Susan Sunday

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Susan Sontag (1979)
Juan Bastos: Susan Sontag (2009)

Susan Sontag , nee Rosenblatt , (born January 16, 1933 in New York City , New York ; died December 28, 2004 there ) was an American writer , essayist , publicist and director . She was known for her commitment to human rights and as a critic of the social conditions and the government of the United States of America.

Life

Susan Sontag was born the daughter of the export merchant Jack Rosenblatt and the teacher Mildred Jacobsen, both of Jewish origin. While parents in the Republic of China , were she was raised by her grandparents. Her father fell ill and died of tuberculosis when she was five years old. Seven years later the mother married Nathan Sontag, a US Army captain. Susan and her sister Judith took the stepfather's last name, although he did not adopt her.

In 1949 Susan Sontag first went to the University of California, Berkeley , but in the same year moved to the University of Chicago and studied literature , theology and philosophy with Leo Strauss . She developed a passion for German-language literature early on; In December 1949 she visited Thomas Mann, whose work she remained connected until her death, in his exile in California. In 1950, at the age of 17, she married the sociologist Philip Rieff , in whose courses she attended. Together with him she published a study on Sigmund Freud's influence on modern culture. Their son David was born two years later and they divorced in 1958. In 1956 Sontag attended a seminar on Classical German Philosophy with Paul Tillich at Harvard . At Harvard she wrote her doctoral thesis in philosophy, where she also met Jacob and Susan Taubes , who, together with Tillich, became her mentors and supporters. Herbert Marcuse referred to her as her boyfriend and Hannah Arendt met her when she moved to New York in her mid-twenties.

From 1988 until her death she lived with the photographer Annie Leibovitz .

Susan Sontag's grave on the Cimetière Montparnasse

Susan Sontag lived in Chelsea, New York . As a publicly perceived intellectual , she was active in the New York Institute for the Humanities , among others , of which she was a member. She appeared as a harsh critic of the Bush Jr. administration. , especially the Iraq war , in appearance. Along with Mary McCarthy and Joan Didion , she was considered the American femme de lettres .

Sontag died of leukemia in New York in late 2004 at the age of 71 and was buried at the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris. Her son, the journalist and author David Rieff , wrote the book Death of an Inconsolable , which was published in 2009 by Carl Hanser Verlag , about her last days .

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Essays

Her essays critical of art and culture received a lot of attention. In particular, two photo-theoretical debates in which Sontag dealt with the aesthetic and moral aspects of photography are among her most important texts. In the collection of essays On Photography , Sontag analyzes people's behavior in the face of the modern flood of images. One of the central theses of the book is that photography is essentially an “act of non-interference” (p. 17). Sontag sees this non-interference as paradigmatic in the field of photojournalism. Overall, the modern flood of images causes people to become numb, according to Sontag.

The thesis of dulling is revised in the essay Seeing the suffering of others in such a way that photography does not make the mediation of suffering impossible, but cannot assume this function on its own. According to Sontag, such communication presupposes political knowledge and a moral system of values ​​for analysis. To illustrate this, Sontag devotes himself to an in-depth «Iconography of Suffering», from the Middle Ages to war photography, with Robert Capa's iconic photograph of a soldier who fell in the Spanish Civil War , taken at the moment when the fatal bullet hit him, one of the key works of the essay.

Movies

Her position on the work of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg , whose film Hitler, a film from Germany (1977) she had praised, was controversial . She also worked in various fields for theater and film. In 1993 she staged the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett during the Bosnian War in Sarajevo .

Her assessment that the "white race" was the "cancer of human history" and America was "founded on genocide" was met with great opposition, but the "loudest outcry" was when the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were the result of superpower politics USA stated.

Awards (selection)

Works (selection)

prose

  • The Benefactor (1963, German title Der Wohltäter , translated by Louise Eisler-Fischer, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1966, ISBN 3-596-11414-4 )
  • Death Kit (1967, German title Todesstation , translated by Jörg Trobitius, Hanser, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-446-13128-0 )
  • I, etcetera (1978, German title Ich, etc. , short stories, translated by Marianne Frisch, Hanser 1979, ISBN 3-446-12826-3 )
  • The Vulcano Lover (1989, German The Lover of the Volcano , translated by Isabell Lorenz, Hanser, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-446-16017-5 )
  • In America (2000, German title In Amerika , translated by Eike Schönfeld , Hanser, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-446-20091-6 )

Plays

  • Alice in Bed , German: Alice in Bed , play in eight scenes, trans. v. Wolfgang Wiens, Publishing House of the Authors, Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-88661-123-X
  • Baby , German: Baby , trans. v. Harry Rowohlt , Publishing House of the Authors, Frankfurt / M., Theatertexte 2012, U: Thalia Theater Hamburg 1994
  • Lady from the Sea , German: The woman from the sea , trans. v. Renate et al. Wolfgang Wiens, Theatertexte 2012, U: Teatro Communale Ferrara 1998; DE: Deutsches Theater Berlin 2003

Essays and other writings

Filmography

Direction and script

  • 1969: Duet for Cannibals (Duet for Cannibals)
  • 1971: Twins (Brother Carl)
  • 1974: Promised Lands
  • 1983: Unguided Tour AKA Letter from Venice

Documentaries

  • 1966: Galaxy
  • 1979: Town Bloody Hall
  • 1983: Zelig (interview)
  • 1984: Mauvaise conduite
  • 1987: Do Not Enter: The Visa War Against Ideas
  • 1991: Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box
  • 2003: The Lover of the Volcano - With Susan Sontag in New York
  • 2003: Campus, le magazine de l'écrit
  • 2006: Absolute Wilson
  • 2011: Susan Sontag. Denkerin und Diva / Une diva engagée / The glamor of seriousness (Director: Birgitta Ashoff)
  • 2014: Regarding Susan Sontag (Director: Nancy Kates)

watch TV

  • 1965: Monitor - (Episode: Always on Sunday ) and (Episode: Cheese! Or What Really Did Happen in Andy Warhol's Studio ) (TV series)
  • 1972 Vive le cinéma - episode of October 15, 1972 (TV series)
  • 1984: Angel Casas Show - (episode 124) (TV Series)
  • 1989: The Poet Remembers (feature film)
  • 1989: Everyman - Just an Illness (TV series)
  • 2002: Negro sobre blanco - (episode dated December 8, 2002) (TV series)
  • 2003: Alexandria - (episode dated November 11, 2003) (TV series)

reception

On the tenth anniversary of Susan Sontag's death, the Münchner Kammerspiele organized a symposium entitled Radical Thinking in cooperation with the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation and the cultural department of the City of Munich in November 2014 . To the topicality of Susan Sontags. that shows Sunday's topicality:

"The former Hanser publisher Michael Krüger , the literary scholar Elisabeth Bronfen , the author Thomas Meinecke , the philosopher Juliane Rebentisch , the publicist Carolin Emcke and the pop literature researcher Eckhard Schumacher explore a remarkably broad, unbroken, fertile intellectual field."

- Jens-Christian Rabe

literature

  • Gero von Boehm : Susan Sontag. May 12, 1989 . Interview in: Encounters. Images of man from three decades . Collection Rolf Heyne, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-89910-443-1 , pp. 201-209.
  • Anna-Lisa Dieter, Silvia Tiedtke (Ed.): Radical thinking. To the topicality of Susan Sontags . Diaphanes, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03734-929-8 .
  • Jan Engelmann, Richard Faber, Christine Holste (eds.): Passion of reason. The public intellectual Susan Sontag. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8260-4325-3 .
  • Stephan Isernhagen: Susan Sontag. The early New York years . Tübingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-16-153936-7 .
  • Michael Krüger , interviewed by Petra Hallmayer: Thinking as pleasure. Michael Krüger opens the Susan Sontag Symposium. A conversation with the publisher about the great essayist. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 272, November 26, 2014, ISSN  0174-4917 , p. R20.
  • Benjamin Moser: Sunday. Her life and work , London: HarperCollins 2019, ISBN 978-1-9826-8865-3 . Review by Johana Hedva: Sie, etc. On Benjamin Moser's Susan Sontag biography . In: Merkur , issue 851, April 2020, pp. 5–21
  • David Rieff: Swimming in a Sea of ​​Death. A Son's memoir. Simon & Schuster, 2008, ISBN 978-0743299473 .
  • David Rieff: Death of an Inconsolable. The last days of Susan Sontag . Translated by Reinhard Kaiser. Carl Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23522-9 .
  • Daniel Schreiber : Susan Sontag. Spirit and glamor. (Biography) Structure, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-02649-3 .
  • Kai Sina: Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017.
  • Tanja Zimmermann: A war photo from Bosnia. Certifications and denials by Ron Haviv, Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard . In: Between apocalypse and everyday life. War narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. Ed. Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank, Andreas Kraft. Transcript, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 3837610454 , pp. 237-262.

Web links

Wikiquote: Susan Sontag  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff: Die Revisionistin. In: Die Zeit , June 26, 2003.
  2. ↑ Kai Sina: Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017.
  3. ↑ Grande Dame of US literature. On the 80th birthday of Susan Sontag on 3sat.de, accessed on May 17, 2017
  4. ^ Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. on friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de, accessed on May 17, 2017
  5. ↑ a b US author Susan Sontag dies , Deutsche Welle , December 28, 2004, accessed on March 18, 2020
  6. ↑ Susan Sontag: Grande Dame and Enfant terrible of US literature , October 12, 2003, accessed March 18, 2020
  7. ↑ »The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx and the Balanchine ballets do not make amends for what this particular civilization brought into the world. The white race is the cancer in human history. ”  Susan Sontag , Partisan Review , Winter 1967, p. 57; Notes on Susan , The New York Review of Books , Eliot Weinberger, 2007
  8. ^ Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In: friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de ( PDF ).
  9. ↑ FENA Agencija: Susan Sontag dobila svoj trg u Sarajevu ( Bosnian ) Oslobodjenje.ba. January 14, 2010. Retrieved August 21, 2011.
  10. ↑ Notes On "Camp" In: interglacial.com (English)
  11. ^ Against Interpretation, the first four sections
  12. ↑ Annette Brüggemann: The uninterrupted dialogue. In: Deutschlandfunk , March 20, 2008.
  13. ↑ Table of contents of the documentation ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at arte.tv. Retrieved August 24, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  14. ↑ Program of the symposium ( Memento of the original from January 6, 2015 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. , accessed December 2, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.susan-sontag-symposium-2014.mimesis-doc.uni-muenchen.de
  15. ↑ Jens-Christian Rabe: Bill Haley and the Bacchae. Between essay and university: The conference “Radical Thinking - On Susan Sontags Current Issues” at the Münchner Kammerspiele. , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 276, December 1, 2014, ISSN  0174-4917 , p. 14.
  16. ↑ Uwe Wittstock: The public death of Susan Sontag . Reviewed in Die Welt , February 5, 2008.
  17. ↑ The public death of Susan Sontag , first chapter.
  18. ↑ Ursula March : cult figure of the literary scene. In: Deutschlandradio Kultur , January 16, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Sunday, Susan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenblatt, Susan (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, essayist, and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York, United States
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 2004
Place of death New York City , New York, United States