Wolf-Dieter Bach

Wolf-Dieter Bach (* 1933 in Stuttgart ; † 2002 in Ulm ) was a German poet who made a name for himself as a psychoanalytically oriented interpreter of Karl May's works . He worked for a time as a publishing editor , editor , translator and publicist . Most recently he was a subject librarian at the Adult Education Center in Ulm .

Live and act

Two years before graduating from high school, Bach entered the class of Oskar N. Sahlberg , the later literary scholar and psychotherapist , with whom he remained lifelong friends. In September 2003 Sahlberg dedicated a considerable obituary to him in the communications of the Karl May Society .

As student

Sahlberg: “We read Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann , Sartre and Heidegger , Freud and Jung , and above all Benn , Baudelaire , Rimbaud . What united us was our sensitivity to the magic of poetry , our ability to be enthusiastic. ... What fascinated us were the poets' visions of the Orient . In 1952 Bach read me his poems for one evening: Navigation through the night , a journey across the continents of the globe along the zodiac signs . The old caliph , he dreams of his lost empire. "

As a student

Sahlberg: “At the university in Munich we heard art history from Sedlmayr , the Turkologist Babinger , the linguist Pokorny . Bach decided to study Turkish , Arabic and Persian , and in 1955 he received a one-year scholarship in Istanbul . ... We came back to Germany. Bach became a publisher's editor, husband and father too. "

As a young adult

Sahlberg: “We were both back in Munich in the mid-1960s. The images of the Vietnamese burned by napalm brought up the images of the heaps of corpses from Hitler's concentration camps . We went to the demonstrations, read Marx , tried to connect him with Freud: a new view of the world, a new identity as the basis of our writing, which had remained our main occupation. The Orient in our minds was changing. An example of Bach's work Symbolon : Merging separate spheres. In the dedication of his first essay on Karl May, Fluchtlandschaften , Bach refers to the methods that we developed together with Ralf Rudolf Rudeloff, the TS Eliot . "

As a Karl May researcher

Sahlberg: “For Bach, Karl May became a crystallization core of his interests. Since Bach was familiar with the languages ​​of the Orient, the world of Kara Ben Nemsi and Hajji Halef Omar acquired a magical presence for him , and this he then opened up to Old Shatterhand and Winnetou . Bach was a poet, he lived in language, in the sensual body of words, their sound; the words opened up to him the world of Karl May, the dimensions of the soul that were present in his books and at the same time hidden , and this bore the traces of society per se."

According to the yearbooks of the Karl May Society, Bach's professional stations during this time were:

• 1970 and 1971: Editor in Mannheim
• 1975: Editor in Schwetzingen
• 1980 and 1981: Writer in Ulm

Bach's great essays on Karl May are called:

• Escape Landscapes (1971)
• Make a name for yourself (1975)
• "The future rises from its legend and blossoms anticipated" (1979)
• Adventure as overcoming fear. Motives of the imagination of Karl May (1983)
• Karl May - Abyss and Hunger (1987)

Sahlberg: “The motives of Karl May's imagination points to Bach's point of view and intent: the exploration of the causes from which the imagination moves, the reasons and the abysses in which the adventure begins and into which it leads down again. Adventure as an escape to the refugee - to cope with it. 'I am a psychologist,' said Karl May when he was five years old, after Freud had shown the depths of the soul and the reasons for human action in the Interpretation of Dreams . "

Escape landscapes

Sahlberg (with quotations from Bach): “'May wrote only one big book, and only the mutual relationship of all the individual features creates the overall picture.' That was Bach's perspective, which he developed in the important first work of Escape Landscapes . He saw May's fables as 'myths from the basic layer of the psyche'. 'The Homer who fled into the subculture is Karl May', coined twice: 'Victim of a bad society' and 'Victim of failures of early childhood love wishes'. And then the 'connection between early childhood orality and poetic impulse': 'finally being able to speak freely'. 'The unbearable social conditions lead to regression in childhood'. 'Escape landscapes as counter-worlds to the social reality in which he was doomed to live, and at the same time landscapes of refuge as imagines of the physical security of the mother', ' pink colored by childish eroticism , warm to the skin and naive.' ... "

Make a name for yourself

Sahlberg (quoting Bach): “In the essay Make Yourself a Name , Bach shows how May makes the names in his books. Dilke , as a German is called in the novel Und Friede auf Erden , was the name of an English writer, world traveler, politician, whose steep career ended abruptly when he fell through a scandal. The character in the novel carries a secret biography with the scheme of May's own fate at the time. In Raffley hides Raffles (Asia travelers know the hotels ), in the West Indies came into the world and so this area as, birthing room 'to have around. May as a ' midwife son' was 'sensitive to everything that was born'. A ship is called Wihlade , which is Arabic for birth. Another is called Schooter , in Dutch Schoot: lap. Or yin , the 'giving birth female principle'. A mountain Gros-Ventre : 'fat belly', which makes you think of a pregnant woman. ... "

Anticipation from the legend

Bach: “May described dreams and nothing that exists. His descriptions of landscapes lay claim to reality that cunningly eludes verification on site. He may well verbally conjure up the parks above the San Luis Valley in Colorado : in the end he designs body landscapes, a topography of the organs, inner 'walking panoramas', the 'richness of color of the bare rocks', the 'salmon-yellow shimmering bare masses of rocks'. But such sensual dreams of landscape are always tempting to look for them in reality, perhaps even to find them. They are utopian views of nature, not reality, but aiming at reality. If only the rocks would turn us back so that we could pat them! That is where happiness sleeps its midday nap, where they breathe warmly, Nietzsche knew . Where nature is our flesh without us cutting into it and bleeding to death from it. One wants to fix them in the real, the pictures of May, because they want to fix in pure reality with no paper left over. Often this goes in places where the author's verbal evocation is aimed. I experienced it myself, heard it from others: The first time you stand on the edge of the desert , in the glowing desert light, in front of a distant glass of a sky floating on dust, the body-warm wind close to the ground, electrically dry smell in your nose - it has long been known; Halef is standing next to you. May Reales suggested that he did not even experience it himself. So anticipation, anticipation from the legend. Just as he, as a blind child, had to anticipate the graphic, fantasizing it out of a black wall of smoke until he really saw. "(" The future rises from its legend ... ", 1979, p. 146)

Adventure as overcoming fear

Sahlberg: “If you leave home behind you , 'the world becomes strange and threatening', but you 'also grow strength and defeat death and the devil' until a 'radiant image glows superhumanly ...'. The adventure novel is 'a ritual for overcoming fear' with the 'claim to the indestructible, eternal figure'. ... "

Karl May - Abyss and Hunger

Sahlberg: “'Fear has its indelible images [...] The bottomless depth of the abyss and the tightness that stifles your breath.' 'Part of the abyss is the vertigo of those who look into it, the passive being carried away, the restriction of freedom of movement through the overpowering suction.' ... "

Basic principles of the May interpretation

Word networking

Sahlberg: "The title of the unprinted essay Word Networking points to a basic principle of May's poetry and Bach's point of view: In the web of languages ​​and words, man takes hold of the world - gives birth to: the microcosm of the soul, multilingual and encyclopedic, reflects the macrocosm of the world. Principle of the alchemists . "

Bring yourself

Sahlberg: “Turning against the dried up sociological trend that was spreading at the time, Bach explains his approach in 1979 in the Horen . Old Shatterhand lives on the readiness of the reader to approach him. And you have to bring yourself with you - or at least the visualization of yourself as a bundle of irrepressible desires: how you were as a child. Whoever leaves the text alone in its wording with May, without enriching it with his own, will stand in front of a sealed sesame . Objectively, May is not available. ' ... "

Knowing as a living experience

Sahlberg (quoting Bach): “… 'I use psychoanalytic tools to enable myself and others to have a deeper experience of texts that are linked to my own life story, which of course always has a social side. By interweaving with personal experience, the texts should become richer, more complex, diversified and also more real. The variety of associations and trains of thought that I have brought into play is intended to loosen, release, and make the imagination swell. ' ... "

Illness and death

Sahlberg: “It wasn't until 1990 that some heretics succeeded in creating a forum for prenatal psychology , which aroused Bach's interest. Only a little later he suffered an injury which soon after led to the destruction of his consciousness. He died in the summer of 2002. "

On the importance of Bach's work

Historical connections

Sahlberg: “A look at the historical context makes the significance of Bach's work clear. The psychoanalysis was banned in Germany in 1933 as Jewish. The university representatives of the humanities remained true to the prohibition of the ' Führer ' even after 1945, and Germany was always united in this (largely to this day. 'Occult anti-Semitism ' says the cultural sociologist Nicolaus Sombart ).

In 1963 Arno Schmidt , as a writer, reintroduced psychoanalysis into the study of literature - using Karl May. Before that, he had shelved another taboo: in 1957 he showed in Abu Kital. From the new grand mystic , that May's late work is part of high literature. Bach continued this, as did Hans Wollschläger shortly afterwards , who also used psychoanalytic instruments. Three literati. You use it in a very individual way. For example, Bach vehemently criticizes Schmidt's fixation on anality and homosexuality in Sitara . -

Why did Karl May become a 'turning point' for literary studies? For Ernst Bloch , May's work is shaped by the 'original color of dreams '. ... May's work has a permeability to the unconscious , to the psychological and social lower class, it is a system of osmosis to which the reader attaches. May's development into the 'grand mystic' of the later works, in which the adventure turned into a journey of the soul, as found in the Divine Comedy and in Faust - Bach shows that the later is laid out in the early. "

Radio broadcasts

Sahlberg: “Some of Bach's works on Karl May were only broadcast on the radio, by Harald Eggebrecht , ... a Karl May specialist ( sensuality and adventure ), who also published the volume Karl May, the Saxon Fantast in 1987 , in Bach Abyss and hunger appeared. Bach had encouraged Eggebrecht to deal with Karl May, and Eggebrecht again induced me and other authors of the volume to do so. "

Development and new interest

Sahlberg: “In the two decades in which his work on Karl May was created, Bach developed. In the follow-up to the essay Abyss and Hunger, he refers to the discussions on narcissism at the time . What was hardly noticed there was Freud's view that it is rooted in 'intrauterine life'. In the 1980s, Leonhard Orr, Arthur Janov , and Stanislav Grof also became known in Germany, radical innovators who broke psychoanalytic dogmas: They researched the mental experience of birth and the prenatal period. ...

In 1957, as if in passing, Arno Schmidt discovered May's birth as well as prenatal life, the 'prenatal state' with an 'intrauterine whisper' from the ' Grand Mystic '. In official psychoanalysis, the taboo that Freud imposed on Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth in 1924 is strictly observed. It was not until 1990 that some heretics succeeded in creating a forum for prenatal psychology , which aroused Bach's interest. ...

For decades we wrote in an inner dialogue with one another, were our first readers to one another, and also worked together. … And in my interpretation of the dreams of birth and conception in the two late novels of May… I am still in dialogue with my old friend, full of gratitude for the years together. "

Works

Translations

• Spain: beauties a. Treasures / With 164 ills. Ue insert by Jacques Lafaye. Text and Images by Yves Bottineau . [In Dt. transfer by Wolf-Dieter Bach], Munich; Zurich: Droemer / Knaur 1962.
• The desert / By A. Starker Leopold ud Red. D. Time-life books. [From d. Engl. Trans. by Wolf-Dieter Bach a. edit from Gesa u. Gerhard Hartmann], Munich; Zurich: Droemer / Knaur 1962.
• The rich and the poor : [Lectures] / Barbara Ward . [From d. American. transfer by Wolf-Dieter Bach], Munich; Zurich: Droemer / Knaur 1963.
• Ambition and Illusion: De Gaulle's Foreign Policy / Paul Reynaud . [From d. French transferred by Lothar Ruehl with collabor. by Wolf-Dieter Bach], Munich; Zurich: Droemer / Knaur 1964.
• The Art of Spain / José Gudiol. [From d. Engl. Trans. by Wolf-Dieter Bach], Munich; Zurich: Droemer / Knaur 1964.
• Japan, History & Art / Bradley Smith. [Trans. from d. American: Wolf-Dieter Bach. Knowledge Mitarb .: Madoka Kanai et al. Photography: Bradley Smith.] Introduction by Marius B. Jansen u. Nagatake Asano, Munich; Zurich: Droemer / Knaur 1965.
• François-René de Chateaubriand : The Natchez . Edited and with an afterword by Oskar Sahlberg, Berlin: Freitag Verlag 1982 [therein translated by Wolf-Dieter Bach:
  • Milas Bad , p. 350
  • Diary without date , p. 350 f.
  • One night in the wilderness , p. 351 f.
  • The song of the birds , p. 353 f.]
• The Doctor's Travels Syntax : in 2 vol. / William Combe u. Thomas Rowlandson . Incorporated into the German by Wolf-Dieter Bach a. together with him ed. by Norbert Miller u. Karl Riha , Frankfurt am Main: Insel 1983.
• Théophile Gautier : In search of elsewhere. Edited and with an afterword by Oskar Sahlberg, 2 volumes, Berlin 1983 and 1984 [therein translated by Wolf-Dieter Bach and Ingrid Grießhaber-Saleh:
  • Hashish I , p. 159 ff.
  • Haschisch II , p. 161 ff.
  • A Bedouin festival , p. 189 ff.
  • Dancing Dervishes , p. 199 ff.
  • Longing for India , p. 207 ff.]
• Istanbul: a guide / John Freely ; Hilary Sumner-Boyd. [Trans. and German arrangement: Wolf-Dieter Bach], Munich: Prestel 1986.
• The drunk ship / Arthur Rimbaud . [Dt. by WD Bach], Schwäbisch Gmünd: Vincent Klink 1988.

Biographical

• In Mainz, around Mainz and around Mainz. About the writer Karl Christian Ernst Graf von Bentzel-Sternau , in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 11, March 1972, p. 10 ( online version ).
• Under the shadow mouth. The curriculum vitae A [rthur]. R [imbaud]. , Schwäbisch Gmünd: Vincent Klink 1988.

Lyrical

• Progress with the Mohren Gaspard . Under the festivities on Walter Höllerer's 60th birthday on December 19, 1982, in: Language in the technical age 81/1982, p. 318, ff .; Reprinted posthumously in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 137, September 2003 ( online version ), p. 42.

Basics

• America rasa. On the Myth of the New Beginning , in: Language in the Technical Age 54/1975, pp. 126–146.
• Symbolon. Or: Voltaire's Iroquois Hercules , in: Language in the Technical Age 58/1976, pp. 112–142.
• Myth , in: Harald Eggebrecht (Ed.): Goethe - A monument comes to life , Munich: Piper 1982, pp. 61–79 (in conversation with Klaus Heinrich ).

Karl May contributions

• Mother poems by Karl Mays and Hermann Hesses , in: Jb-KMG 1970, pp. 114–117 ( online version )
• Fluchtlandschaften , in: Jb-KMG 1971, pp. 39–73 ( online version ).
• The current gloss. About a review of the Jb-KMG , in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 12, June 1972, p. 2 ( online version ).
• Arabic arabesques around Karl May , in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 16, June 1973, p. 29 ( online version ).
• About the origin of the name Winnetou . Miszelle, in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 24, June 1975, p. 7 ( online version ).
• Make a name for yourself , in: Jb-KMG 1975, pp. 34–72 ( online version )
• Hitler's shadow between Klaus Mann and Karl May , in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 27/1976, pp. 14-17 ( online version ).
• "The future rises from its legend and blossoms anticipated". On the yearbook of the Karl May Society 1978 , in: die horen 114/1979, pp. 145–155.
• Knowing as a living experience. On psychoanalytic optics, applied to May in essayistic forms , in: Jb-KMG 1980, pp. 28–34 ( online version ).
• Passing May with Mohammed. On I. Hofmann's and A. Vorbichler's criticism of Karl May's Islam-Phantasien , in: Jb-KMG 1981, pp. 375–381 ( online version ).
• Adventure as overcoming fear: Motives of the imagination of Karl May , in: Helmut Schmiedt (Ed.): Karl May , Frankfurt 1983, pp. 245-251.
• Karl May - Abyss and Hunger , in: Harald Eggebrecht (Hrsg.): Karl May, the Saxon fantastic. Studies on life and work , Frankfurt 1987, pp. 153–188.

literature

• Oskar N. Sahlberg: Therapist Kara Ben Nemsi , in: Harald Eggebrecht (Ed.): Karl May, the Saxon fantastic. Studies on life and work , Frankfurt 1987, pp. 189–212, therein:
  • 1. The discovery of May's fantasy world by Schmidt , Wollschläger , Bach (p. 189 ff.)
  • 2. The therapies in the " Silver Lion " and in " Ardistan and Dschinnistan " (p. 192 ff.)
  • 3. From therapist to prophet (p. 202 ff.)
• Oskar N. Sahlberg: "Recognition as a living experience". Wolf-Dieter Bach and Karl May (with photo), in: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 137, September 2003, pp. 35–41 ( online version ).
• Oskar N. Sahlberg: The "grand mystic" Karl May. The conception and birth dreams of the son and the father. "In the realm of the silver lion". “Ardistan und Dschinnistan” , in: Meredith McClain, Reinhold Wolff (eds.): Karl May im Llano estacado (on the symposium of the Karl May Society in Lubbock / USA 2000), Hansa Verlag Husum 2004, p. Xxx.
• Lutz Hieber , Hans-Joachim Jürgens, Eva Koethen, Gertrud Schrader, Florian Vaßen, Nicole M. Wilk (Eds.): Der kartographische Blick , Hamburg: LIT Verlag 2006.
• Hans Hintz: love, suffering and megalomania. An integrative study on Richard Wagner , Karl May and Friedrich Nietzsche , Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2007.
• Helmut Schmiedt , Joachim Biermann, Florian Schleburg (eds.): "If you don't experience anything, then you don't do anything glooben!" Fifty years of the Karl May Society 1969-2019 , Husum: Hansa Verlag 2019, ISBN 978-3- 941629-23-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Wollschläger: The tenth year book. In: karl-may-gesellschaft.de. Retrieved July 5, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Communications from the Karl May Society . No. 137 , September 2003 ( karl-may-gesellschaft.de [accessed July 5, 2019]). The following Sahlberg quotes are all taken from this obituary.
3. ^ Gravestones: Bremen-Riensberg cemetery. In: grabsteine.genealogy.net. Retrieved July 5, 2019 . 
4. ↑ http://karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/jahrbücher_der_Karl-May-Gesellschaft
5. ↑ Sahlberg elsewhere: “In contrast to Schmidt and Wollschläger, Bach does not proceed chronologically in his work Fluchtlandschaften , but takes May's work as a whole and unfolds the ' monomyth ' contained therein . On the basis of comparative research into myths - and as a connoisseur of Middle Eastern languages, literatures and countries - he explores the development of the universal dream figures in May's fantasy, which he nevertheless sees rooted in the real and interprets psychoanalytically: In the beginning there was oral frustration, deprivation the influx of maternal love power - and the ability to respond creatively: From the 'thirsty landscapes' May reaches maternal paradises. In the essay Make Yourself a Name , Bach goes more into the details of the texts and shows the associative interweaving of geographical and historical elements, making the process of mental work visible. ”( Therapist Kara Ben Nemsi , 1987, p. 191 f. )
6. ↑ Nicolaus Sombart: The German men and their enemies. Carl Schmitt - a German fate between the male union and the matriarchal myth , Munich 1991.
7. ^ Arno Schmidt: Abu Kital. From the new grand mystic , in: ders .: Dya Na Sore. Conversations in a library , Karlsruhe 1958, pp. 150–203.
8. ↑ Bach on Schmidt: "... the funny man has the wrong theory" ( Fluchtlandschaften , 1971, p. 54).
9. ↑ Sahlberg continues at this point: "Incidentally, in the less burdened Romance studies, The Psychoanalytical Literary Criticism was re-admitted to the German university in 1975: by Reinhold Wolff ..." - at that time chairman of the Karl May Society . See: Reinhold Wolff (Ed.): Psychoanalytische Literaturkritik. With afterword and further bibliography , Munich 1975.
10. ↑ Ernst Bloch: Primordial Color of Dream , in: Jb-KMG 1971, pp. 11-16 ( online version ).
11. ↑ Harald Eggebrecht: Sensuality and Adventure. The emergence of the adventure novel in the 19th century , Berlin 1985.
12. ↑ Otto Rank: The trauma of childbirth and its significance for psychoanalysis , Leipzig 1924.
13. ↑ Sahlberg: The “Grand Mystic” Karl May… , 2004, p. Xxx.
14. ↑ Vincent Klink in the foreword: "There were many transport damage on the way from French to German - Wolf Dieter Bach hides almost a quarter of his life so far in the harmless translation of the drunken ship."