Tadeusz Borowski

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Tadeusz Borowski

Tadeusz Borowski (born November 12, 1922 in Zhytomyr , † July 3, 1951 in Warsaw ) was a Polish writer .

Life

Tadeusz Borowski was born in the city ​​of Zhytomyr, then part of the Soviet Union , where there was a large Polish minority. His mother Teofila, née Karpińska, (1897-1993) and his father Stanislaw (1890-1966) came from farming families in the Ukraine. They married in Zhytomyr in 1917 and they had two sons, Juliusz and Tadeusz. Stanislaw worked as an accountant in a beekeeping and horticultural cooperative. In 1926 he was sent to prison because he was a member of the POW, Polska Organizacja Wojskowa (Polish Military Organization), before World War I. He was deported to Karelia , where he worked on the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal . Teofila, a seamstress, was deported to Siberia, to Igarka , near Yenisseisk . In 1932 the Soviets exchanged Stanislaw for communists imprisoned in Poland. The Red Cross then brought about the repatriation of the two sons. Back in Poland, Stanislaw became a construction worker, then a warehouse keeper in the Lilpop, metal and mechanical works in Warsaw's Wola district . The two boys spent the next few years in a Franciscan boarding school in Nowy Korczyn . After their mother came back, who made tailoring for the very poor, they lived on Smolna Street. The house burned down in September 1939, after which they moved into a half-destroyed department store. After Tadeusz's arrest by the Germans, the family hid a Jewish boy with them until the end of the war. Stanislaw returned to work as an accountant after the war, now at the union of agricultural and forest workers in Allenstein . From the traditional letters we can see a particularly close relationship between mother Teofila and Tadeusz.

During the Second World War , Tadeusz graduated from a secret underground grammar school in 1940 in German-occupied Warsaw and began studying polonistics at the also secret Warsaw underground university . There he met his future wife Maria Rundo, who - sometimes more, sometimes less obviously recognizable - appears again and again as the protagonist in his literary works. He also worked as a night watchman and published poems and short stories in the monthly magazine Droga ("The Way"). Most of his poems were written during this time.

In 1943 Borowski was arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. After contracting pneumonia as a slave laborer, he worked as a paramedic in the camp hospital. Borowski witnessed newcomers being asked to leave their belongings and then sent to the gas chambers.

In 1944 he was transferred to the Dautmergen concentration camp (a satellite camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near Balingen ) or later to Dachau , where American soldiers liberated him on May 1, 1945.

He spent the next few months in a camp for displaced persons and then initially stayed in Germany ( Munich ). In 1946 he returned to Poland, where his fiancée Maria Rundo, arrested in 1943, had also survived imprisonment in the camp. They married in December 1946.

Borowski now turned to prose; His four volumes of stories appeared in quick succession. On February 20, 1948, he became a member of the Communist Party, which sent him to Berlin at the end of June 1949 as cultural advisor for the Polish Information Office. In March 1950 he returned to Warsaw. On July 1, 1951, five days after the birth of his daughter Małgorzata, he attempted suicide, as a result of which he died on July 3, not yet 29 years old.

effect

Borowski made his underground debut during the war with apocalyptic poems, which dealt with the bitterness of his generation from experiences of violence and death. Here one encounters the question of guilt and responsibility of the individual, which should shape his work after the end of the war. He was one of the first to try to process the experience of the concentration camps in literature. His stories such as Proszę Państwa do gazu (Please, the gentlemen to gas) or Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria) depict the alienation and discouragement of people in the extreme situation of the camp. The lines between good and bad are beginning to blur, which is why he has sometimes been accused of moral nihilism.

Borowski is one of the most important representatives of Holocaust literature because of his laconic clarity and his language and his disturbing rigor of content . In 1950 he received the Polish "National Second Class Prize" for literature. His works are now considered classics. In his 2002 Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, Imre Kertész identified Borowski's prose as a key to his understanding of dehumanization in the first half of the twentieth century.

bibliography

Volumes of poetry
  • Gdziekolwiek ziemia (Everywhere on Earth, 1942)
  • Arkusz poetycki nr 2 (Poetisches Blatt No. 2, 1944)
  • Pieśń (The Song, 1996, posthumous)
Volumes of stories
  • U nas w Auschwitzu (1946); first German edition: Bei uns in Auschwitz , translation by Vera Cerny, Munich 1963; New translation by Friedrich Griese , Frankfurt 2006
  • Pewien żołnierz. Opowieści szkolne (A soldier. School stories, 1947)
  • Pożegnanie z Marią (1947); German edition: Farewell to Maria , Munich 1963
  • Kamienny świat (1948); German edition: Die Steinerne Welt , Munich 1963
  • Single edition of the story dedicated to Victor Klemperer Musik in Herzenburg (Polish original title: Muzyka w Herzenburgu ), Berlin 1950

literature

Adaptations as a film or radio play

Based on Borowski's stories, Andrzej Brzozowski and Andrzej Wajda wrote the screenplay for Wajda's film Landscape after the Battle (1970).

The feature film Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria, 1993, director: Filip Zylber ) was also based on motifs from Borowski's stories.

In 2008 the rbb produced the radio play Bei Uns in Auschwitz in cooperation with Radio Bremen (radio play adaptation and direction: Kai Grehn ).

Web links

Commons : Tadeusz Borowski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tadeusz Drewnowski, ed .: Postal indiscretions. The correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski. Translated by Alicia Nitecki. Northwestern Univ. Press, Evanston 2007, p. 328
  2. ↑ Arno Lustiger : Who was Tadeusz Borowski? , Die Welt , January 20, 2007.
  3. ↑ trans. Vera Czerny, in ders., Die Steinerne Welt; Piper, 1959 et al .; dtv 1970; also in The Great Masters. European storytellers of the 20th century, 2nd ed. Rolf Hochhuth . Bertelsmann Lesering , Gütersloh 1960, pp. 415-434
  4. ↑ “ Looking for authentic sources, I read Tadeusz Borowski's clear, self-tormenting, merciless stories for the first time, including Please, the gentlemen on the gas! . "
  5. ↑ Thomas Taterka: "That cannot be expected of the German reader". Polish literature on concentration camps and the extermination of Jews in the GDR . In: Micha Brumlik, Karol Sauerland: Re-interpret, hide, remember: The late coming to terms with the Holocaust in Eastern Europe , Campus Verlag 2010, pp. 211 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Borowski, Tadeusz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Zhytomyr
DATE OF DEATH 3rd July 1951
Place of death Warsaw , Poland