Work diary
Work Diary - Early Poetry and Prose is a chronologically and thematically arranged collection of the poetry of François Maher Presley . The book was published by In-Cultura.com in July 2012 .
About the characteristics of the diary
The book contains a selection of short stories , poems , letters and greetings from the years 1984–1992, from the era of the late Rhenish-West German Federal Republic and the early "post-reunification" period in Germany. In the second half of the 1980s, cultural life flattened out as a result of perestroika and glasnost , which made an external threat increasingly unlikely and because a generation assumed social responsibility that had only seen war and uprooting on television. In “Harald's Cat” Presley describes a dominant trait of the “Golf Generation”: their latent inability to communicate and their distance, which has to be overcome again and again. This does not apply to the author himself, as can be seen from the long line of addressees of the card greetings, letters and poems. On the contrary, Presley's ontologically intersubjective conception emerges more than once from his addresses. No one seems to him to be a hopeless case, even if the love connection becomes a path of suffering for the creative spirit: "... because when you laugh, I have hope, hope for you and also for me" Communication as a "loving struggle", as Karl Jaspers did formulated. The human complement is a constant that cannot be overlooked in the author's literary work.
In the meantime, the work diary is related to only one part, albeit an important one: the ephemeral years of youth, which are characterized by an intense I-you “experience”. From his early contained in this collection work of the short period of life his is oriental influenced childhood represented with ups and downs: These are firstly the reminiscences "mother," "When I was a little kid" with its intense experience of nature, but it is the poignant story “To our games”, a war scenario from Damascus . The natural phenomenon of snow was only known to Presley from a one-time visit to the Golan Heights until 1967; the northern German rainy and foggy weather, which gives some of his texts the external "color", keeps him longing for the blue sky over the desert. Even as an adult, after his time in the Benedictine monastery, Germany was still a country for him that is not my home country (13.01 .86 / FOR MY MOTHER MALLAKH).
The cultural anthropologist Matthias H. Rauert, who was a companion of the author for a number of years from 1988, characterizes in his introduction to the “work diary” basic features of Presley's poetry: Presley remembers the desert sun with awe; it may have nurtured his spiritualism , which is actually a pneumatism. The author of the “monastery diary” rejects the external characteristics of a community, whether in Christianity or Islam . It is noticeable that Presley often deals with the subjects of death and “newborns”, for example in “My Birth”. Rhematically, the relationship is often set differently: Then death is not the end of “being”, but its new beginning, above all: It does not only occur at some point or as the external end of life, but every day, every moment. The perspective of death is placed in the middle of the lived life and expands it, constitutive in the letter "When I was a little child". Here death is not real death, nor is it the “death of the author”, but a “virtual” (re) felt experience, sometimes in other people as well. The "death in you" is of course of a different, intersubjective quality, but shows even more clearly that this author has a particularly deep and wide experience, as expressed in the main title of the monastery diary. The new birth, on the other hand, is in the context of Presley's conviction of the rebirth of humans, so that many generations of their ancestors live in each human being . So the human being is not an individual , but an intergenerational “we” . Under this aspect, for example, To my birth and the letter What will it be now that enables us to read (11/11/90 / for Hannelore Greve ).
People and addressees
The following personalities may appear a. as addressees of letters and dedications (in the order as mentioned first in the diary):
- Ralf Altmeyer
- Jakob Augstein
- Alexander Beisel
- Michaela Daudt
- Hans Eppendorfer
- Elke Figge
- Hannelore Greve
- Harald Gutzahn
- Halem El Hassadi
- Mallakh (mother of the author)
- Rock Hudson
- Carsten W. Jungclaus
- Roger Kusch
- Michael Kusmierczyk
- Klaus Peters
- Waltraud Radke
- Martin Schallwig
- Raimond look
- Henriette Stamm
- Markus Tornau
- Claudia Voss
- Terje Magnussønn Watterdal
- Stefan Weslowsky
- Harald Zörner
reception
The short stories Lola , excursion , blood red passepartiert , The Gardener , cannibals , awakening - associations in Lanzarote , the ball , the scout , Harald's cat , the fulfillment , the declaration , the old story , Cain and The ride - the latter two each by a poem introduced - were discussed by Matthias H. Rauert in 1992 in the version at that time, that is, in the form in which they existed in the anthology “Denkspiele” as part of a related corpus.
Three novellas were translated into Hungarian by Dezső Tandori and published in 1992 in the Hungarian literary journal Nagyvilág, Világirodalmi folyóirat: Lola, p. 200; A felderítő (The Scout), pp. 201ff; Vérvörös paszpartu (blood red passeparted) p. 203ff.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.alexanderbeisel.de/
- ↑ http://www.afghanistan.no/English/Contact_NAC/index.html
- ^ Rauert, Matthias H .: Epilogue. In: François Maher Presley: Puzzle games. Short prose. Hamburg 1992, 77-90.