Unica Zürn

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Unica Zürn (* July 6, 1916 in Berlin-Grunewald as Nora Berta Ruth Zürn ; † October 19, 1970 in Paris ) was a German writer and illustrator .

Live and act

Nora Zürn attended in Berlin the high school , but they before the final examination left. From 1934 to 1942 she was employed by Ufa , initially as a secretary and archivist , and later as a dramaturge for advertising films. In 1942 she married Erich Laupenmühlen, with whom she had two children. In 1949 this marriage was divorced and the father was granted custody. From 1949 to 1955 she earned her living writing stories for Berlin newspapers.

In 1953 Zürn met the artist Hans Bellmer , with whom she subsequently had a close relationship. Zürn followed him to Paris, where she began to draw and write anagrams . In 1953 and 1957 her drawings were exhibited in Paris. From 1957 she maintained contact with the Parisian surrealists Hans Arp , André Breton , Marcel Duchamp , Max Ernst and Henri Michaux and began working on surrealist prose pieces.

Gravestone of Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer on the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

In 1959 Unica Zürn was a participant in the documenta II in Kassel in the graphics department . At the beginning of the 1960s, paranoid schizophrenia broke out. From 1961 to 1963 she stayed in a psychiatric clinic in Paris, and in the years that followed she was hospitalized several times. When the Kestnergesellschaft held a Bellmer exhibition in Hanover in 1967 , works by Unica Zürn were on view at the same time in the Brusberg gallery there . She spent the summer of 1970 in the open psychiatric clinic Château de la Chesnaie de Chailles. Here her condition improved noticeably for the first time since the onset of the disease. On October 18, she was given leave of absence from hospital for a few days. On October 19, 1970, she committed suicide by jumping out of a window in Hans Bellmer's apartment. Bellmer died alone in Paris in 1975. Unica Zürns and Hans Bellmer's grave is on the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise .

Unica Zürn's literary work, which received little attention during her lifetime, consists, on the one hand, of autobiographical and often fragmentary prose , which is primarily about their love relationships, their illness and their treatment, and, on the other hand, of poetic texts, of which their 123 anagrams - Poems are most significant.

Honor

In the credits of the film drama Despair - A Journey into the Light by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978) it is written that the film is dedicated to Antonin Artaud , Vincent van Gogh and Unica Zürn.

Oskar Pastior found the anagram for Unica Zürn's name: “Unica Zuern - Azur in nuce” ('Sky blue in a nutshell') .

Works

Exhibition catalogs

  • Unica Zürn: watercolors, drawings, etchings. Galerie Brusberg Hannover 1967.
  • Unica Zürn: Pictures 1953–1970. Brinkmann & Bose Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-922660-71-1 .
  • Unica Zürn: Albums. Brinkmann & Bose Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-940048-06-6 .

Settings

3.  Death is the longing of my life (anger) - 5.  Time is the bread we feed on (anger)
1.  I don't know how to make love - 2.  Will I meet you one day? - 3.  Still waters run deep - 4.  Dans ta lumière, dans ton ampleur, dans ton horreur - 5.  And shear off your rose beards - 6.  I know how to make lust
1.  Life is beautiful - 2.  I don't know how to make love - 3.  Nobody stops living

literature

  • Frauke Hartmann: The anagrams of Unica Zürns . Hamburg 1988.
  • Sabine Scholl: Mistakes, traps, art . Frankfurt am Main 1990.
  • Gunn-Irén Glosvik: In the labyrinth of Ariadne . Bergen 1995.
  • Cornelia Saxe: Unica Zürn . In: Oh big edges on my future hat! - Portraits of surrealist artists and writers . Berlin 1997.
  • Ute Baumgärtel: ... your ego is a gram of poetry ... the anagrams of Unica Zürns . Hamburg 2000, p. 23-42 .
  • Gisela von Wysockil: Femininity as an anagram . In: The frosts of freedom . Vienna 2000.
  • Erna R. Fanger: Like a woman, completely sacrificing herself ... Unica Zürn - María Luisa Bombal . Hamburg 2001.
  • Helga Lutz: typefaces and picture fonts . Stuttgart et al. 2003.
  • Malcolm Green: Introduction . In: The Man of Jasmine . London, ISBN 0-947757-80-5 .
  • Ruth Henry: The only one - encounter with Unica Zürn . Hamburg 2007.
  • Sarah Palermo: Unica Zürn. I doni della follia . Italy 2014.
  • Elke Schmitter: In the bowels of language . In: passions. 99 women authors of world literature . Munich 2009.
  • Rita Bischof: So everything is: the purple of the ice - your dream. On the work of Unica Zürn. In: Unica Zürn - Camaro - Hans Bellmer. Berlin 2016.
  • Rike Felka: Desublimation. In: Unica Zürn, pictures 1953–1970. Berlin 1998.
  • Rike Felka: Repères biographiques. In: Unica Zürn. Paris 2006.
  • Rike Felka: The dreaming hand. In: Unica Zürn, albums. Berlin 2009.
  • Rike Felka: Unica Zürn. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon. Stuttgart / Weimar 2009.
  • Thüne, Eva-Maria (2016): “Will you tell your secret? Intertextual and semiotic references in anagrams by Unica Zürn ”, in Uta Degner & Martina Wörgötter, eds., Literary secret and private languages. Forms and functions. Würzburg (Königshausen & Neumann), 103–124.
  • Thüne, Eva-Maria (2012a): “The cabinet of solar plexuses. An example of text and image relationships in Unica Zürns Das Haus der Kranken ”, in Franciszek Grucza; Anne Beds; Alexander Schwarz & Stanislaw Predota, eds., Files of the XII. IVG Congress “Diversity and Unity of German Studies Worldwide”. Vol. 4. Language in literature / Contact and transfer in the history of language and literature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period / Dutch linguistics - diachronic and synchronous, Frankfurt / M. et al. (Peter Lang), 133–138 [publications of the IVG; 4];
  • Thüne, Eva-Maria (2008): Unica Zürn, Due diari. Introduzione e traduzione. Brescia (Edizioni l'Obliquo).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ deutschlandfunk.de: "The fun spirit is completely wrong". (accessed on May 20, 2015)
personal data
SURNAME Zürn, Unica
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zürn, Nora Berta Unica Ruth (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German draftsman and prose writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Grunewald
DATE OF DEATH 19th October 1970
Place of death Paris