Werner Bräunig

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Werner Bräunig, 1968

Werner Bräunig (born May 12, 1934 in Chemnitz , † August 14, 1976 in Halle an der Saale ) was a German writer.

Live and act

Bräunig's father was a laborer and later a driver, the mother a seamstress. After 1945, Bräunig ran black market shops, began an apprenticeship as a locksmith, and at the age of 16 came to a correctional facility. In 1953 he worked as a promoter at SDAG Wismut in Johanngeorgenstadt and in the same year was sentenced to three years in prison for smuggling trips to West Berlin. After early dismissal, he worked in the VEB paper and cardboard factory in Niederschlema in 1954/55 , briefly in 1956 as a full-time instructor for the FDJ district management in Schneeberg and until 1958 as a stoker in the Schneeberg municipal laundry. His first attempts at writing were made at that time, and he was the people's correspondent for the Karl-Marx-Städter newspaper Volksstimme .

In 1957 he was accepted into the Working Group of Young Authors (AJA) of Wismut AG and had his first publications. In 1958 he joined the SED . From 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature . In 1959, in preparation for the 1st Bitterfeld Conference , he and Jan Koplowitz wrote the appeal for a pen, buddy!

Bräunig's poem You, Our Time , which was written around 1960, was very popular in the GDR and found its way into school books. It reflects the authentic optimism of the time, which Bräunig shared unreservedly. After the wall was built, many believed that the GDR could open up democratically to the inside. Movements like the Bitterfelder Weg gave young proletarian authors like Bräunig the self-confidence to feel as representatives of the social awakening.

From 1961 to 1967 Bräunig was assistant for distance learning and head of the proseminar at the Literature Institute Johannes R. Becher, where he came into the focus of the Ministry for State Security for a time because of alleged "hostile group formation" .

In 1960 he began working on the large-scale Roman Rummelplatz , which deals with the post-war period in East and West and ends with the popular uprising of June 17, 1953 , which, in line with the SED's view, he describes as being controlled by the West. The main venue is the Wismut - a Soviet-owned company that mined uranium for the Soviet Union's nuclear program. Bräunig was able to draw from his own experience as a worker at Bismut and describes the situation with unadorned realism. The compositional intention was aimed at “a amalgamation of educational and social novels”, at the center of which the generation of the then 30-year-olds in East and West should be.

A preprint of the novel appeared in the October 1965 issue of the literary magazine ndl , which was dedicated to the birthday of the republic . Bräunig's novel came into the focus of party and state leadership, which at that time was dealing with anti-socialist moods in the population, especially among the youth, and who also blamed certain artists for this. At a meeting with writers in September 1965, Walter Ulbricht attacked Bräunig's extract from the novel as an example of "corrosive tendencies". The Politburo organized a press campaign against Bräunig. In the SED central organ Neues Deutschland he was sharply attacked for allegedly "insulting the working people and the Soviet partners". The fact that the writer Erik Neutsch was awarded the GDR national prize a year earlier for the novel Spur der Steine , which also depicted developments in production with drastic realism , while Bräunig was branded as a supposed deviant, gives the events a tragic character.

At the 11th plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in December 1965, the campaign against Bräunig and other artists reached its climax. Under the heading “A clean state with immovable standards”, the attack “against the influences of capitalist culture and immorality” began in art. Erich Honecker criticized Rummelplatz in his lecture as a work that “has nothing in common with our socialist attitude towards life”. Only Christa Wolf defended Bräunig in a spontaneous speech against the accusations.

When it became clear that the manuscript would have to be fundamentally revised according to the ideological guidelines of the 11th plenum in order to have a chance of publication, Bräunig broke off work on the text in 1966. The novel was never published during the GDR era, only a censored copy of 170 pages from the manuscript in the anthology Ein Kranich am Himmel , published in 1981 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag. Bräunig no longer wrote a novel, but instead wrote essays , short stories and film scenarios, reports and portraits.

Bräunig has not recovered from the conflict with the SED over the fairground , although he still felt that he was a socialist. He became an alcoholic and died in 1976 at the age of 42.

Rummelplatz was published in 2007 by Aufbau-Verlag and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the same year .

The Werner Bräunig Literature Prize , endowed with 5,000 euros, has been awarded by Textmanufaktur and Aufbau-Verlag since 2010 .

Works

Radio plays

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Angela Drescher: "But dreams have names". The Werner Bräunig case. In: Werner Bräunig: Fairground . Novel. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-03210-4 , pp. 632-633, 638
  2. ^ Werner Bräunig: Notes . In: Findings and Confessions . Halle (Saale) 1964, p. 48
  3. ↑ Angela Drescher: "But dreams have names". The Werner Bräunig case. In: Werner Bräunig: Fairground . Novel. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-03210-4 , p. 647
  4. ↑ Clear- cutting. The 11th plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in 1965. Studies and documents . Edited by Günter Agde. Development of Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH 1991
  5. ↑ Angela Drescher: "But dreams have names". The Werner Bräunig case. In: Werner Bräunig: Fairground . Novel. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-03210-4 , p. 653
  6. ↑ quoted from: Gunnar Decker: 1965. The short summer of the GDR . Vol. 1598, Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2015. ISBN 978-3-8389-0598-3 , p. 370

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bräunig, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1976
Place of death Halle on the Saale