Ryszard Kapuściński

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Ryszard Kapuściński (1997)

Listen to Ryszard Kapuściński ? / i (born March 4, 1932 in Pińsk , Poland , now Belarus ; † January 23, 2007 in Warsaw ) was a Polish reporter , journalist and author . He is one of the most frequently translated authors in Poland. Audio file / audio sample

Life

Kapuściński was born on March 4, 1932 in Pińsk, then eastern Poland, and grew up in a family of teachers. After the Red Army marched into what was then eastern Poland , his mother fled with him in 1940, faced with the threat of deportation to Siberia, to the part of Poland occupied by Germany.

In 1945 his family moved to Warsaw . There he married in 1952 and began studying history at the University of Warsaw in the same year . He joined the Polish United Workers' Party , according to his biographers as a "believing communist" at the time. In 1955 he made his first trip to Asia and was a reporter at the Conference of Non-Aligned States on Java . In 1956 he finished his studies with a master's degree and began to work for the youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych ( Flag of Youth ).

In 1956/57 he reported on a trip through China. Just one year later he became an employee of the Polish news agency PAP and in 1958 traveled to Africa on their behalf. After his return he worked in the editorial department of Polityka magazine . In 1962 he was back in Africa for the PAP. In 1967, immediately after his stay in Africa, he traveled through the Soviet Union . In 1967 he began his trip to South America, where he worked for the PAP as a foreign correspondent for six years . He was also a consultant for the Polish magazine Kontynenty .

In 1994 he was a guest of the German Academic Exchange Service in Berlin. In 2003 he also gave the lecture “Herodotus - Reporters of Antiquity” in Berlin.

He was a six-time honorary doctor. In total, he received over 40 prizes and honors. Kapuściński was a member of the Polish pen club .

On January 23, 2007, Kapuściński died in the Banach Hospital in Warsaw as a result of heart surgery.

criticism

A few months after his death, files from the Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw came to light, according to which Kapuściński was temporarily an informant of the Polish secret police SB .

Even before its publication, the Kapuściński biography was a source of intense controversy . Non-Fiction (2010) by Artur Domosławski triggered, because Kapuściński's widow wanted the publication to be banned by a court, but failed. Domosławski cites the results of his own research and statements by contemporary witnesses who cast doubt on the truthfulness of numerous reports as well as the family history as he presented them. The biographer also states that Kapuściński's later claims that he was in opposition to the regime of the People's Republic of Poland are untrue. Furthermore, despite his statements, Kapuściński is said not to have known Che Guevara or to have met the Congolese politician and first prime minister of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba . Rather, he has extended the boundaries of reportage to include literature. “He made fables, he subordinated the facts to his narrative goal,” says his biographer Domosławski. The claim that his father escaped from a Soviet prisoner-of-war transport that was supposed to take him to Katyn is also said to be pure invention. Domosławski claims to have found out that Kapuściński's father never ended up in Soviet captivity.

Criticism of King of Kings

Regarding Kapuściński's book King of Kings. A parable of power about the end of the reign of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie , Asfa-Wossen Asserate raised accusations against Kapuściński's representations in his biography of the emperor. He argues that Kapuściński's book “is of little use as a historical source”, already the “famous opening scene” (which reports that there was a servant in the palace whose only job was to remove the urine of a dog from the emperor's shoes from dignitaries' shoes to clean) is "absurdly" wrong. Also Lore Trenkler , body cook Haile Selassie 1962-1975, called this representation to be incorrect and criticized the book in several ways.

Kapuściński argues that his book was written on the basis of interviews with former court servants. Asserate doubts this: the Mengistu regime in power at the time of the alleged interviews was “downright on the hunt for former courtiers of the emperor; they would have risked their lives if they had ... invited a white journalist into their home ”. This argument is weighty, because Kapuściński describes the situation in the same way: he went to his interlocutors under cover of darkness and was afraid to “go up” with them and feared for his life, especially because “the Ethiopians ... immensely be suspicious ". Other points are also questioned (here Asserate refers to the American Haile Selassie biographer Harold Marcus), such as the claim that the emperor spoke no foreign languages ​​and read no books. The assessment of the person Haile Selassie and his regime is by and large the same with Asserate as with Kapuściński.

Awards (in selection)

Visiting professorships

literature

Primary / own works

  • PL 1962: Busz po polsku
  • PL 1963: Czarne gwiazdy
  • PL 1968: Kirgiz schodzi z konia
  • PL 1969: Gdyby cała Afryka
  • PL 1970: Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti?
  • PL 1975: Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu
  • 1984: King of Kings (PL 1978: Cesarz ) 2009: Martin Pollack (Translator): King of Kings: A Parable of Power Piper, ISBN 978-3492252379
  • 1986: Schah-in-Schah (PL 1982: Szachinszach ) New edition 2006: Martin Pollack (translator): Schah-in-schah: A report on the mechanisms of power and fundamentalism Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3821856728
  • 1990: The Football War : Reports from the Third World (PL 1978: Wojna futbolowa ); Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-8218-4071-4
  • 1992: Lapidarium (PL 1990: Lapidarium ), as paperback: 1999: Fischer Taschenbuch - Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3596128525
  • 1993: Imperium (PL 1993: Imperium )
  • 1994: Again a Day of Life German first edition, Eichborn Verlag, as paperback: 1999: Fischer, Frankfurt ISBN 978-3596128532 (PL 1976: Jeszcze every dzień życia )
  • 1999: African fever (PL 1998: Heban ) - review or Martin Pollack (translator): African fever. Forty years of experience. The Other Library - successful edition , Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3821844831
  • 2000: The world in a notebook (PL 1996 and 1997: Lapidarium II and Lapidarium III ); Martin Pollack (translator): Verlag Piper, edition: 5 July 2008, ISBN 978-3492236454
  • 2000: The earth is a violent paradise (text compilation for the German market from works already available in German) - review ; Verlag Piper, 7th edition, 2007: Martin Pollack, Renate Schmidgall, Edith Heller (translator): The earth is a violent paradise: reports, essays, interviews from forty years ISBN 978-3492236447
  • 2000: From Africa (PL 2000: Z Afryki ) (illustrated book) - review (English)
  • 2000: Martin Pollack (translator): Imperium. Soviet forays. The Other Library - Successful Edition , ISBN 978-3821847078
  • PL 2003: Autoportret reportera
  • 2007: Martin Pollack (translator): My travels with Herodotus: Reports from all over the world Piper Verlag, ISBN 978-3492247870 (PL 2004: Podróże z Herodotem )
  • 2007: Ilija Trojanow (editor): The world of Ryszard Kapuscinski: His best stories and reports ISBN 978-3821858234
  • 2007: Martin Pollack (translator): Notes of a Cosmopolitan , German first edition: Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3821857565 ; as paperback: 2008: Piper, ISBN 978-3492252362 (PL 2000 and 2002: Lapidarium IV and Lapidarium V )
  • 2008: Martin Pollack (translator): Der Andere Suhrkamp Verlag, German first edition, ISBN 978-3518125441
  • 2010: A Paradise for Ethnographers : Polish Stories . Translated from Polish by Martin Pollack and Renate Schmidtgall, with a foreword by Martin Pollack, 978-3821858371

Secondary literature

biography

  • Artur Domosławski: Ryszard Kapuściński - Life and Truth of a Reporter of the Century . Translated from the Polish by Antje Ritter-Jasińska and Benjamin Voelkel. Rotbuch Verlag, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-86789-185-1

Audio

  • 2002: King of Kings. A parable of power radio play, Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3821851884
  • 2007: Hanns Zischler (reader): Kapuscinski's world. Stations of a well-traveled Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3821854489

Web links

Commons : Ryszard Kapuściński  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nationaler Infantilismus , Der Spiegel, March 8, 2010
  2. ↑ http://www.lettre-ulysses-award.org/download/pressemappe_deu.pdf (full text pdf)
  3. ↑ University of Silesia (October 17, 1997), University of Wroclaw (2001), University of Sofia (2002), Jagiellonian University (2004), University of Gdansk (January 29, 2004), University of Barcelona (2005).
  4. ↑ Prices u. Honors ( Memento of the original from July 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Polish) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kapuscinski.info
  5. ↑ Kapuściński powinien się przyznać Dziennik, October 13, 2007.
  6. ^ Artur Domosławski: Kapuściński non-fiction. Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2010. ISBN 978-83-247-1906-8 .
  7. ↑ Poland's ace reporter Ryszard Kapuściński accused of fiction-writing , The Guardian , March 2, 2010.
  8. ^ My friend Che , by Thomas Urban , Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 1, 2010.
  9. ↑ a b Kapuscinski biography: World reporter with a truth problem , by Jan Puhl , Der Spiegel , February 28, 2010
  10. ↑ Asfa-Wossen Asserate, The Last Emperor of Africa, 2nd edition, Berlin 2014
  11. ↑ pp. 247-249
  12. ↑ See Lore Trenkler : Working and Living at the Court of Haile Selassies I. Memoirs 1960-1975, ed. by Rudolf Agstner . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2011, ISBN 978-3-447-06447-7 . and Franz Fluch : The cook of the King of Kings , Ö1- Hörbilder , October 7, 2017
  13. ↑ P. 7/8, quoted from the 1995 edition of Eichborn-Verlag
  14. ↑ Renner Institute ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Laudation by André Heller PDF 0.9 MB @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.renner-institut.at
personal data
SURNAME Kapuściński, Ryszard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish reporter, journalist and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Pinsk
DATE OF DEATH January 23, 2007
Place of death Warsaw