Willi Bredel

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Willi Bredel
on January 5th, 1951 in East Berlin

Willi Bredel (born May 2, 1901 in Hamburg , † October 27, 1964 in East Berlin ) was a German writer and president of the GDR Academy of Arts . He was one of the pioneers of socialist-realistic literature .

Life

Willi Bredel was the first-born son of the cigar sorter Johann Carl Bredel and his wife Frieda Pauline geb. Harder. After graduating from primary school, he learned iron and metal lathe from 1916 to 1918 in what was then the Hamburg shipyard Blohm & Voss . From 1916 to 1917 he was a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth , from 1917 to 1920 of the Spartakusbund and from 1919 of the KPD . In 1923 he took part in the Hamburg uprising and was sentenced to two years in prison. After his amnesty in 1925, he worked as a seaman, as a taxi driver, as a lathe operator in the Nagel & Kaemp machine factory in Hamburg-Winterhude and worked as a journalist for the Bremer Arbeiterzeitung and the Essener Ruhrecho . In 1928 he became editor of the Hamburger Volkszeitung . Because "Preparing literary treason and high treason", he was in 1930 to two years imprisonment convicted. He wrote his first novels while in prison.

In March 1933 he was after the seizure of power of the NSDAP in " protective custody taken" and came into the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp .

Willi Bredel as a Spanish fighter (GDR postage stamp)

In 1934 he managed to escape to Czechoslovakia . From there he emigrated to Moscow , where he worked for Radio Moscow , among others . In London his novel The test , the first internationally acclaimed novel about a German concentration camp . From 1936 to 1939 he edited the literary magazine Das Wort with Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger . From 1937 to 1938 he took part in the Spanish Civil War as war commissioner of the Thälmann Battalion of the 11th International Brigade . In 1939 he returned to Moscow and from 1941 took part in the Second World War on the Soviet side . In the winter of 1942/1943 he was with Walter Ulbricht and Erich Weinert at the Stalingrad Front to convince the German soldiers of the pointlessness of continuing the war. In 1943 Bredel co-founded the National Committee Free Germany . As his front-line representative, he operated in 1944 near Thorn . Here he who deserted was Winfried Müller assigned as a front helper who later in the Algerian war built a successful organization, the Foreign Legion for desertion called and helped them to return to their home countries.

In 1945 he returned to Germany with the Sobottka subgroup of the Ulbricht group and worked as a full-time political instructor for the central committee of the KPD in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (from 1947 Mecklenburg). In August 1945 he was a co-founder of the Landes-Kulturbund for the democratic renewal of Germany. From 1947 to 1949 Bredel was a member of the Mecklenburg Landtag and from 1949 to 1950 of the People's Chamber of the GDR . He worked as editor-in-chief of the literary magazines Heute und Morgen (1947–1950) and ndl (new German literature) (1952–1956). In 1950 he was a founding member of the German Academy of the Arts . He had living space at 201 Street , where many artists and scientists were housed.

The President of the German Academy of the Arts, Otto Nagel , brings Willi Bredel (on the right in the picture) the Academy's congratulations on his 60th birthday.

From 1954 to 1964 Bredel was a member of the Central Committee of the SED , and since 1957 a member of the Culture Commission. In the trial against his friend Walter Janka , he sat on the witness bench. After Janka had been sentenced in July 1957, Bredel dropped his friend and at the 33rd meeting of the SED Central Committee in October 1957 he was self-critical : he was deceived by Janka. From 1962 to 1964 he succeeded Otto Nagel as President of the German Academy of the Arts , which under his leadership developed into the “Socialist Academy” by resolution of the Central Committee of the SED.

Since 1947 Bredel was married to the Swedish journalist Maj Bredel, née Olson (1914-2001), a second marriage.

From 1961 to 1976 a work edition in fourteen volumes was published in Berlin and Weimar .

Willi Bredel's library has had an eventful history that goes back to his years of exile in Moscow. After 1987 it was stored in Schwerin Castle . The Willi-Bredel-Gesellschaft has owned the library since 1992 . In 2009 it was given to the Fritz Hüser Institute by the Willi Bredel Society as a permanent loan.

Literary work

Bredel always saw his literary work as part of the class struggle . He began his literary career as a workers correspondent . His journalistic work then formed the basis of his first novel, Maschinenfabrik N. & K. If he - by his own admission - also referred to his experiences at the Hamburg factory Nagel & Kaemp , he did not describe any real events that he had experienced himself.

Critics like Georg Lukács accused Bredel that his characters were too woodcut-like, not real figures, but only batches , his language too much that of lectures, his literary method “ Trotskyist ”. Bredel was about in his early novels Maschinenfabrik N. & K. and “Rosenhofstrasse”, however, was not about portraying special characters, but rather wanted to portray the conflicting interests of different social groups. That is why the heroes of these novels are often not individuals, but collectives (a communist cell in the “machine factory”, a street cell in “Rosenhofstrasse”).

He showed that Bredel could do differently with his novel Dieprüfung , published in London in 1934 , in which he processed his own experience in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp ("Kola-Fu"), but also some of the notes made by fellow inmate Fritz Solmitz . Written in exile in Prague , it was the first literary representation from a German concentration camp and was translated into various languages ​​and - outside of Hitler's Germany - distributed. From the trilogy “Relatives and Acquaintances” “The Fathers” stands out, this work was compulsory reading in the Abitur level at GDR schools. Bredel managed to describe the life of the social democratic Hamburg workers shortly after the turn of the 20th century with humor and precise knowledge of the environment. According to Alfred Kantorowicz in the ZEIT , the second novel, Die Söhne , published in 1949, contains “a few more readable parts”, whereas the third novel, “Die Enkel”, published in 1953, has “fallen to the required and enforced level of depraved socialist realism” and party literature had become.

Awards and honors

tomb

Works

  • Marat - the friend of the people , Hamburg 1924
  • Maschinenfabrik N&K , 1930 completely readable as HTML
  • Rosenhofstrasse , 1931 completely readable as HTML
  • The property paragraph (could no longer appear due to the "seizure of power" in Germany and was first published in German in 1961 by Dietz Verlag Berlin; previously in Russian in 1933, in Ukrainian in 1934)
  • The exam , 1934
  • The informer and other stories
  • Your unknown brother , 1937
  • Encounter on the Ebro. Records of a war commissioner , 1939
  • The Commissioner on the Rhine and other historical stories , 1940
  • Father Brakel and other stories , 1940
  • Relatives and acquaintances , trilogy:
    • The fathers , 1941
    • The sons , 1949
    • The grandchildren , 1953
  • Der Sonderführer , 1943
  • The silent village and other stories , 1949
  • The Brothers of Vitality , 1950
  • Fifty days , 1950
  • From the Ebro to the Volga , 1954
  • On the military roads of the time , 1957
  • For you - freedom , 1959
  • A new chapter , novel trilogy,
    • First book , 1959
    • Second book , 1964
    • Third book , 1964
  • War in Spain , Volume 1 / On the History of the 11th International Brigade, 1977
  • War in Spain , Volume 2 / Encounter on the Ebro: Writings, Documents, 1977
  • Under towers and masts , 1960
  • Stories I , 1967

Film adaptations

Estate and research institutions

The archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin houses the Willi Bredel archive with manuscripts, letters and other documents from Bredel's estate. In 1988 the Willi-Bredel-Gesellschaft Geschichtswerkstatt e. V. established in connection with the establishment of a concentration camp memorial. On permanent loan from the Willi Bredel Society, Bredel's library is located in the Fritz Hüser Institute in Dortmund.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see the parents' marriage register entry from May 10, 1900 (Hamburg registry office 01 No. 331/1900).
  2. ^ Valentina Choschewa: "VOICE OF RUSSIA celebrates 85th anniversary" . In: “Voice of Russia, October 28, 2014”. Retrieved October 29, 2014.
  3. ↑ Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability. Si Mustapha alias Winfried Müller: From Wehrmacht deserter to hero of the Algerian liberation struggle , mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85476-544-8 , pp. 20-21
  4. ^ Page of the Max Lingner Archive in the Academy of the Arts
  5. ^ Doris Danzer: Between trust and betrayal. German-speaking communist intellectuals and their social relationships (1918–1960) . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012. ISBN 978-3-89971-939-0 . P. 507f.
  6. ^ Rolf Richter: Willi Bredel. A German way in the 20th century . Rostock 1998. p. 110.
  7. ↑ Wiily-Bredel Library on dortmund.de
  8. ^ Alfred Kantorowicz: Willi Bredel - indulgent commemoration , Die Zeit , November 6, 1964

Web links

Commons : Willi Bredel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

See also

personal data
SURNAME Bredel, Willi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, politician (KPD, SED), MdV and President of the German Academy of the Arts
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1964
Place of death East Berlin