Wang Meng (writer)

Wang Meng
Frankfurt Book Fair 2009

Wang Meng ( Chinese  王蒙 , Pinyin Wáng Méng , * 1934 in Beijing ) is a Chinese writer.

Life

As the son of a professor of philosophy, he grew up under the rule of the Japanese occupying forces . At middle school, barely thirteen, his political engagement began with his joining the New Democratic Youth League, a forerunner organization of the Communist Youth League . After Beijing was occupied by Red Army troops in 1948 , he rose to his first office as secretary for the youth organization's district.

At the age of 19 he began his first creative creative phase, his debut work, a novel entitled Long Live the Young , is about student life, but was not published until 1979. Stories of his first became public in 1955 with Xiao Dour , then in the same year Spring Festival and The Newcomer in the Organization Department , in which he critically examines the shortcomings of the organizational apparatus. He did manage to make a name for himself with the publications, but shortly afterwards they gave rise to criticism from the official side when the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956) took a turn and became part of the anti-right-wing campaign (1957 ) ended. At the age of 24, discredited as a deviator, he disappeared in a labor camp not far from Beijing.

In 1961 he was rehabilitated for a short time to a certain degree and a teacher at the Teacher Training College of Beijing in charge, but the prohibition of literary activity remained, and one year later, there was an exile in Ili again in the Autonomous Region of the Kazakhs in Xinjiang on the border with the Soviet Union.

There he was to spend the next 16 years, but he did not remain idle, but learned the Uyghur language in order to finally translate stories. During this time he wrote only two of his own works.

After the Cultural Revolution , China opened up, and at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978 a new political and economic policy was adopted. During this time the zeitgeist and the awareness of values ​​changed rapidly.

As a result of the plenary decisions, Wang Meng was rehabilitated. He returned to Beijing and gave himself up again to his literary work. Possibly inspired by a writers' congress in September 1979, in which the new line of literature should be determined, he wrote the short story The Eye of the Night (1979), in which he criticized the privilege addiction of rehabilitated cadres .

In addition to criticizing the social circumstances in this short story, Wang Meng admits that his design was inspired by the techniques of the modern European novel , namely the stream of consciousness . He is variously regarded as a pioneer in this regard; he is the first and best-known Chinese writer who began to experiment with Western influences after the Cultural Revolution. In China in the 1980s, Wang Meng's experiments initiated a trend and, with that, the debate about modernism in Chinese literature .

After a first stay abroad in 1980, Wang Meng became a member of the Council of the Chinese Writers ' Union a year later, and again a year later became Vice President of the Chinese PEN Center and also a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party . Since 1983 he has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Volksliteratur . In 1985 Wang Meng was a guest at the West Berlin Horizon Festival (Horizon Festival of World Cultures : No. 3, 1985). The poet Bei Dao , the later Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian and the writer Zhang Jie also traveled to Berlin in his delegation .

As Minister of Culture (1986 to 1989) he made a reputation for himself as a liberal promoter of art and literature. After the June events of 1989, he was the only minister to refuse to condemn the student democracy movement as a counter-revolution and was replaced shortly afterwards by a hardliner. In a subsequent campaign carried out under the guise of literary criticism, this successor wanted to damage him further. However, Wang Meng successfully took legal action against it.

After 1990, Wang Meng was a guest of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in the Heinrich Böll House in Langenbroich for a few months . In 2015 he was awarded the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

Fonts

stories

• Xiao Dour . 1955
• Spring festival . 1956
• The newcomer to the organization department . 1956
• Rain at night . 1962
• Eyes . 1962
• The most valuable . 1978
• The eye of the night . 1979
• The grateful heart . 1979
• Butterfly . 1980
• Voices of spring . 1980
• The kite line . 1980
• Andante Cantabile . 1981

novel

• Long live the youth . 1953
• Rare gift of folly . Frauenfeld 1994, ex. by Ulrich Kautz

literature

• Valeria May: Stream of consciousness in modern Chinese literature? Text analysis of Wang Meng's short story “Ye de yan” (“The Eye of the Night”) and criticism of the German translations . University of Frankfurt, 2007 ( publications.ub.uni-frankfurt.de [PDF; 857 kB ]).
• Martin Woesler: "The essay is the longing for freedom" - Wang Meng, former minister of culture of China, as an essayist in the period 1948–1992 . Lang, Frankfurt a. a. 1998, ix, 394 pp.
• Martin Woesler: Political Literature in China 1991–92. A translation of the grotesque “Tough Bread” and the documentation of an absurd debate . 2nd Edition. Bochum 2003, ISBN 978-3-89966-004-3 , 252 pp. (Describes a campaign against Wang Meng under the guise of literary criticism, against which he successfully defended himself.)
• Words from afar . In: Die Zeit , No. 7/1990; with biogr. Information

Web links

• Literature by and about Wang Meng in the catalog of the German National Library