Rolf Schroers

Rolf Schroers (born October 10, 1919 in Neuss ; † May 8, 1981 in Altenberge , Münster ) was a German writer.

Life

Rolf Schroers was the son of Johannes Schroers (1885–1960), a senior Prussian civil servant who later made a career in the police service (joining the NSDAP in 1932; SS brigade leader from 1942). After graduating from high school in 1937, Schroers studied German, history and philosophy in Munich and Berlin . In the Second World War he took part as an officer in the cavalry , at the end of the war with the rank of first lieutenant .

In the first post-war years, Schroers lived with his family in the Oldenburger Heide . During this time he worked for the Bremen publishing house Dorn-Verlag and delivered a. a. Contributions for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Frankfurter Hefte as well as for the radio. From 1950 to 1958 he belonged to the group 47 . From 1955 to 1957 he was a lecturer at the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house in Cologne and a consultant for television documentaries. He then lived as a freelance journalist and writer in Eitorf-Obenroth and in Meckenheim near Bonn and in Blankenheim in the Eifel .

In addition to his journalistic and writing activities, Schroers was politically active. He was a member of the FDP , for which he ran twice in federal elections. From 1965 he was editor-in-chief of the Liberal FDP organ . In the following years, as a member of the program committee of his party, he played a key role in the reorientation of the Free Democrats in social and Eastern politics . From 1968 to 1980 he was the first director of the 1967 opened and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation belonging Theodor Heuss Academy in Gummersbach . Schroers was also a temporary member of the board of trustees of the Wolf-Erich-Kellner Memorial Foundation .

Rolf Schroers wrote novels, stories, diaries, essays, radio and television plays. In his exploration of the Third Reich and World War II, which was influenced by existentialism , he is a typical representative of the literature of the early Federal Republic.

Rolf Schroers was a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany . He received u. a. The following awards: 1949 part of the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt for German writers donated by Thomas Mann , in 1956 the sponsorship prize for the Immermann Prize of the City of Düsseldorf , in 1959 the Bremen Literature Prize , in 1957 a scholarship from the Villa Massimo and in 1979 the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class .

Part of Schroers' bequests are in the Münster State Archives and in the Liberalism Archives of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Gummersbach.

Works

• TE Lawrence. Fate and form. Biographical study , Bremen-Horn 1949.
• The fire threshold , Stuttgart 1952.
• The junk dealer with the wire figures , Stuttgart 1952.
• Jakob und die Sehnsucht , Düsseldorf 1953.
• In a strange matter , Cologne [u. a.] 1957.
• Autumn in Apulia , Cologne [a. a.] 1958.
• The partisan. A contribution to political anthropology , Cologne [u. a.] 1961.
• Selection of the victims , Hamburg 1962.
• Cross-examination , Hamburg 1963.
• In such circumstances. Glosses , Frankfurt am Main 1964.
• Over the course of a year. Notes of a writer , Cologne [u. a.] 1964.
• My German question , Stuttgart 1979.
• The captain leaves Venice , Stuttgart 1980.

Editing

• Thomas Edward Lawrence : Life without Legends , Munich 1955.
• On the trail of time. Young German prose , Munich 1959.
• The democratic government , Bonn 1969.

Translations

• Guido Ballo: Italian Painting from Futurism to Today , Cologne [u. a.] 1958.
• Väinö Linna : Crosses in Karelia , Cologne [u. a.] 1955 (translated together with Karl-Heinz Bolay ).

Letters

• Paul Celan: Correspondence with friends from the Rhineland: Heinrich Böll, Paul Schallück, Rolf Schroers . Edited and commented by Barbara Wiedemann. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011.

Memberships (selection)

• Paul Ernst Society

literature

• Helmut Böttiger: The stable defense against the alien [published in 2011. Correspondence between Paul Celans and Rolf Schroers a. a.]. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 101, May 2, 2012, p. 14.
• Monika Fassbender / Klaus Hansen (eds.): Feuilleton and Realpolitik - Rolf Schroers: writer, intellectual, liberal . Baden-Baden 1984 [with list of publications by Schroers pp. 177–187].
• Monika Faßbender:  Schroers, Rolf Bernhard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 583 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Rolf Schroers , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 31/1981 of July 20, 1981, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely accessible).

Web links

• Literature by and about Rolf Schroers in the catalog of the German National Library
• Rolf Schroers in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors