Waldemar Krause (writer)

Waldemar Krause (born January 28, 1926 in Flensburg ; † August 9, 2006 in Heide ) was a North German writer and businessman .

Life dates

Waldemar Krause was born in Flensburg and grew up in Kiel . He came from a German-Danish family. For racial reasons he had to leave the grammar school on Knooper Weg in Kiel in 1938 and trained as a druggist after secondary school . From 1943 he also had to serve as a flak helper in Kiel, followed by labor service and a short time as a pioneer in the Wehrmacht . After the war he went first to Eiderstedt and in 1950 to Heide, where he worked as a self-employed businessman (wholesale for painting and glazing supplies). Between 1987 and 1996 he lived in Lübeck , where he was a managing board member of the Lübeck painting cooperative for five years. He was married twice, and both marriages resulted in a total of six children. Krause moved back to Heide in 1997, where he died in 2006 after a long and serious illness.

Writing activities

Waldemar Krause has been writing stories for various newspapers since the early 1950s, including the Dithmarscher Landeszeitung and the Norddeutsche Rundschau . He later collected stories from his Dithmarschen environment and published them in the book "Old Stories from Dithmarschen", which was published for the first time in 1976 by the West Holstein publishing house Boyens & Co. The book was a great success and was published several times. The illustrations were by the then still young painter Jens Rusch . Another book followed in 1980 by the same publisher, which took up much more demanding topics and had, among other things, autobiographical topics (“The Last Ship”). In one of the articles he describes his experiences as a 16-year-old flak helper. Another story, based on a true story, described how Heinrich Himmler landed in Delve in the days after the end of the Second World War and from there tried to escape to Argentina in an eider boat (which the boat was not suitable for, like himself then turned out).

In 1980 Waldemar Krause also published a book in the Low German language , a love story set in the Middle Ages (Margret - young Hart in grote Leev).

Due to a tragedy in his closest personal circle, he stopped writing for many years, but then continued in the 1990s to write stories with predominantly historical references (on Schleswig-Holstein and Danish history). As editor-in-chief of the members 'newspaper of a large painters' cooperative, he also wrote short stories under the pseudonym "Schmidtpott" that derived the meaning of idioms. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Schmidtpott's comments were published as a book by the Altona MEGA painters' cooperative.

Books

• Old stories from Dithmarschen. As told by Waldemar Krause, with drawings by Jens Rusch. Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens & Co, Heide 1976, ISBN 3-8042-0157-1 .
• The last ship, and other stories, with an afterword by Adalbert Blankenburg. Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens & Co, Heide 1980, ISBN 3-8042-0233-0 .
• Margret. Jung Hart in Grote Leev. Quickborn Verlag, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-87651-071-6 .

Web links

• Waldemar Krause in the Low German Bibliography and Biography (PBuB)