Reinhard Jirgl

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Reinhard Jirgl (2013)
Reinhard Jirgl at the Leipzig Book Fair 2013

Reinhard Jirgl (born January 16, 1953 in Berlin ) is a German writer . In 2010 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize by the German Academy for Language and Poetry .

Life

Reinhard Jirgl spent his childhood with his grandmother in Salzwedel until he returned to his parents in Berlin in 1964 at the age of eleven, both of whom were interpreters . From 1960 he attended the polytechnic high school up to the 10th grade and at the same time made an apprenticeship as an electrical mechanic from the 8th grade , which he also completed in 1970. From 1970 Jirgl was in working life and made up for his Abitur at night school. From 1971 to 1975 he studied electronics at the Humboldt University in Berlin . At that time there were decisive impulses for his literary development in the Köpenick poetry seminar. This is where authors met who presented their manuscripts and worked on their texts with great intensity, with the advice of the poets Ulrich and Charlotte Grasnick . This group of poems included u. a. Benjamin Stein , Monika Helmecke , Fritz Leverenz , Elisabeth Hackel, Andreas Diehl, Michael Manzek and Klaus Rahn. He completed his studies as a university engineer and then worked at a research institute of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin-Adlershof as a service engineer. In 1978 he gave up the unpopular profession and moved to the Volksbühne in Berlin as a lighting and service technician . Jirgl has lived as a freelance writer in Berlin since 1996. He is a member of the PEN Center Germany and since 2009 of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . At the beginning of 2017, Jirgl “withdrew completely from the public” according to the information on the Hanser literary publishers ' website . He refrained from readings and other appearances, “as well as any publication of his manuscripts that are still being created. All newly written texts remain in private ownership ”.

plant

The beginning of his authorship, which initially developed in writing “ for the drawer ”, took him to the Volksbühne in East Berlin in 1978, where he found time to write and was significantly supported by Heiner Müller . In an interview, Jirgl u. a. Michel Foucault , Georges Bataille , Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt as important influencing factors of an "intellectual counter-existence" in the GDR, which was reflected in his literature.

Jirgl belonged to the younger generation of authors in the GDR who increasingly took up experimental forms during the 1980s. Jirgl's manuscripts remained unprinted in the GDR. His first novel, Mother Father Roman , was rejected by the Aufbau-Verlag in 1985 for ideological reasons. Another five manuscripts written before the fall of the Wall could not be published either. Two decades later, Jirgl summed up his situation as an author without public as follows: "The story of my literary works from the years before 1990 is the story of officially imposed death by suffocation."

In the spring of 1990 Jirgl's first work was finally published by Aufbau-Verlag. The mother father Roman , who takes up the late war and the post-war years with a view to the construction generation of the GDR, already contains the central themes, motifs and idiosyncrasies that also shaped Jirgl's further work. Formally, inner monologues, psycho-narration and dream-like sequences dominate, interweaving memories of the bombing war, violent fantasies and distressing relationships into oppressive images. A “sliding self” (Jirgl) as a difficult to grasp, perspective changing, almost amoral reflection instance also characterizes the later prose texts. His Genealogy of Killing , which was first published in the GDR in the 1980s and published in 2002 . Trilogy , combines heterogeneous text blocks that also work with theatrical elements and media mix - based on the Greek tragedy and libretto staging with tape.

Jirgl's novel Abschied von den Feinden (Munich 1995), the manuscript of which was awarded the Alfred Döblin Prize in 1993, brought him his public breakthrough; The text combines traumatizing family and relationship experiences of two warring brothers with set pieces of GDR existences to create a difficult narrative network in which the narrative situations and fictional levels overlap. The seemingly parallel worlds of FRG and GDR as well as their sudden reunion after the so-called Wende form the foil for Jirgl's figure constellations, which Hundsnächte (Munich 1997) is also linked to: Here one of the brothers vegetates in a ruin in the no man's land of the former inner-German death strip and produces incessantly Script, a "symbol of writing" ( Helmut Böttiger ).

While Jirgl's texts always show the impossibility of escaping one's own past, Die atlantische Mauer (Munich 2000) is about the search for a tabula rasa , attempts to break out and break out of GDR and FRG biographies into the New World; According to some critics, the text that extends to the USA marks a transition in the author's writing project, but this novel, too, is essentially dedicated to the German state of mind. The following works consequently turn back to old Europe in space and time, to the German trauma: Die Unfinendeten (Munich 2003) looks at the expulsion of the Germans from the Sudetenland from broken perspectives , while his novel Abtrünnig (Munich 2005) follows up In a tried and tested manner, a GDR and a FRG biography can run parallel in contemporary Berlin.

Characterization of the work

Basically, Jirgl's interest is first and foremost the disclosure of the " homo homini lupus " that is hidden behind sentences, words and signs: the power relations that allow and produce psychiatric findings. The author's radical skepticism does not allow for excuses, it turns almost solipsistically to a creature corporeality as the ontological last resort and attacks any collectivist or individualistic promises of meaning or redemption.

Even in the post-structuralist style , Jirgl's writing takes Foucault's idea of ​​the subversiveness of literature seriously : Using an unconventional, sometimes " onomatopoeic " spelling and his own sign nomenclature, the author tries to model the text visibly as a body, which at the same time makes its sign character self-reflective is disclosed. Critics of Jirgl's novels sometimes criticize the fact that the character speech is overloaded with essayistic digressions.

Scholarships and Awards

Autograph

Works

literature

  • Friedrich Christian Delius : There has never been so much tension. Laudation [Döblin Prize]. In: Language in the Technical Age 1993, No. 126, pp. 179–198.
  • Erk Grimm: Nightmare Berlin: On the novels of R. Jirgl . In: Monatshefte 86 (1994), pp. 186-200.
  • Christine Cosentino: East German authors in the mid-nineties: Volker Braun, B. Burmeister and Reinhard Jirgl . In: The Germanic Review 1996, No. 71, pp. 177-194.
  • Erk Grimm: Reinhard Jirgl . In: Critical Lexicon for Contemporary German Literature (KLG) , 55th supplement. (January 1, 1997).
  • Werner Jung: Material has to be cooled. Conversation . In: NDL 1998, No. 3, pp. 56-70.
  • Helmut Böttiger : The 13th lighting technician. Reinhard Jirgl. A portrait . In: writing book 2000, No. 54, pp. 101-108.
  • Jan Böttcher : "Accuracy is still a criterion for reality". Conversation with Reinhard Jirgl . In: Berlin booklets for the history of literary life 3, Berlin 2000, ISSN  0949-5371 . Pp. 180-191.
  • Helmut Böttiger: laudation for Reinhard Jirgl . In: Joseph Breitbach Prize . Mainz 2000.
  • Ulrich von Loyen: Staged Impossibility . Conversation with Reinhard Jirgl. In: Kassandra. Literatures 1, Dresden 2000. pp. 7-14.
  • Uwe Pralle: The fly and the spider . Reinhard Jirgl in conversation with Uwe Pralle. In: Schreibheft 2000, No. 54. pp. 109–113.
  • David Clarke, Arne De Winde (Ed.): Reinhard Jirgl . Perspectives, readings, contexts. [Collection of articles]. In: German Monitor 65, Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York, NY 2007, ISBN 978-90-420-2137-2 .
  • Fausto Cercignani : Reinhard Jirgl e il suo «Addio ai nemici» (Farewell to the enemy) . In: Studia theodisca XIV , Milan 2007, pp. 113–129.
  • Karen Dannemann: The bloody-obscene-banal 3-groschen-novel called "Geschichte" . Criticism of society and civilization in Reinhard Jirgl's novels, In: Epistemata , literary studies series. Volume 667. Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8260-4042-9 . (At the same time dissertation at the Humboldt University Berlin 2008).
  • Arne De Winde, Bart Philipsen: Beyond the limits of the bearable . Letter conversation with Reinhard Jirgl. In: nY 3 (2009) / ny-web. ( online )
  • Scen-Eric Wehmeyer: None of you on earth. In: The Science Fiction Year 2013. Edited by Sascha Mamczak , Sebastian Pirling and Wolfgang Jeschke , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 2013, pp. 400–403, ISBN 978-3-453-53444-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FAZ.NET with epd: Most important German literary prize. Reinhard Jirgl awarded the Büchner Prize. October 23, 2010, accessed on October 23, 2010 : “The Berlin writer Reinhard Jirgl was honored with the Georg Büchner Prize 2010 in Darmstadt on Saturday. The 57-year-old author received the award for his epic work, said the President of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Klaus Reichert. In his novels he developed a "haunting, often disturbingly suggestive panorama of German history in the 20th century". "
  2. ↑ a b Reinhard Jirgl . Hanser literary publishers. Retrieved August 20, 2017.
  3. ↑ Cf. Reinhard Jirgl: Schreibwärts or Vergessen - everything forgotten… , in: Renatus Deckert (Ed.): The first book. Writer on her literary debut. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-45864-8 , pp. 288-291, p. 290.
  4. ↑ Thomas Rothschild: All-German quarry . In: Friday , No. 46/2006. (Review of the Renegade novel )
  5. ↑ Gunther Nickel: German CVs, told polyphonically . In: Die Welt from February 28, 2009. (Review of the novel Die Stille .)
personal data
SURNAME Jirgl, Reinhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin