Stephan Hermlin

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Stephan Hermlin, 1954

Stephan Hermlin (born April 13, 1915 in Chemnitz , † April 6, 1997 in Berlin ; actually Rudolf Leder ) was a German writer and translator of French texts. Hermlin stood out for his stories, essays and poetry and was one of the most famous writers in the GDR .

Live and act

Stephan Hermlin (left) with Nâzım Hikmet , 1952

Hermlin grew up as the son of the Jewish entrepreneur and art collector couple David (1888-1947) and Lola Leder (1892-1977) in Chemnitz and Berlin. In 1931 he joined the communist youth association . From 1933 to 1936 he completed an apprenticeship as a printer; at the same time he was working in the resistance . In 1936 he emigrated to Palestine , later he lived in France and Switzerland .

After his return to Germany in 1945, Hermlin worked as a radio editor in Frankfurt am Main . Since 1947 Hermlin lived in East Berlin and worked in the magazine editors of the Tälichen Rundschau (daily newspaper of the Soviet military administration ), of Ulenspiegel , structure as well as sense and form . Hermlin worked in important bodies in the Soviet occupation zone and quickly became one of the most influential writers in the newly founded GDR after 1949 . In 1949 he wrote his famous poem Die Asche von Birkenau , which was set to music by Günter Kochan . As a close friend of Erich Honecker , Hermlin saw himself as a protagonist of socialist cultural policy at the time , but was also involved as a mediator between literature and politics.

Memorial plaque on his former home, Hermann-Hesse-Strasse 39, in Berlin-Niederschönhausen

In August 1961, Hermlin justified the construction of the Berlin Wall in an open letter to Wolfdietrich Schnurre and Günter Grass . In December 1962, Hermlin was one of the initiators of a sensational reading by young poets (with Wolf Biermann , Volker Braun , Bernd Jentzsch , Sarah Kirsch , Karl Mickel, among others ) at the GDR Academy of the Arts , which initiated the wave of poetry in the 1960s. Hermlin was then released from his position as secretary of the poetry and language maintenance class at the academy. Later, in a meeting of the Politburo with authors and artists, he stated that the decision was the right one and that he was “not the right man in the right place”. His serious mistake was to have poorly guided a debate in the second part of the evening and not to have seen this and the poems of some authors "in connection with the situation" in which the evening took place. In 1968 Hermlin criticized the crackdown on the Prague Spring , but did not make it public.

In 1976, Hermlin was one of the initiators of the protest by prominent writers against the expulsion of Wolf Biermann. After his commitment to Wolf Biermann, Stephan Hermlin received a severe reprimand from the party and from then on was monitored even more thoroughly by the Stasi. However, he was not expelled from the SED and continued to express himself as a staunch communist . Against the official policy of the East-West confrontation , Hermlin organized the Berlin Peacebuilding Encounter in December 1981 , a German-German writers' meeting.

Hermlin was a member of the Writers' Union of the GDR , the Academy of the Arts of the GDR and, since 1976, the Academy of Arts West Berlin .

Grave of Stephan Hermlin in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin

In 1996, the Hessian literary editor Karl Corino claimed in a Zeit article (and subsequently in a book) that Hermlin had wrongly presented that his father died in a concentration camp, that he himself fought in the Spanish Civil War and that he was an active member of the French Been Resistance . Corino mainly referred to the autobiographical collection of texts "Evening Light". The accusation was that Hermlin had for a long time accepted it without comment that biographers and philologists believed the literary material to be true. After the German-German discussion about Christa Wolf's story What remains in 1990 and the Stasi literary debate from 1991 onwards, the Hermlin controversy in 1996 ushered in the third major literary debate on German unity.

Stephan Hermlin's daughters are Andrée-Thérèse Leder (1938-2020), married Leusink (from her marriage to Juliette Leder, née Brandler), the actress Cornelia Schmaus (from her marriage to Lily Leder-Schmaus) and Bettina Leder (from her marriage with Gudrun Hermlin). His son from his marriage to Irina Belokonewa-Hermlin, Andrej Hermlin , is a musician (founder of the Swing Dance Orchestra). The German writer and journalist Mirna Funk is the granddaughter of his first daughter Andrée-Thérèse Leder and thus Stephan Hermlin's great-granddaughter.

Prices

Works

Poems and prose

  • Twelve ballads from the big cities. Morgarten Verlag Conzett & Huber, Zurich 1945.
  • Lieutenant Yorck von Wartenburg. Narrative. Upper Baden printing and publishing company, Singen (Hohentwiel) 1946.
  • Views on some new writers and books. [with Hans Mayer ] essays. Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden and Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1947
  • A painter's journey in Paris. Narrative. Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1947.
  • The time of togetherness. Stories. Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1949.
  • The first row. Portraits. New life publishing house, Berlin 1951 and Weltkreis-Verlags-GmbH, Dortmund 1975.
  • The flight of the pigeon. Poems. Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1952.
  • Encounters: 1954–1959. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1960.
  • Poems and prose. Klaus Wagenbach Publishing House, Berlin 1966.
  • Stories. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1966, ext. 1974.
  • The cities. Poems. Bechtle, Munich / Esslingen 1966.
  • Reading: 1960–1971. Articles, essays, survey responses. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1974, extended version: Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1997.
  • The Argonauts. Narrative. Children's book publisher, Berlin 1974.
  • Evening light. Reclam, Leipzig and Wagenbach, Berlin 1979. New edition, with an afterword by Kathrin Schmidt and a speech by Klaus Wagenbach ; Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-8031-3271-0 .
  • Articles, reports, speeches, interviews. Edited by Ulla Hahn . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1980.
  • Poems. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1981.
  • Utterances. 1944-1982 . Edited by Ulrich Dietzel. Essays, speeches, reports and interviews. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1983.
  • Texts. Materials. Pictures . Compiled by Hubert Witt. Reclam Leipzig 1985.
  • Destinations Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-8031-0136-0
  • Lifetime. Collected stories. Klaus Wagenbach Publishing House, Berlin 1987.
  • Poems and post-poems. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1990, ISBN 3-351-01613-1 .
  • Narrative prose . 1990.
  • as editor: German reading book - from Luther to Liebknecht . Leipzig 1990, ISBN 978-3-379-00239-4 .
  • In the struggles of this time. Talk. Conversations. Klaus Wagenbach Publishing House, Berlin 1995.
  • Decisions. All the stories. Klaus Wagenbach Publishing House, Berlin 1995.

Radio plays

  • Scardanelli. Radio play, director: Fritz Göhler , 60 min., GDR radio 1970, first broadcast: September 9, 1970
  • Scardanelli. Radio play. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1970, director: Oswald Döpke , 50 min., WDR, first broadcast: 23 September 1970

literature

  • Gerhard Wolf: Stephan Hermlin . In: Hans Jürgen Geerdts (Hrsg.): Literature of the GDR in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 416). Kröner, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41601-7 , pp. 177-195.
  • Edited by Maritta Rost and Rosemarie Geist: I. Bibliography; II. Texts, materials, images . Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1985.
  • Silvia Schlenstedt (Ed.): Letters to Hermlin. 1946-1984 . Structure, Berlin and Weimar 1985.
  • Silvia Schlenstedt: Stephan Hermlin . People and knowledge, (East) Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-88436-150-3 (West Berlin: Verlag Das Europ. Buch, 1985).
  • Olf Sobotka: Stephan Hermlin's relationship to the Soviet Union and its reflection in the writer's journalistic and literary work , Univ. Diss., Zwickau 1991.
  • Fritz J. Raddatz: Witness and Testimony . In: The time . No. April 16 , 1997 ( zeit.de [accessed August 11, 2011]).
  • Alexander Krüger: Stephan Hermlin's written statement on the 'Junge Lyrik' evening on December 11, 1962. Two unpublished documents . In: Berliner Hefte on the history of literary life . tape 3 , 2000, ISSN  0949-5371 , p. 116-122 .
  • Wolfram Mach: Stephan Hermlin 1958–1989. Attempt of a spiritual form of existence in socialism. (PDF; 204 kB) In: Humboldt University, Berlin. 2001, accessed April 11, 2012 .
  • Short biography for:  Hermlin, Stephan . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Eric Hobsbawn, Interesting Times. A Twentieth-Century Life, New York 2002, pp. 62-65, ISBN 0-375-42234-X

To the Corino debate

Web links

Commons : Stephan Hermlin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edwar Engelberg: More on "Mona Lisa" on Kristallnacht. ( Memento from April 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Open letter from Stephan Hermlin to Wolfdietrich Schnurre and Günter Grass , August 17, 1961.
  3. ↑ Markus Somm : Report of an indestructible. In: Basler Zeitung , January 7, 2017.
  4. ↑ spiegel.de wrote: “The unrest among the Eastern intellectuals was articulated even more violently when the SED leadership expatriated the convinced communist and songwriter Wolf Biermann from the GDR after a concert in Cologne in November 1976. Through the Western media, cultural workers and students across the country, including state-sponsored artists such as the poet Stephan Hermlin and the sculptor Fritz Cremer , condemned the actions of the Politburo. The SED reacted helplessly: in the years that followed, it pushed a large part of its unruly artistic elite into the West, including the actors Armin Mueller-Stahl and Manfred Krug as well as the writers Jurek Becker , Sarah Kirsch and Günter Kunert . The GDR did not recover from the intellectual bloodletting. "
  5. ↑ a b Hermlin protests against Biermann's expatriation.
  6. ↑ Karl Corino : GDR writer Stephan Hermlin made a lie about his life myth , in: Die Zeit , 41/1996 (accessed on July 10, 2015)
  7. ↑ David Ensikat: Life - A Struggle. Obituary for Andrée Thérèse Leusink. In: Der Tagesspiegel. May 12, 2020, accessed August 8, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Hermlin, Stephan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leder, Rudolf (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1997
Place of death Berlin