Tadeusz Nowakowski

Tadeusz Nowakowski (born November 8, 1917 in Allenstein , † March 11, 1996 in Bydgoszcz ) was a Polish writer.

Life

Nowakowski was the son of a well-known journalist and grew up in Bydgoszcz, where he also graduated from high school. At the same time, he started literary work early on. From 1936 to 1939 he studied Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw . Immediately after the start of the war he was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities in Włocławek and spent the years up to the end of the war in various concentration camps. He himself later reported that he had been sentenced to death by the People's Court in 1942 , but was then "pardoned" for years of imprisonment in a camp because he had criticized his inactive defense lawyer in German.

In 1945 Nowakowski did not return to Poland, which had now become communist, and worked for two years as a Polish teacher in a camp for displaced persons in north-west Germany. He then went to Italy, England and the USA until he settled in Munich in 1953, where he lived until shortly before his death and worked closely with Radio Free Europe .

Unlike many other emigrants , Nowakowski tried to maintain close contact with the German cultural scene throughout his life, where he became a member of Group 47 . In Germany he was best known as the author of the autobiographical novel Obóz Wszystkich Świętych (German: Polonaise Allerheiligen ) from 1957.

In addition to a number of other literary texts, he was also active as a journalist. In the last years of his life he often accompanied Pope John Paul II on his travels and wrote many reports about it, which also made him famous in Poland. He knew the Pope through his contacts with the Krakow weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny . Nowakowski was a member of the Polish Academy for Literature in Emigration and the German PEN Center . He worked as a translator from German into Polish (from Siegfried Lenz and others) and was an important bridge builder between the two cultures.

In 1971 he was awarded the American Jurzykowski Foundation Prize for his work, and in 1992 he received the Karl Wolfskehl Prize for Exile Literature from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts .

The city of Olsztyn made him an honorary citizen in 1991 and the city of Bydgoszcz in 1993.

Works

prose

Szopa za jaśminami (1948)
Panna z drugiego piętra (1951)
Obóz Wszystkich Świętych (1957) (German: Polonaise Allerheiligen . Cologne 1959)
Syn zadżumionych (1959)
Saga rodu Radziwiłłów (1966) (German: The Radziwills. The story of a great European family . Piper, Munich 1966)
Niestworzone rzeczy. Zbiór opowiadań (1968)
Happy ending (1970)
Byle do wiosny (1975)
Wiza do Hrubieszowa (1979)
Never umiera się w Miami (1991)
Urzeczenie (1993)
Za kurtyną snu ... (2005)

Reports

Aleja Dobrych Znajomych (1968)
Reporter Papieża (1980) (German: I'm not afraid. The Pope's travels . Munich 1981)
W bagaźniku Jego Świątobliwości (1981)
Volo papale (1982)
Na skrzydłach nadziei (1984)
Boeing św. Piotra (1986)
Kwiaty dla Pielgrzyma (1987)

literature

Karl Dedecius (Ed.): Portraits (= Panorama of Polish Literature of the 20th Century. 4). Ammann, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-250-50003-8 , pp. 619-623.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Nowakowski, Tadeusz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish writer
DATE OF BIRTH	November 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH	Allenstein
DATE OF DEATH	March 11, 1996
Place of death	Bydgoszcz