Ronnith Neumann

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Ronnith Neumann (born February 29, 1948 in Haifa , today: Israel , also in the spelling Ronnith Neuman ) is a German-Israeli writer and photographer. She also exhibits under her pseudonym Ronnith Bat Zeëv .

Life

Ronnith Neumann spent her early childhood in Israel and moved with her parents to Germany in 1958, where she initially lived in Frankfurt am Main and learned German. After graduating from high school in Frankfurt / Main, she trained as a photographer, worked as a freelance photographer and completed traineeships : first at the Hessischer Rundfunk and from 1970 on the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg. Until 1995 she worked for the Norddeutscher Rundfunk, attended the Academy for Journalism in Hamburg and did a Phonetics course .

Neumann has been working as a freelance writer since 1985, and since 2001 also in the field of fine arts . She has received numerous prizes for her plays and stories, including the “Hamburg Literature Prize for Short Prose” in 1986, the “Prize of the North Rhine-Westphalian Authors' Meeting” in Düsseldorf in the prose category in 1987, the “Gladbecker Satirepreis” in 1989 and the “Herford Culture Prize” in 1995 ". Ronnith Neumann was married to Günter Hagedorn (1932–2018) until his death and lives as a freelance artist and writer in Corfu in Greece and temporarily in Munich.

Literary work

Neumann's 1985 book Heimkehr in die Fremde. At home in Israel or at home in Germany? is called "Roman", but has a strong autobiographical background. The protagonist is a young woman who, twenty years after she came to Germany from Israel as a child, spends her first vacation in Israel. In numerous conversations with Israeli acquaintances, the question arises of how she could live as a Jew in Germany after the Holocaust . The first-person narrator wants to reach and reconcile the Germans born after the war, and at the same time she is looking for her Jewish identity in the West German context . The book contains her thoughts on her political, historical and emotional affiliation with Judaism in Germany and Israel as well as on her ties to her parents. “The tension relates to 'Homecoming in a Strange' from the protagonist's life story turmoil between Israel and Germany, in particular from the complex problem of how a life as a Jew in post-war Germany 'in the land of the perpetrators can be justified.'

In her stories, which are collected in the volumes Die Tür (1992) and A stormy Sunday (1996), the author shows a great thematic diversity. The generation conflict in which the young German Jews born here find themselves plays an important role . In the story “The Encounter”, a Jew quasi gives her a literary assignment: “As a writer of a new generation, a Jewish post-war generation in Germany, you are something like our heritage, our hope, not only in this city, a hope which none of us dared to think back then. " However, linguistic deficiencies in Neumann's representations are criticized, which sometimes contain clichés and to which sometimes" a decidedly didactic trait "adheres.

The criticism that applies to a certain extent to the early novel "Heimkehr in die Fremde" is lost in her later literature: "Anyone who has observed Ronnith Neumann's development can see an astonishing increase. Her texts have a newly acquired precision and concentration. The clear, accessible language enables the reader to identify with the person experiencing it, even with complex texts. "

Quote

“It's strange how quiet it is now. They took my handcuffs off. An old woman with handcuffs. A ridiculous sight. How gray, my hair, in the mirror, there, opposite. Grayer since last night. Grayer since the others left. Over the fields there, to the south. Max had smoked another cigarette. One last cigarette from its silver can. How I loved the smell of his tobacco in the steaming pipe. The frosty evenings by the winter fireplace. Hot, spicy smell. Smell of paradise from childhood with father. "

- Ronnith Neumann

Works

Books

Contributions to (selection)
  • Wolfgang Balk, Sebastian Kleinschmidt (ed.): I think of Germany ... - Voices of alienation. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11838-7 .
  • Christel Hoberg-Heese (Ed.): Border Crossers. Lessing Verlag, Dortmund 2004, ISBN 3-929931-19-2 . (Stories by Christel Hoberg-Heese, Christel Keiderling, Ronnith Neumann, Christine Schulz and Maria Sperling.)
  • Sonat Hart, Barbara Jurasek (Ed.): Literary Heimat - German and Austrian Jewish Writings after the Shoah. Focus Publishing, R. Pullins and Company, Newburyport 2005, ISBN 1-58510-124-9 .
  • Gino Leineweber (Ed.): Meere. Verlag LangenMüller, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7844-3083-6 . (Anthology of the Hamburg authors' association)

Plays

  • Circled. 5 acts for one evening. Premiere: Staatstheater Braunschweig 1993 (further performances e.g. in the Kammerspiele Paderborn, Paderborn 1995, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Bochum 1995)
  • Murder game. WP: Villingen-Schwenningen and LTT Tübingen, 1997.
  • A stormy Sunday . Premiere: Westfälische Kammerspiele , Paderborn 2000 (further performances for example in the ETA-Hoffmann-Theater Bamberg 2003)

Exhibitions

Secondary literature

  • Leslie A. Adelson : Nothing like home. Jeannette Lander and Ronnith Neumann on the utopian search for Jewish identity in the West German context. In: Jewish Culture and Femininity in Modernity. Böhlau, Cologne 1994, pp. 307-330.
  • Inga-Marie Kühl: Between trauma, dream and tradition: Identity Constructions in Young Contemporary Jewish Literature. (Dissertation 2001). Humboldt University of Berlin
  • Anna K. Kuhn: Voices from the edge. Minority literature in Germany. In: Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Issue 124, 2001, ISSN  0049-8653 .
  • NN: Ronnith Neuman (-Hagedorn). In: Lexicon of Westphalian Authors 1750–1950. Vol. 4.
  • Peter Peters: Ronnith Neumann. In: Critical Lexicon for Contemporary German Literature KLG. ISBN 978-3-88377-927-0 .
  • Sonat Hart, Barbara Jurasek: Literary Heimat - German and Austrian Jewish Writings after the Shoah. Focus Publishing, R. Pullins and Company, Newburyport 2005, ISBN 1-58510-124-9 , pp. 125-129.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Peters in the Critical Lexicon for Contemporary German Literature - KLG
  2. ↑ The encounter . In: Westphalian life stations. Texts and testimonies by Jewish writers from Westphalia . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-89528-649-0 .
  3. ^ Critical lexicon for contemporary German-language literature - KLG
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Brosche, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, in the Neue Westfälische, November 10, 1986.
  5. ↑ Quoted from the story Die Tür . In: The door. Narratives . Frankfurt / M 199
  6. ↑ Publisher's website on "Grenzgängerinnen"
personal data
SURNAME Neumann, Ronnith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bat Zeëv, Ronnth; Neuman, Ronnith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Israeli writer and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Haifa , Israel