for example about Treblinka , the Sorbs and Wends in the GDR, about Aragon or the Paris Commune .

Jokostra's publications include four novels, five volumes of poetry, various workshop, non-fiction and travel books, and he is represented with contributions in more than 80 anthologies. The largest collection of Jokostra literature currently available is on permanent private loan in the Spree-Neisse district library in Spremberg. In homesickness for Masuria , he wrote down his memories of his youth in East Prussia , which were reprinted several times.

As a recognized literary critic and editor of anthologies, Jokostra was in correspondence with important writers of the 20th century, his encounters and correspondence with Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski are archived in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the processing of the correspondence between Peter Jokostra and Erwin Strittmatter is still pending.

Selected poems

  • Camargue (lived once and never again)
  • June legend (conjure up the evening before the silence falls over us)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Benjamin Voss, Bernhard Ströbele: Jokostra - The Mecklenburg year . In: Natural and regional studies . No. 4-6 , 2017, ISSN  1611-3829 , p. 66-80 .
  2. ↑ Guntram Vesper : Berlin's darkest train station and a place condemned to death. In: neue deutsche literature , 1991, p. 139, ISSN  0028-3150 .
  3. ↑ Klaus Krause: Erwin Strittmatter and Peter Jokostra - In search of a secret friendship . In: Carsten Gansel, Matthias Braun (ed.): It's about Erwin Strittmatter or the argument about memory . Göttingen 2012, ISBN 3-89971-997-2
  4. ↑ Hermann Kant : To the documents . Berlin 1980, pp. 37-41.
  5. ↑ Home: Knolles stories . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1984 ( online ).
  6. ^ Frankfurter Rundschau of April 16, 1984
  7. ↑ The two poems are from: Hans Bender (Ed.): Gegenpiel. German poetry since 1945 . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1962
personal data
SURNAME Jokostra, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Knolle, Heinrich (real name); Berg, Peter (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden - Trachau
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 2007
Place of death Berlin