Peter Kast

Peter Kast , actually Carl Preißner , (born August 1, 1894 in Elberfeld , † May 23, 1959 in East Berlin ) was a German writer and journalist.

biography

Family, education and work

Preissner, later Kast, was the son of a social democratic cooper and union official. The mother came from a family of nine miners from the Ruhr area.
After leaving school, he completed an apprenticeship in a building and art locksmith's shop and then worked in various companies. He is said to have been a fan of the FC Schalke 04 soccer club. In 1912 he joined the Free Metal Workers Association but was not active himself. In January 1913 he volunteered for technical service in the Navy.

From around 1921 he was his first marriage to the communist Cläre Preißner, b. Mehlhase (1900–1991) married; Both had a son. The marriage ended in divorce in the 1920s. In his second marriage, he was married to the writer Helga Höffken-Kast (1904–1990) from 1947.

Politician, editor, writer

He was a member of the KPD and the BPRS and lived in Berlin as a delegate of the Emden Workers 'and Soldiers' Council from 1918 . From 1928 to 1932 he was a workers correspondent for the KPD party newspaper Die Rote Fahne . Around 1929 he then worked under the name Peter Kast. The reasons for his name change are unknown. In 1932, as editor in charge of the Rote Fahne, he was sentenced to three months in prison and imprisoned in Berlin-Spandau .

At the end of 1932 he managed to escape to Prague . When he was expelled in 1935, he went to the Soviet Union and then to France . From June 1937 to the beginning of 1939 he was in Spain and took part in the Spanish Civil War on the part of the Republic . He worked for the International Brigades at the base in Albacete and in the Commissariat in Madrid . As an experienced editor, Kast was part of the "publishing" staff of the Interbrigades and wrote about Spain's struggle for newspapers and magazines. B. for Le Volontaire de la Liberté and the DVZ. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, he fled to France and was interned there, first in the St. Cyprien camp and later in Les Milles . From there he managed to escape to Switzerland , where he was interned again.

tomb

In 1945 he was able to return to Berlin and from 1946 became editor of Vorwärts . From 1951 he worked as a freelance journalist in the GDR and developed a lively writing activity with novels, stories and children's books. His story Die Nacht im Grenzwald was filmed in 1968 by DEFA under the same title . On June 24, 1960, a street in Berlin-Adlershof was named after him that was previously called Radickestrasse and has been called that again since January 1, 1992.

His urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the memorial of the socialists at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried.

Works

• Racocrats (satire)
• The German war pilot appeared in several editions of Le Volontaire de la Liberté
• The pear tree, Moscow 1939
• The million dollar treasure from Müggelsee, Berlin 1951
• The night in the border forest, Berlin 1952
• The party order, in: Weinert, E. (selected and introduced): The flag of solidarity. German writers in the Spanish Freedom Army 1936–1939, Berlin 1953, p. 463ff.
• Hunting on the Autobahn, Berlin 1953
• Company Z ... A ..., Berlin 1953
• The decisive night, Berlin 1954
• The scattered, Berlin 1955
• The Admiral von Kiel, Berlin 1959
• The present, Berlin 1954
• Twenty rifles, Berlin 1960
• Experiences on the long journey, from the estate, Berlin 1963

literature

• Weiskopf, FC: Under strange skies. An outline of German literature in exile 1933–1947, Berlin / Weimar 1981
• Art and literature in anti-fascist exile 1933–1945 in seven volumes. Volume 1: Exile in the USSR, Leipzig 1979
• Art and literature in anti-fascist exile 1933–1945 in seven volumes. Volume 6: Exile in the Netherlands and in Spain, Leipzig 1981, p. 350f.
• Preissner, Karl (Kast) . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Kast in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Kast archive in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin