Reinhard Lettau

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Reinhard Lettau (born September 10, 1929 in Erfurt , † June 17, 1996 in Karlsruhe ) was a German-American writer .

Life

Lettau grew up in Erfurt and moved with his family to Karlsruhe in 1947, where he passed the Abitur two years later. From 1950 to 1955 he studied German literature in Heidelberg , Cologne and the USA. He then worked as an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in Cambridge , Massachusetts , and at Smith College , Northampton , Massachusetts. During this time he became an American citizen. His dissertation at Harvard in 1960 was titled Utopia and Novel; Investigations into the form of the German utopian novel in the twentieth century .

Then Lettau worked as a freelance writer. From 1962 to 1967 he took part in meetings of the writers' association Group 47 around Hans Werner Richter . In 1965, Lettau returned to Berlin, where he worked as an external editor for the Hanser Verlag and employee at Sender Freie Berlin . He took part in actions of the student movement and made contacts with the extra-parliamentary opposition . When the last meeting of Group 47 in Waischenfeld in Upper Franconia in the powder mill in 1967 was disrupted by protests by the Erlangen SDS , during which Axel Springer's expropriation was demanded and copies of the Bild newspaper were burned, Lettau expressed solidarity with the protesters and was one of them Signing an anti-jumpers resolution of the group, which he presented to the students.

In April 1967, Lettau gave a speech at the Free University of Berlin under the title Von der Servilität der Presse , in which he criticized the West Berlin press as "police and servile" for taking the side of the authorities instead of them check. A subsequent expulsion from Lettau on the grounds that he had been incited against the German police as a foreigner was only withdrawn after long debates. In 1968 Lettau returned to the United States as Professor of German Literature at the University of California in San Diego , California . There, too, he remained politically active and took part in actions against racism and the Vietnam War, in the course of which he was also placed in custody. In the 1970s and 1980s he repeatedly stayed in Germany for long periods of time. In the winter semester 1979/1980 he was "Poet in Residence" at the University of Essen .

In 1954, Lettau married Gene Carter and they had three daughters, Karin (1957), Kevyn (1959) and Katie (1965), who was born shortly after separating from his wife - they divorced in 1968. From 1965 he lived in Berlin-Schöneberg with Véronique Springer, the daughter of the gallery owner Rudolf Springer . They were married from 1969 to 1972. In 1979 Lettau married Dawn Teborski. Since the mid-1970s he has worked several times with artists in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district , e. B. Uwe Bremer , together. From 1991 to 1993 he lived in Grabow in Wendland . During this time he wrote Escape from Guests .

After reunification, Lettau and his wife returned to Berlin after Lettau took early retirement due to health problems in the United States. Lettau was a member of the German Academy of Performing Arts and the West German PEN Center . To protest against the lack of efforts to form an all-German authors' association, he also visited the East German PEN Club. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung in 1995, he stated: “If everyone is on one side anyway, it is not a mistake to be on the wrong side. I no longer need to worry about one side. But the other can be right under certain circumstances. "

Tomb in Berlin-Kreuzberg

In 1996 he traveled to Karlsruhe for his mother's 90th birthday. After a fall, he was taken to the hospital and died of pneumonia . Lettau was buried in Cemetery III of the Jerusalem and New Churches next to ETA Hoffmann's grave in Berlin-Kreuzberg .

Prizes and awards

Works

  • Difficulties building houses (1962)
21 stories about absurd - or rather normal, situations that tip over into the absurd.
American. Edition: Obstacles (1965)
  • Appearance of Manig (1963)
51 short (generally less than a page) descriptions by Manig. We learn a lot about Manig despite the extremely brief but highly precise observations. The first public reading of this book took place at a meeting of Group 47 in Berlin from October 25 to 28, 1962.
  • Group 47 - Report, Criticism, Polemic (1967)
Lettau was both a member of Group 47 and a keen observer of its work. A group of writers usually met once a year to criticize one another's work. Gert Rückel describes a scene towards the end of the time of Group 47, in which Lettau gives a fiery speech for demonstrators.
  • Poems (1968), Literary Colloquium Berlin
  • Enemies (1968)
Three longer and three short stories. The main story, "The Enemy," is a collection of short, grotesque stories about the senseless absurdity of the military. The first public reading took place at a meeting of Group 47 in Princeton / USA from April 22 to 24, 1966. Excerpts were also printed in Kursbuch 7 (1966).
  • Daily Fascism (1971)
Lettau analyzes selected newspaper articles from the USA for six months and discusses the fascist tendencies he sees in them. Topics are workers' problems, student protests, manipulation of the press and racism.
  • Stories that are getting shorter and shorter. And poems and portraits. (1973)
This is a collection of stories written between 1962 and 1968.
  • Breakfast Conversations in Miami (1977)
Where do dictators go when they are deposed? Well, to Miami to await the news that they can return. Lettau imagines dictators meeting for breakfast and discussing business. 43 short breakfast talks on topics ranging from how to avoid assassinations to the benefits of smoking. A radio play version was written by Lettau and the director Walter Adler in the winter of 1978/79 and produced by SDR in Stuttgart in February 1979 .
  • Absent-minded Looking Out - From Writing to Events in the Immediate Area or Far from Desks (1980)
35 short chapters (but long, measured against the Lettau standard) that look at Germany and the problems caused by Lettau's participation in a demonstration in Berlin and his expulsion.
  • The Maze - Stories and Conversations (1980)
The GDR publishing house Reclam / Leipzig has put together a selection of stories with some additional footnotes.
  • Mr. Strich goes to extremes. Stories (1982)
The cover story was first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 7, 1952. This is a collection of short stories published in various newspapers and literary magazines.
  • On the question of the cardinal points (1988)
What does east mean? Where is the west? If you stand in San Francisco and look out over the ocean, you look at China and Russia - definitely the East. If you are in Erfurt , it doesn't matter where you look - north, south, east or west - east everywhere. 52 short chapters. In Erfurt this is made clear by the street signs that all directions are the same.
  • Escape from Guests (1994)
Lettau describes his return from America to Germany with his third wife, Dawn. Five chapters of unnumbered stories about terrible guests and the return to Germany.
  • Forest in the rush
This "Noyau" (core) of a book that Lettau was working on at the time of his death and which he provisionally titled "Gramercy Park" was published on November 7, 1995 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . Lettau read 10 pages from it for the NDR in Hanover on January 27, 1996.
What is FUN ... woodcut Uwe Bremer
  • Reinhard Lettau's renovated Rixdorfer Ruebezahl (1996)
5 verses by Lettau to four woodcuts and a leporello, made for the IFA holiday park Hohe Reuth in Schöneck / Vogtl. in Vogtland, together with Uwe Bremer in the printing workshop Rixdorfer Drucke, where the Rixdorf artist group gathers every year to work on a joint project.
  • All stories , Carl Hanser 1998, ISBN 3-446-19286-7 , posthumously, eds. Dawn Lettau and Hanspeter Krüger
A collection of the most important prose works that Lettau published. The editors have tried to remain true to Lettau's spelling and comma hatred. Since there were no bound manuscripts, just piles of notes filed in folders, it was a lot of work for the editors to put these stories together. A second volume is being planned. Included is a detailed timeline including the names of his dogs and the addresses under which he lived.
  • Red storm over Thuringia - Germany's heart turns red , Wartburg Verlag, Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-86160-336-8 , posthumously, edited and with a postscript by Christina Onnasch.
The novel by the young Reinhard Lettau, borne by great expertise and detailed knowledge and published for the first time, leads back to 1946 and documents the political trench warfare of the time in Thuringia, in which Lettau's father Reinhard sen. was involved.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Reinhard Lettau archive in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
  2. ↑ Dae Sung Jung: The fight against the press empire: The anti-Springer campaign of the 68 movement . Transcript, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3371-9 , p. 166.
  3. ↑ Poet, poet . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1967, p. 178-182 ( Online - Oct. 16, 1967 ).
  4. ↑ a b c Cornelia Geißler: Preference for the wrong side obituary in the Berliner Zeitung from June 18, 1996.
  5. ↑ Police want to deport Lettau if necessary. In: The world . Axel Springer SE , May 29, 1967, p. 3 , accessed on August 3, 2015 (via Medienarchiv68.de , PDF digitized ).
  6. ↑ Now they have a martyr. In: BZ Axel Springer SE , May 29, 1967, p. 4 , accessed on August 3, 2015 (via Medienarchiv68.de , PDF digitized ).
  7. ↑ Wendland-Lexikon , Volume 2, Lüchow 2008, p. 51.
  8. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 244.
personal data
SURNAME Lettau, Reinhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Erfurt
DATE OF DEATH June 17, 1996
Place of death Karlsruhe