Reinhard Baumgart

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Reinhard Baumgart (born July 7, 1929 in Breslau , Province of Lower Silesia ; † July 2, 2003 in Gavardo , Italy) was a German writer , literary and theater critic.

Life

Baumgart was born the son of a doctor and a nurse in a suburb of Wroclaw. Towards the end of the war , the father was transferred to Königshütte in Upper Silesia. While fleeing from there, Baumgart survived the big bomb attack on Dresden in February 1945 at the age of 15 . He worked for relatives in the Allgäu until he was allowed to go to school again. After graduating from high school in 1947, Baumgart studied history, English and literature at the universities of Munich , Glasgow and Freiburg , where he received his doctorate from Walther Rehm on irony from Thomas Mann in 1953 (Mann took good note of the dissertation, as can be seen in the diaries published later ). After a year as a German lecturer at Manchester University , Baumgart decided against a university career. From 1955 to 1962 he worked as an editor (among others for Ingeborg Bachmann ) at Piper Verlag , then as a freelance writer and critic.

From 1957, Baumgart was regularly invited by Hans Werner Richter to the meetings of Group 47 , as a publisher's representative, critic, and also as an author. In public he was mainly known as a literary and theater critic. Baumgart first wrote for the Süddeutsche Zeitung , for a while in a monthly column for the Spiegel , then mainly in Die Zeit .

In the early 1970s he was at the side u. a. by Dieter Lattmann four years Deputy Chairman of the German Writers 'Association , which began at this time intensively to improve the situation of writers and journalists (u. a. was created as a result of this commitment, the artists' social welfare ).

Baumgart moved in many literary and journalistic forms. His only novel The Lion Garden (1961) received a lot of attention and was translated. In 1962 he published his second narrative work, Hausmusik, an unconventionally constructed family chronicle from the Nazi era . This book was decidedly panned in the time of Marcel Reich-Ranicki , which was judged by observers to be the result of the rivalry between these two critics, who were influential at the time and of very different types. When Baumgart then published a critical review of the Reich-Ranicki-Werk Deutsche Literatur in Ost und West in Spiegel , Reich-Ranicki understood it as an act of revenge with an anti-Semitic background.

After this conflict, Baumgart initially wrote hardly any fictional prose; it was not until 1967 that another volume of short stories appeared (Battleship Potjomkin). He published reviews and essays on literature, was a. a. In 1966 Adorno invited him to the Frankfurt Poetics Lecture and fundamentally opposed the then strong tendency towards documentary representation (The Repressed Fantasy), in which independent literary language hardly played a role. In the 1970s and 1980s he was a member of the jury for the Berlin Theatertreffen for a total of eight years .

It was not until 2002 that Baumgart published another volume with stories: Glück und Schorben. He had never let go of the “real”, literary writing as a longing and vanishing point of his versatility.

Baumgart liked to say that with his frequent genre changes he “sat between all stools”. The medium of film also attracted him theoretically and practically. All of his cinematic works relate to historical persons or literary works and are therefore not purely fictional in this sense. Baumgart first made a film for television with director Michael Mrakitsch about García Lorca , then two about the elective affinities and Wilhelm Meister in a Goethe series on Hessischer Rundfunk . This was followed by the script Summer in Lesmona for a six-part television series by Peter Beauvais based on the diary letters of a young woman from Bremen in the last decades of the 19th century (played by Katja Riemann in her film debut ; the production was awarded four Adolf Grimme Gold Awards , among others for Baumgart's script).

Baumgart took up the topic of elective affinities, which had already been dealt with on film, in a play Elective Affinities . Another play, Jettchen Gebert's story, was based on a novel by Georg Hermann that was very popular in the early 20th century (premiered in 1978 at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin ). After Baumgart later became a Richard Wagner lover, he wrote the script: Wahnfried. Pictures of a marriage, which was filmed in 1985 by Peter Patzak with Otto Sander as Wagner.

Reinhard Baumgart's grave in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

From 1990 until his retirement in 1997, Baumgart held the former chair for literary studies of Walter Höllerer at the TU Berlin .

His life was shaped by the cultural, political, and especially left-wing intellectual debates and tensions of his time, which also led to conflicts in his personal friendships (for example with Uwe Johnson , Martin Walser , Jürgen Habermas ). Baumgart eventually wrote his autobiography Back then. A life in Germany. This was published posthumously in 2004, because a few days after he had finished working on this manuscript, he died completely unexpectedly on July 2, 2003 after a brief severe fever, probably as a result of a viral infection. The burial took place in the state-owned cemetery Heerstraße in Berlin-Westend (grave location: 11-A-6/7).

Reinhard Baumgart was married to the Romance philologist, translator and author Hildegard Baumgart since 1954 and has two daughters and a son with her.

Fonts

Essays

  • Numerous essays, especially for the time in Hamburg .
  • Literature for contemporaries. Essays . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1966.
  • The repressed imagination 20 essays on art and society . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1973, ISBN 3-472-61129-4 .
  • Traces of love. A reading tour through world literature . Hanser, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-446-19920-9 .

Autobiography

prose

  • The lion garden. Novel . Dtv, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-423-10999-8 (based on the Olten 1961 edition).
  • House music. A German family album . Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / M. 1989, ISBN 3-596-29574-2 (reprint of the Olten 1962 edition).
  • Armored cruiser Potjomkin. Twelve stories . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1967.
  • Jettchen Gebert's story. A piece based on two novels by Georg Hermann . In: Theater Today. Die Theaterzeitschrift , Vol. 19 (1984), Issue 4, pp. 33-44, ISSN  0040-5507 .
  • Wahnfried. Pictures of a marriage . Hanser, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-446-14310-6 .
  • Luck and broken pieces. Three long stories, four short ones . Hanser, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-446-20207-2 .

Non-fiction

  • The ironic and the irony in the works of Thomas Mann . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 1974, ISBN 3-548-03085-8 (also dissertation, University of Freiburg / B. 1963).
  • Prospects of the novel or does literature have a future? Frankfurt lectures . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1968.
  • Spirit of happiness and soul of woe. About life and writing, reason and literature . Hanser, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-446-14654-7 .
  • Forgetfulness. Three ways to the work: Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka , Bertolt Brecht . Hanser, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-446-15744-1 .
  • Resurrection and death of Joseph Roth . Three views . Hanser, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-446-16207-0 .
  • Contemporary German literature. Reviews. Essays, Comments, 1959-1993 . Hanser, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-446-17679-9 .
  • Addio. Farewell to literature. Variations on an ancient theme . Hanser, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-446-18267-5 .

Awards and honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 483.
personal data
SURNAME Baumgart, Reinhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw , Lower Silesia Province
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 2003
Place of death Gavardo , Italy