Wolfgang Borchert

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Wolfgang Borchert, 1941 Wolfgang Borchert Signature.jpg

Wolfgang Borchert (born May 20, 1921 in Hamburg , † November 20, 1947 in Basel ) was a German writer . His narrow work of short stories , poems and a play made Borchert one of the most famous authors of rubble literature after the Second World War . In the post-war period, large parts of the German audience could identify with his homecoming drama Outside the Door . Short stories like bread ,On this Tuesday or at night the rats are asleep, however , as exemplary examples of their species, they became frequent school reading. The lecture of the pacifist warning Then there is only one! accompanied many peace rallies.

Wolfgang Borchert wrote numerous poems in his youth, but for a long time he strove to become an actor . After training as an actor and spending a few months in a touring theater, Borchert was drafted into the armed forces for military service in 1941 and had to take part in the attack on the Soviet Union . He sustained severe wounds and infections at the front . He was convicted and imprisoned several times for criticizing the National Socialist regime and so-called degradation of military strength .

In the post-war period, too, Borchert suffered severely from illnesses and liver damage. After brief attempts to become active again as an actor and cabaret artist, he remained bedridden. Numerous short stories were written there between January 1946 and September 1947 and, within a period of eight days, the drama Outside the Door . During a spa stay in Switzerland, he died at the age of 26 from the effects of his liver disease. Borchert was already known during his lifetime for the radio broadcast of his homecoming drama in January 1947, but his audience success began mainly posthumously , beginning with the theater premiere of Outside Front Door on November 21, 1947, one day after his death.

Life

Training and first literary attempts

Birthplace of Wolfgang Borchert, Tarpenbekstraße 82 in Hamburg-Eppendorf

Wolfgang Borchert was born in Hamburg-Eppendorf as the only child of elementary school teacher Fritz Borchert and his wife, the Low German native writer Hertha Borchert . While the son had a very close relationship with the mother throughout his life, the relationship with the later ailing father is said to have been fraught with conflict. Both the longing for the mother and weak and helpless father figures are frequent motifs in Borchert's later work.

In 1928 Borchert started school at the Erikaschule in Hamburg-Eppendorf, where his father also taught. Today the school bears the name "Wolfgang Borchert School". In 1932 he switched to the upper secondary school in Eppendorf on Hegestrasse. On March 7, 1937, Borchert was confirmed in St. John's Church , but left the church three years later. The family's open-minded culture brought Wolfgang Borchert into contact with literature and art at an early stage. This also resulted in his early rebellion against any government - whether school, state or family - that tried to restrict the freedom of art.

Borchert began writing poetry at the age of 15. His literary productivity was considerable, often composing five to ten poems a day. Borchert later admitted in a letter that he “never worked out or struggled with his texts while writing”, they were more likely to be “a brief intoxication”. He says “it hardly takes more time to write a poem than it takes to copy the same number of words from a book. I cannot file or change afterwards ”. The young poet called himself “Wolff Maria Borchert” based on his great role model Rainer Maria Rilke and considered himself a “genius”. His work always sprang from an urge for self-expression. He took his poetry to his parents or used her to woo women, sent them to the actress Aline Bußmann , who was friends with his mother, and later to her daughter Ruth Hager, his unhappy childhood sweetheart. Borchert's youthful works were characterized by strong pathos and changing literary models such as Rilke or Hölderlin ; other poems imitated Benn , Trakl or Lichtenstein . According to Peter Rühmkorf , the youthful Borchert hardly gave rise to literary hopes, because at that time he was an "all-rounder and ineffectual". In 1938 Hugo Sieker published Borchert's first poem in the Hamburger Anzeiger . It starts with the verses:

“I am a rider,
storming through time!
My ride leads through the clouds -
My horse reaches out!
Ahead! Ahead!
[...] "

- Wolfgang Borchert : Reiterlied
Wolfgang Borchert, 1940

A year earlier, in December 1937, a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Hamburg Thalia Theater with Gustaf Gründgens in the lead role had become a formative experience for the young Borchert. The performance made him want to become an actor himself. In a letter from 1946, Borchert rated the visit to the theater as the “cause of my theatrical craze”. As a result, Borchert wrote his first drama Yorick the Fool in 1938 at the age of 17 , a variation on the Hamlet material. A year later followed the comedy Cheese , composed with his friend Günter Mackenthun , a parody of National Socialism, and in 1940 the dramatic poem Granvella. The black cardinal . Borchert's little-known and unperformed youth dramas were not published as a private print until 2007 .

While Borchert devoted himself to his newfound love for literature and the theater, the scholastic performance of the formerly good pupil had steadily deteriorated, so that his transfer was ultimately endangered. In December 1938 he left the high school with no qualification after the Obersekunda . His last report card showed grades from “satisfactory” in German to “unsatisfactory” in mathematics, accompanied by the verdict: “Most of the time, Wolfgang showed too little domestic work. A much stronger strain of all forces is necessary. ”At the instigation of his parents, Borchert began an apprenticeship as a bookseller with Heinrich Boysen in 1939 , but he continued to pursue his passion and took acting lessons from Helmuth Gmelin .

In April 1940, after the family had moved to the Hamburg-Alsterdorf district, Borchert came into conflict with the state for the first time. He was arrested by the Gestapo and held overnight and interrogated. He was accused of glorifying homosexuality in his poems and of having a relationship with a young man named Rieke. Some contemporary witnesses actually reported of a regular visitor of this name in the Boysen bookstore, others accused the police officers of having wrongly deciphered and misinterpreted the " Rilke love" that Borchert had praised in a letter . Socially critical writings by Borchert may also have reached the Gestapo or the family has been monitored since a denunciation against Hertha Borchert in 1934, which accused the family of "having a peculiar position towards the National Socialist movement". Borchert told his childhood sweetheart, Ruth Hager, that his mail was often opened by the Gestapo. However, he added carelessly: "Well, they'll leave it again." In the same letter he sent out some of the politically objectionable verses. He also continued to fearlessly interact with artists who were critical of the regime, such as the Hamburg Museum of the Muses .

In December 1940 Borchert broke off his apprenticeship and from then on concentrated on acting training, which he passed on March 21, 1941 with a final exam. On April 3rd he was engaged by the Landesbühne Osthannover , a touring theater based in Lüneburg . Although he mainly played small roles and his acting talent was assessed by colleagues as only modest, Borchert spoke of the following three months as "a short, wonderful time at the theater", to which his love affair with actress Heidi Boyes (1917-2016) also contributed. In June 1941, Borchert's draft for military service ended, in his own words, the “best time” of his life. In a letter, the young actor complained that he felt “torn from his lifelong dream”.

Second World War

Wolfgang Borchert as a soldier, between 1943 and 1945

From July to September 1941 Borchert completed his basic training at Panzer-Nachrichten-Ersatz-Dienst 81 in Weimar-Lützendorf . He suffered from the military drill, at the same time his spirit of resistance awakened, which was expressed in numerous letters to relatives and friends. On a postcard with a picture of his barracks he openly greeted "[a] from one of the most beautiful penitentiaries of the Third Reich". Borchert's unit took part in the German attack on the Soviet Union as part of Army Group Center ; Borchert left Weimar on September 10, 1941 and later reached Pytalowo and Vitebsk . In December he was posted to the front near Smolensk .

Many later short stories addressed Borchert's experience at the front. So he took up an episode in Jesus makes no longer in which he was assigned to measure graves for the fallen. In The Many Many Snow he described a lonely guard gang in the Russian winter: “And the snow in which it stood made the danger so quiet. So far. [...] That drives you crazy. This eternal silence. This eternal one! ”On February 23, 1942, Borchert returned from such a guard with a gunshot wound to his left hand. The left middle finger had to be amputated. According to Borchert, a Soviet soldier had emerged from a cover ditch immediately in front of him. In the scuffle, a shot from his own weapon was released, whereupon his counterpart fled. Borchert's superior expressed suspicion of self-mutilation in a note . The incident was never cleared up even after the war. Borchert's environment doubted an intentional injury, as he had attached great importance to his hands as an actor and was aware of the draconian punishments for self-mutilation. Borchert himself was silent about the events.

With diphtheria , Borchert was transferred to his home hospital in Schwabach , where he arrived on March 3, 1942. Hardly recovered, he was arrested on June 25 in the city hospital on charges of self-mutilation. The trial took place on July 31 in Nuremberg . The prosecution called for the death penalty , but the court ruled that he was acquitted. However, Borchert remained in custody , as the incriminating evidence, in particular Borchert's correspondence with her openly expressed criticism, led to an indictment of violating the treachery law . In a second trial, Borchert was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment, after which, at the request of the defense, the sentence was changed to six weeks of stricter arrest with subsequent so-called “ frontline probation ”. His experiences in the Nuremberg military prison formed the basis of his later story Die Hundeblume . Shortly before his death, Borchert confirmed in a letter "that there is this dog-flower man, that he was 21 years old and sat in a solitary cell for 100 days with the prosecution's motion to be shot dead!"

Makeshift hospital in a gymnasium in Russia, June 1941

Borchert was released from prison on October 8, 1942. He returned to the replacement unit in Saalfeld and was then transferred to Jena . In November 1942 he arrived at the front again and took part as a reporter in the fighting for Toropez . Borchert suffered second-degree frostbite on both feet during the missions and was treated in the field hospital. There was also a febrile infection , persistent jaundice and the suspicion of typhus , which was not confirmed. In January 1943 Borchert was transferred to the Smolensk epidemic hospital, from which, in his words, "half a dozen dead were carried out every day". He later built the stay in the camp into his story This Tuesday . Still unable to walk, Borchert was transferred to the Elend reserve hospital in the Harz Mountains to recover in March , where he was also given home leave . Borchert processed his experiences at the front in a memory of a fallen comrade, which appeared under the title Requiem for a friend on July 19, 1943 as Borchert's first prose text published in the Hamburger Anzeiger . Nevertheless, poetry continued to be his main form of expression, as in the poem Letter from Russia from this period:

“You get beastly.
That's what the ferrous
air does . But the wrinkled
heart sometimes still feels lyrical.
[...] "

- Wolfgang Borchert : Letter from Russia
Hamburg after the bombing of Operation Gomorrah in 1943

A few weeks after his first visit to Hamburg, Borchert found the city completely different on another home leave in August 1943. Large parts of Hamburg were destroyed by bombing raids that had only happened a few days ago. Borchert's dismay at the vast landscape of rubble echoed in a later story about Canadian sergeant-major Bill Brook and the Hamburg district of the same name : “Only the chimneys stabbed the late afternoon sky like corpse fingers. Like the bones of a huge skeleton. Like gravestones. ”Nevertheless, Borchert retained his thirst for action and his sense of humor. He used the vacation for poems about his hometown and performances with comical verses in the cabaret Bronzekeller . Even after his departure he was concerned with the fate of Hamburg. In a letter from October 1943 he asked: “What is our ruined city doing? Is she still alive? I think we are obliged not to let them die - we have to rebuild them. ”In many texts, Borchert set a literary monument to his hometown. So he raved in Hamburg : “Hamburg! That is more than a pile of stones, inexpressibly much more! [...] That is our will to be: Hamburg! "

Joseph Goebbels giving a speech in Berlin in 1934

On returning to his unit in Jena, Borchert, still suffering from attacks of fever, was declared unfit for front duty. The testimony of his company commander, according to which Borchert's comedic interludes during the war had repeatedly raised the company's morale, enabled him to be transferred to the front theater of a troop support . Borchert himself felt “five minutes before such a wonderful goal” when he performed a Goebbels parody on the night of November 30th in a transit company in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe in front of his room mates “Referred to Goebbels' clubfoot. The next day an informer reported him; Borchert was arrested and taken back to Jena. Still used to the open tone and the gallows humor from the hospitals, he was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction to his demonstration. In a letter to his lawyer Curt Hager, he emphasized that he “did not feel guilty for such a state crime”, that he had “at worst committed something stupid”.

In January 1944, Borchert was taken to the Lehrter Strasse cell prison in Berlin-Moabit for remand . He suffered from poor detention conditions, both in terms of sanitary conditions and food, and was denied any medical care. Five to six men were locked together in each cell, some of them political prisoners, some civil offenders; there were always violent disputes. A homosexual inmate, accused of murdering his aunt, later found its way into Borchert's short story Our Little Mozart . Some of the defendants in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt were also detained in the Moab cell prison and harassed by the guards in front of the other prisoners. On August 21, Borchert's trial took place at the Central Court of the Army . He was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for degrading military strength , including five months in pre-trial detention. The verdict became final on September 4th and Borchert was granted “suspension of punishment for the purpose of probing the enemy”. His classification as "conditionally fit for use in the war" saved him from being deployed at the front.

Borchert spent the last months of the war in the garrison in Jena. As he admitted in a letter, his regained freedom was overshadowed by “the aftermath of my time in Berlin, because I have no good or happy thoughts.” Borchert increasingly sought refuge in art. For the first time he toyed with the idea of ​​becoming a writer after the war and invented the pseudonym "Kai Wasser", which he later never used. In addition, he began to paint in his free time. When American troops occupied Frankfurt am Main on March 29, 1945 , his unit was deployed for the last time, but the unmanaged soldiers surrendered near Frankfurt without resistance. During the transfer into French captivity, Borchert managed to escape from the van. He made his way north for 600 kilometers on foot and, seriously ill and completely exhausted, reached Hamburg on May 10, 1945.

post war period

Wolfgang Borchert, 1945

In the post-war period, Borchert was inspired by the desire to make up for lost time. In a letter he wrote to a friend: “After these years with NS standard hairstyle and character and mediocrity I will be thinking of something really crazy!” Borchert made friends with artists like Curt Beckmann and Rosemarie Clausen . Although still plagued by jaundice and foot injuries, he became active in Hamburg's theater and cabaret scene. He wrote texts for the cabaret Janmaaten in the port of his later publisher Bernhard Meyer-Marwitz , but Borchert's physical condition only allowed the appearance in the first performance on September 27, 1945. It was his last stage appearance. When the backyard theater Die Komödie, co-founded by Borchert , opened in Hamburg-Altona on November 11th and closed again a good month later, he was already bedridden and could only move around his parents' apartment with the help of the walls. The premiere of Lessing's Nathan the Wise in the Hamburg Schauspielhaus , whose first specimens he as assistant director on the side of Helmuth Gmelin had accompanied, took place on 21 November without him. Nevertheless, Borchert held on to the hope of being back on stage one day. In an “application for an ID card to be issued for those politically, racially and religiously persecuted by Nazism” from May 1946, he stated that his profession was “actor”, and in a letter from May 1947 on his success as a writer he emphasized: “ I'm an actor by nature. "

At the beginning of December 1945 Borchert was admitted to Hamburg's Elisabeth Hospital. His fever attacks worsened and made those who were initially hoping for a speedy recovery more and more discouraged. In this situation he turned to writing. Borchert's first extensive prose text was written on January 24, 1946, the short story Die Hundeblume . Peter Rühmkorf rated the story as Borchert's first masterly text. It is not the result of a gradual development of talent, but represents an "sudden birth of wealth" in which Borchert demonstrates stylistic skills that he had not previously revealed. The sudden literary development went hand in hand with Borchert's change from poetry to prose as the main form of expression. Borchert himself judged in March 1946 about his experiences in the newly discovered literary genre: "I have to get used to prose first - prose is too slow for me, I'm too used to speed." The dog flower was born on April 30th and May 4th Published in an abridged version in the Hamburg Free Press in 1946 . Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt became aware of the story and held out the prospect of the publication of a short story collection if Borchert could offer more dog flowers .

At the beginning of April, Borchert was discharged from the hospital without any improvement in his condition. An X-ray irradiation had not struck, penicillin had been constituted only in small quantities, the inflamed liver always swelled stronger. Borchert accepted the discharge with cynicism: "Since the German resources available cannot cure the disease, the patient was discharged as not cured." Borchert also remained in need of care and bedridden in his parents' apartment. His days were divided into feverish fits and obsessive work. Half-seated, he wrote one story after another in his sickbed. Since paper was scarce, he wrote in exercise books or on the back of letters. Borchert's father typed the stories on the typewriter after work. A list that was subsequently made in Basel contains 29 prose texts up to the end of 1946, and a further 21 works followed in 1947. However, this list remained incomplete. Without a clear development being discernible, the subjects jumped between light and difficult texts, between short stories and prose manifestos - Borchert referred to them as “stories” without any distinction. He considered many to be unsuitable for publication, and in a letter he confessed: “On the whole, I am not satisfied with my work. In the moment I write, must I do it. It forces me !!! Afterwards, looking at what has been written, I no longer see any need and find everything journalistic and literary! ”In December 1946, Borchert's first book was published. Bernhard Meyer-Marwitz ' Hamburgische Bücherei published the poetry collection Laterne, Nacht und Sterne with 14 poems from the time between 1940 and 1945, all of which revolve around Borchert's hometown Hamburg, in an edition of 3,000 copies. The following verses introduced the book:

"I want to be a lighthouse
in night and wind -
for cod and smelt -
for every boat -
and yet I am
a ship in need myself !"

- Wolfgang Borchert : Lantern, Night and Stars. Poems about Hamburg

In late autumn 1946 - Rühmkorf dates the time to January 1947 - Wolfgang Borchert wrote his drama Outside the Door in a period of eight days . Then he invited friends and declaimed the piece in a three-hour reading. The impressed friends wanted to try to get the play on stage. The manuscript also came to the Northwest German Radio , where the chief dramaturge Ernst Schnabel was interested in a radio play adaptation. Borchert's original version was edited for radio, partially shortened and recorded on February 2, 1947. It was broadcast in the evening program on February 13th. Borchert himself was unable to receive the broadcast due to a power cut, but the radio play became an immediate success in the broad broadcasting area of ​​the NWDR. In response, the station received an unusually high number of letters from the audience, ranging from enthusiasm to outrage. Many listeners stated that the author spoke from their hearts. As a result, various theaters were interested in a stage performance, above all Ida Ehre , the founder and director of the Hamburger Kammerspiele , who accepted the play for its premiere in November 1947.

" Persil remains Persil" advertisement on Berlin's Alexanderplatz in 1951

The success of Outside the Door changed Borchert's life fundamentally. As a result, the patient received numerous letters and visits, and various publishers asked about further work. Borchert signed a contract with Rowohlt Verlag , which published his complete works in 1949 . In June 1947, Borchert's first short story collection, Die Hundeblume , appeared in the Hamburg library , followed by the second collection On This Tuesday , each with an initial edition of 5,000 copies and a second edition soon to follow. Borchert himself experienced a real "Borchert hype" in June of that year. He also wrote numerous short stories over the course of 1947 and planned a novel under the title Persil remains Persil , which, however, did not get beyond the initial stage. His life and work remained overshadowed by the disease. After the cold winter of feverish Borchert now suffered from the hot summer 1947. In a letter he confessed: "I do not want any line can write more if I could just once go across the street, again tram ride - and at the same go ". He set his hopes on a spa stay in Switzerland, which his newly won publishers Ernst Rowohlt , Henry Goverts and Emil Oprecht wanted to make possible for him, but the application for an exit permit and a Swiss visa was delayed, and the necessary deposit of 5,000 Swiss francs was a problem for Borchert's stay.

The borders were closed, the military authorities had to approve the journey through the occupation zones, and German money was not allowed to be transferred to Switzerland. Finally, on September 18, Borchert left Hamburg by train. Henry Goverts received the patient at the Swiss border. Borchert's state of health did not allow the originally planned onward transport to Davos . Instead, he was admitted to the nearby St. Claraspital in Basel. Borchert, who felt unwelcome and isolated in a foreign country and in a Catholic hospital, already suspected: “I will not get up again. I can't anymore. ”His condition worsened from day to day, Borchert suffered from seizures and the first internal bleeding occurred. Nevertheless, the terminally ill received a number of visitors and continued to work. The prose text Then there is only one! , according to Bernhard Meyer-Marwitz written a few days before Borchert's death, is considered the last work created in Basel and is often seen as Borchert's legacy. He is addressed in an appeal to readers:

Death certificate Wolfgang Borchert

"You. Man at the machine and man in the workshop. If tomorrow they order you to stop making water pipes and cooking pots - but steel helmets and machine guns, then there is only one thing to do:
say NO!
[...] "

- Wolfgang Borchert : Then there is only one!
Urn grave in the Ohlsdorf cemetery

Wolfgang Borchert died on November 20, 1947. The pathological examination showed that he had suffered from an oversensitive liver, which had been increasingly damaged by persistent nutritional deficiencies and which ended up swelling to an enormous size. The pathologist expressed astonishment “that this young person was able to live and work for so long.” The funeral service organized by Emil Oprecht took place in the crematorium of the Basel cemetery on the Hörnli .

One day after Borchert's death, on November 21, 1947, the world premiere of Outside in front of the door took place in the Hamburger Kammerspiele . Not until shortly before the start of the premiere did the death report reach the participants, the director Wolfgang Liebeneiner informed the audience, which included Borchert's parents. The premiere was a great success. After Borchert's urn had been transferred to Hamburg, the funeral took place on February 17, 1948 with great interest in the Ohlsdorf cemetery . The grave of Wolfgang Borchert and his parents is on Stillen Weg at the western end of the Ohlsdorf cemetery (Section AC 5/6). It was protected by the Hamburg Senate in 2010 when it was added to the list of “Graves of Public Interest”.

Artistic creation

Literary position and influences

Today Wolfgang Borchert is considered to be one of the best-known representatives of the so-called clear-cut or rubble literature . Writers of this literary epoch after the Second World War, which lasted only a few years, responded to the collapse of the old structures and the traumatic experiences of the war by calling for a tabula rasa in literature. The goal of a new beginning in terms of content and form should be an unadorned and truthful representation of reality. However, voices also contradicted Borchert's categorization, which reduced his work to its temporal reference. Gordon JA Burgess, for a time chairman of the International Wolfgang Borchert Society, saw Borchert's works wrongly "as school reading and rubble literature [...]".

Both stylistically and thematically, Borchert was strongly influenced by Expressionism , which had shaped German literature in the first quarter of the 20th century, while Expressionist tendencies in literature were suppressed and their artists persecuted during the Nazi era . Borchert was often seen as a later descendant, heir or even an epigone of Expressionism. For Hans Mayer, for example, the literary new beginning propagated by Borchert was merely a “second-hand novelty”. Borchert's morally motivated and emotional protest referred to the style of Expressionism as well as its repetitive and expressive language. His play Outside Front Door followed the pattern of a station drama that, based on August Strindberg , had determined the expressionist drama. It is not known how consciously Borchert took up the tradition of the past literary epoch, but his works were familiar to him. In a letter from 1940 to young people, he stated: "I am an expressionist - more in my inner disposition and birth than in the form."

Seven years later, in May 1947, Borchert referred to a different literary tradition by now listing American short story authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe as his favorite authors. Even Alfred Andersch named in 1948 their influence: "Blessed are the friends, he Wolfe Faulkner Hemingway gave into the hand. Could he have expressed what he had to say using Wiechert's or Carossa's , Hesse's or Thomas Mann's stylistic devices ? ”Before Borchert's letters were published, Wolfgang Borchert was influenced by American short stories and whether he even knew them was again doubted, but Werner Bellmann recognized a clear change in style from the early lyricisms and sentimentalities to the later texts, which were determined by gaps, careful composition, lacony and understatement . An investigation by Kerstin Möller Osmani showed that Borchert and other German post-war authors received the texts of Ernest Hemingway, both in terms of the adoption of individual characteristics of the style as well as the narrative form. The priority of post-war literature, however, was its commitment to the content, which is why there was no artistic debate or the search for a style of its own. Manfred Durzak saw Borchert's short stories in the American tradition at the center of his prose, ranging from satirically exaggerated grotesques to war to narrative monologues - described by Rühmkorf as a “kind of infinitesimal prose ”. Heinrich Böll took Das Brot as an example from Borchert's work, which in his opinion is a "prime example of the genre short story, which does not tell with novellistic highlights and the explanation of moral truth, but tells by depicting."

poetics

Memorial stone “Say No!” On the Friedenseiche in Hamburg-Eppendorf with a text passage from Then there is only one!

In addition to classic short stories, Borchert's prose work from 1946 onwards also contains texts that are to be understood more as programmatic proclamations or manifestos by the author. In these texts, Borchert gave not only his ideological views but also information about his poetics . In This is Our Manifesto , he made himself the mouthpiece of a young generation who, after the defeat of the Second World War, are settling accounts with the past and are left with nothing to plan their future. His demand for renewal also sought a new aesthetic through direct expression, a truth that should not be softened or glossed over:

“Who will write a new theory of harmony for us ? We no longer need well-tempered pianos . We ourselves are too much dissonance . [...] We don't need any more still lifes . Our life is loud. We don't need poets with good grammar. We lack the patience for good grammar. We need those with the hot hoarse sobbed feeling. Those who say to Baum Baum and Frau Frau and say yes and say no: loud and clear and threefold and without subjunctive . "

- Wolfgang Borchert : This is our manifesto

At the same time, he countered the nihilism of the zero hour with the mandate of a new utopian way of thinking from which a future society could emerge:

“Because we are naysayers. But we don't say no out of desperation. Our no is protest. [...] Because we have to build a yes again into nothingness, we have to build houses in the open air of our no, over the gullies, the funnels and holes in the ground and the open mouths of the dead: Build houses in the clean air of the nihilists, Houses made of wood and brains and of stone and thoughts. "

- Wolfgang Borchert : This is our manifesto

In the prose text The Writer , Borchert outlined his role in society, which he compared to a house in which the writer lived in the lonely room of the attic, in order to name society from this prominent point of view and at the same time to serve as a critic and admonisher:

“He is allowed to live in the attic in the house. There you have the best views. Great, that's beautiful and gruesome. It's lonely up there. And it's coldest and hottest there. "

- Wolfgang Borchert : The writer

Borchert formulated a fundamental skepticism about the expressive possibilities of language in the text In May, in May the cuckoo cried . At a time when there was no language for existential experience, for Borchert silence became a heroic act:

"Withhold the cuckoo scream of your lonely heart, because there is no rhyme and no meter for it, and no drama , no ode , and no psychological novel can withstand the cuckoo scream, and no lexicon and no print shop has words or symbols for your wordless worldly courage, for your lust for pain and your love affair. "

- Wolfgang Borchert : In May, in May the cuckoo screamed

But here, too, Borchert did not persist in resignation , but sought the possibilities of a new literary beginning, which was expressed in linguistic reduction and simplicity. The writer became a chronicler who captured reality through his description:

“All we can do is: add, collect the total, enumerate, write down. But we must have this daring, senseless courage for a book! We want to note our distress, perhaps with trembling hands, we want to put it in front of us in stone, ink or notes, in unheard of colors, in a unique perspective, added, added up and piled up, and that gives a book of two hundred pages. "

- Wolfgang Borchert : In May, in May the cuckoo screamed

Urs Widmer emphasized in his dissertation that Borchert had only partially achieved the language ideal formulated in This is our manifesto . His texts reached a range from sparse noting reality to literary word acrobatics, so that they appeared as if they had been written by different authors. But it is precisely in this extreme stylization of both forms that Borchert tries to cope with the negative reality linguistically. Horst Ohde saw stylization as an attempt to counter language doubts and language difficulties, which in Borchert's work have a twofold cause: in the individual development of the young author, not yet having found a confident use of language, and in the collective experience of the Post war to see the ancient language damaged or lost.

style

Borchert's style is characterized by short, choppy sentences, a staccato created by ellipses , parataxes , idiosyncratic punctuation and the use of conjunctions and adjectives as the beginning of a sentence. An example of a text passage made up of voices is there in the air - at night : “But in the train you sat, warm, breathing, excited. Five or six sat there, people, lost, lonely in the November afternoon. But escaped the fog. Sat under comforting dim lights. It was empty on the train. Only five were there, quite a few, and were breathing. ”The rapid succession of sentences is often intended to express the characters' excitement or to create tension. The repetition of clauses underlines the urgency of what is being said.

Borchert often increases the intensity of his sentences through the stylistic device of the climax , occasionally he weakens them through the anticlimax , for example in the different characterization of the two main characters in Schischyphusch : "My uncle, drunkard, singer, violent man, joker, whisperer, seducer, Short-tongued, sparkling, bubbly, spitting worshipers of women and cognac. ”The waiter, on the other hand, said:“ A thousand times in the garden restaurant, crawled an inch into himself, crouched, shrunk. ”Borchert uses alliteration to emphasize it . In addition, his choice of words is characterized by compound words , neologisms and virtuoso used attributes , so again in Schischyphusch : “Broad, brown, grumbling, bass-throaty, loud, laughing, lively, rich, huge, calm, safe, full, juicy - my uncle! "

Rhetorical figures that run through Borchert's work are the personification , for example when in The Three Dark Kings a slat sighs and a door cries, various forms of metaphors , the comparison , the hyperbole and the allegory , for example in Outside in front of the door : “The dead stick to the walls of the century like flies. Like flies, they lie stiff and dry on the windowsill of the times. ”Although Borchert mainly describes the suffering of the victims of the war in his work , there are also humorous elements in some short stories, especially in Schischyphusch and Der Stiftzahn or Why my cousin no cream candy eat more . But Borchert's drama also makes use of irony , sarcasm and satire . The everyday language gives the people authenticity and to identify them as the average person.

All of Borchert's texts work with symbols , in particular with color symbolism , which underlines contrasts and emotions, atmospherically reflects or even replaces the plot. While green is mostly used as a symbol of life and hope, and yellow is also usually supposed to have a life-affirming effect, red rarely stands for the color of love, but rather for war, blue for both cold and night. The non-bright colors have a predominantly negative connotation: gray denotes the indeterminate and indicates pessimism, white often serves as a symbol for illness or cold, black as an omen of gloom and threat.

Plot elements and characters

The Hungarian German scholar Károly Csúri worked out a basic structure that Wolfgang Borchert's stories mostly followed completely or in part. Then the "ideal Borchert story" goes through the following stages:

  • Initial state: the protagonist is in a "harmonious stage of virtual, timeless security (or apparent security)".
  • Transitional state: the protagonist gets into a conflict “in the disharmonious stage of temporal-historical being ostracized (or pseudo-ostracized)".
  • Final state: through ambivalent intermediary figures, a - sometimes only seemingly harmonious - "stage of virtual, timeless security (or pseudo-security)" is shown, whereby the return of the protagonist to this stage is often impossible or apparently impossible.

Many of Borchert's stories already begin in the transitional state, from which the initial and the final state only have to be constructed in the course of the process.

Memorial stone by Timm Ulrichs for Wolfgang Borchert on the Outer Alster from 1996 near the Literaturhaus Hamburg with a text from Borchert's generation without saying goodbye

The Bulgarian Germanist Bogdan Mirtschev saw the protagonists in Borchert's works mostly as representatives of a certain generation who are often in rebellion against persons of authority. They are drawn as prototypes by people in inner need, whereby their personal life crisis is less a result of war than the result of loneliness, fear of life and the lack of love and security. They are not looking for a way out of their misery, but persist in pessimism and despair. Borchert's protagonists often suffer from states of restlessness or anxiety and feel threatened by their environment. Her response was marked by regression , retreating into childhood. As Mirtschev compiled from quotations from Borchert, they belong to a “generation without […] protection”, “cast out from the playpen of childhood” too early, and now lament their “cuckoo fate”, their “no cuckoo, this fate imposed on us ". Incapable of long-term relationships, they are constantly on the run: “There is no valley in which to escape. I meet everywhere. Mostly in the nights. But you keep piling up. The animal love reaches for you, but the animal fear barks in front of the windows, […] and you pile up. ”The cause is often a guilt complex, which, although they claim, cannot be tied to a specific, individual guilt, but arises from imagination and misunderstanding. Nevertheless, Borchert rarely paints the picture of ultimate failure, but instead offers his heroes a way out of their crisis situation in the end. This is how the tired man from The Wood succeeds in making atonement for tomorrow and returning to those who need him. And in a conversation over the roofs , one of the dialogue partners made the decision to go on living “out of spite. Out of sheer defiance. "

The interpersonal relationships of Borchert's characters examined the American Germanist Joseph L. Brockington. In Borchert's stories, a person is mostly isolated and alienated from his fellow men through the disturbing war experience . A second person walks up to him. There are three possibilities in the encounter:

  • People pass each other, are not able to overcome their isolation. A typical short story for this possible solution is The Dog Flower with the prisoners walking past each other on the courtyard every day.
  • A person is ready to free himself from the past and isolation, but his fellow man is not. This is the most common phrase used by authors in post-war literature. In Borchert's work it can be found in Beckmann's relationship with the girl in Outside Outside the Door as well as in short stories such as Stay the Giraffe or The Sad Geraniums .
  • The third, optimistic possibility that both people in contact with each other leave the past behind and turn to the future together, Borchert chose in the encounter between the boy and the old man from The Rats at Night .

reception

Significance in the post-war period

While Borchert's publications initially attracted little interest, the first broadcast of the radio play version of his drama Outside the Door on February 13, 1947 on Northwest German Radio made him known almost overnight. In response to the broadcast, the station received an unusually high number of letters from the listeners, ranging from enthusiastic approval to violent rejection. In the weeks that followed, the NWDR repeated the radio play and all other West German and West Berlin broadcasters followed suit. Borchert's biographer Helmut Gumtau remarked that Borchert "was lucky enough to find the actor who made the show an event - Hans Quest ", and he added: "The success was not based on poetry".

Poster of the world premiere of Outside in front of the door in the Hamburger Kammerspiele

The world premiere of Outside Front Door at the Hamburger Kammerspiele on November 21, 1947, one day after Borchert's death, posthumously increased his popularity. The critique of the Spiegel summarized : “Seldom has a play shaken the audience as much as Wolfgang Borchert's Outside Front Door .” Hellmuth Karasek rated the world premieres Outside Outside the Door together with Carl Zuckmayer's Des Teufels General and Günther Weisenborn's Die Illegalen as Beginning of the drama in the Federal Republic ”. For Borchert's biographer Gordon JA Burgess, the contemporary reviews showed that the success of Borchert's piece was primarily due to its reference to time and the appeal to contemporary morality. The fact of the early death of its author also contributed to its reputation, which was determined by the perception of a unity between the tragic life of Borchert and his work. Soon comparisons were made with Georg Büchner , who also died at an early age . Jan Philipp Reemtsma also saw the reason for the positive reception of the drama in Borchert's defensive handling of the question of guilt, and he assessed: “ Outside the door provided the formulas and images with which a German audience could break away from their past without to ask the question of responsibility and guilt, let alone answer it. "

The special role that Borchert's work played in the immediate post-war society was emphasized in many cases. The lack of literary processing of the events of the Second World War was summarized by Hans Werner Richter in September 1946 in the magazine Der Ruf in the question: "Why are the young people silent?" Ernst Schnabel , the chief dramaturge of the NWDR, took up this with his announcement of Borchert's radio play Expectation reference: “We have heard the question a hundred times: Why are young people silent? Doesn't she have anything to say? - And today we are announcing the radio play Outside the Door by Wolfgang Borchert. We have been waiting for this piece, or rather, for this author. "Bernhard Mayer-Marwitz assessed in the afterword to Borchert's oeuvre :" Borchert gave this youth their voice back, he found himself with them in a common fate and helped them to achieve this fate to encounter. In those days, this merit outweighed more agreeable literary achievements. ” In his critical assessment of Borchert's literary abilities, Günter Blöcker agreed that“ Borchert's attempts lived at least as much from the accompanying biographical circumstances and the psychological situation of the time as from talent. ” For Bettina Clausen , after the end of the Third Reich, Borchert acted as the “collectively so urgently needed identification model”, the fusion of death and fame in his person became a symbol of the new zeitgeist , Borchert a myth that has endured to this day .

Transformation of the recording

In contrast to many other works of the so-called rubble literature, which gained no significance beyond their contemporary historical context, Borchert's work was read, played and discussed beyond its time of creation. In 1969, Wulf Köpke stated that Borchert's works “of all that was written by the younger generation around 1946 and 1947, had best outlasted time”. In the 1950s and 1960s, the interest in German studies shifted from Borchert's drama to his prose, and his short stories were first examined in terms of their importance for post-war literature , later as exemplary examples of their genre for frequent school reading. With the growing perception of Borchert as a “textbook author” and “light author”, interest in scientific research of his work in Germany declined. Instead, Borchert research took place mainly abroad in later years. Rolf Michaelis scoffed: "Literary scholars neither get nor get the unruly slag - as Dürrenmatt would have said - in one of their preserving jars."

In the GDR, Borchert's assessment changed in the 1960s. Borchert, initially rejected because of his criticism of post-war society, was now celebrated as a fighter against imperialism and fascism . The volume Theater der Zeitenwende , published in 1972 by the Institute for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED , stipulated: "The anti-fascist consciousness [...] was the neuralgic point in Borchert's humanistic image". In contrast, the Luxembourg media scientist Alexandre Marius Dées de Sterio Borchert saw "carried by an almost naive, believing trust in the individual", whereby he misunderstood the social laws. That's why he was a bourgeois humanist , "in a society whose contradictions he suspects, but does not understand, can be found in most deaf ears." A text Borchert had, however, in particularly a social and political impact: the appeal Then there only one! with its repeated formula “Say NO!”. Michael Töteberg described it as "Borchert's most famous text", which "as a passionate admonition and warning" "has never lost its relevance to the present" and was declaimed at numerous demonstrations of the peace movement .

Influence, Honors, and Legacy

Borchert's influence on other writers began with his relevance to Group 47 . In November 1947, Hans Werner Richter, unaware of Borchert's serious illness, invited him to the second conference of the young group of authors. Alfred Andersch described the entire orientation of the early Group 47 as “Borchertism”, and he continued: “There was no doubt that in the famine years that followed World War II, a style that Wolfgang Borchert had uniquely and definitively shaped it was with most of them Writers who began to write at that time are available in nuce. "In the afterword to the paperback edition from Outside in front of the door, Heinrich Böll confessed himself to Wolfgang Borchert, who expressed in his texts," what the dead of the war, to which he belongs, no longer do could say ”.

Later authors like Dieter Wellershoff also felt “electrified” by the reading experience of Borchert's texts, and Wilhelm Genazino stated : “I read Wolfgang Borchert's homecoming piece Outside the Door and immediately felt like a betrayed soldier.” Jan Philipp Reemtsma revised his youthful fascination later and saw in Borchert's texts an adolescent "tendency to kitsch in feelings and thoughts". On the other hand, Jürgen Fuchs raised Borchert's quote “We will never again compete at a whistle” as the motto of his resistance in the GDR. In 2006, the feature film The Lives of Others quoted Borchert's poem Try it in the 1970s setting by the Weimar folk jazz formation Bayon :

Wolfgang Borchert Memorial (1994, EA Nönnecke), Rosengarten, Eppendorfer Landstrasse

“Stand in the middle of the rain,
believe in its
blessing of drops, weave yourself into the noise
and try to be good!
[...] "

- Wolfgang Borchert : Try it

Several memorial sites have been set up in his hometown of Hamburg to commemorate Wolfgang Borchert. Two of them - on Eppendorfer Marktplatz and on Eppendorfer Landstrasse - quote the text Then there is only one! At Schwanenwik on the Outer Alster there is an obelisk as high as a man with a quote from generation without farewell . In Tarpenbekstrasse, a former air raid shelter was converted into the sub-stage - Another memorial for Wolfgang Borchert . By 1997, seven schools were named after Wolfgang Borchert, including the elementary, secondary and secondary school in Hamburg-Eppendorf, which he himself had once attended. A private theater in Münster has been called the Wolfgang Borchert Theater since 1982 .

The HADAG has a 1956-built ferry type 00 renamed Wolfgang Borchert 1,981th In 1993 this ship name was transferred to a new, larger ferry that operates on the Elbe. Deutsche Post commemorated Wolfgang Borchert's 75th birthday in 1996 with a postage stamp.

Wolfgang Borchert's mother, Hertha, who managed his son's estate after the death of her son, founded the Wolfgang Borchert Archive and handed it over to the Hamburg State and University Library in 1976 . In 1987 the International Wolfgang Borchert Society was founded, which regularly publishes an annual report on current research. In November 2002 the asteroid (39540) Borchert was named after him.

On his 100th birthday on May 20, 2021, the City of Hamburg will remember the Hamburg writer with (for the time being) many digital presentations until June 12th.

Works

Printed stage manuscript from Outside the Door (July 1947)

Dramas

There are also three little-known youth dramas, published in:
Jugenddramen. Private printing of the International Wolfgang Borchert Society e. V., Hamburg 2007.

  • Yorick the Fool , 1938
  • Cheese. Die Komödie des Menschen , together with Günter Mackenthun in 1939
  • Granvella. The black cardinal , 1941

In addition to outside the door , only cheese has been performed so far (for the first time on February 27, 2015 by the Wasserburg Theater ).

Poems

  • Lantern, night and stars. Poems about Hamburg , 1946

Further postponed poems were published in The Complete Works of 1949 and in the expanded edition of 2007 (51 in total).

Short stories

Story collection Die Hundeblume , 1947

  • The dog flower
  • The crows fly home in the evening
  • Voices are there in the air - in the night
  • Conversation over the rooftops
  • Generation without saying goodbye
  • Railways, afternoon and night
  • Please stay, giraffe
  • Over over
  • The town
  • Hamburg
  • Billbrook
  • The Elbe

Narrative collection This Tuesday , 1947

  • The bowling alley
  • Four soldiers
  • The many, many snow
  • My pale brother
  • Jesus no longer participates
  • The cat was frozen to death in the snow
  • The nightingale sings
  • Our little Mozart
  • The kangaroo
  • But the rats sleep at night
  • He was also in a lot of trouble with the wars
  • In May, in May the cuckoo screamed
  • Long long road

Postponed narratives from The Complete Works , 1949

Story collection The sad geraniums and other stories from the estate , 1961

  • The sad geraniums
  • Late afternoon
  • The cherries
  • The wood for tomorrow
  • All dairy shops are called Hinsch
  • The pin tooth or why my cousin doesn't eat cream candy anymore
  • Love blue gray night
  • The storm
  • The wall
  • Tui Hoo
  • Strange
  • Prussia's Glory
  • A Sunday morning
  • Ching Ling, the fly
  • Maria, all Maria
  • Marguerite
  • It's Christmas behind the windows
  • The professors don't know anything either

The story collection was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list from May 9 to July 17, 1962 .

Publications

  • Wolfgang Borchert: The Complete Works. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1949. (The edition used in the article for the page numbers corresponds to the edition of May 1986, ISBN 3-498-09027-5 .)
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The Complete Works. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-00652-5 . (Extended and revised new edition, edited by Michael Töteberg , with the collaboration of Irmgard Schindler; as a paperback ibid. 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24980-8 ).
  • Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door and selected stories. 94th edition, Rowohlt, Reinbek 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-10170-0 .
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The sad geraniums and other stories from the estate. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, ISBN 3-499-10975-1 .
  • Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, poems and documents. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-13983-9 .

Settings

  • Berthold Goldschmidt : Noble little soldier's wife… , for baritone and xylophone, 1948
  • Wilhelm Keller : Lantern, Night and Stars, Poems about Hamburg , Choir Cycle, 1953.
  • Gottfried von Eine : Seven songs based on various poets op. 19 (in it: "On the way home 1945" by Wolfgang Borchert), 1956.
  • Andre Asriel : Großstadt for voice and piano, 1957.
  • Tilo Medek : Try it . Four songs for medium voice and piano, 1961.
  • Lothar Graap : Five songs based on poems by Wolfgang BorcherT for voice and piano op.19 , 1963.
  • Udo Zimmermann : Five songs for baritone and chamber ensemble (texts: Wolgnag Borchert), 1964
  • Rainer Kunad : Bill Brook. Opera, 1965.
  • Ruth Zechlin : Seven songs for medium voice and piano based on texts by Wolfgang Borchert, 1966.
  • Jürgen Golle : 7 songs based on poems by Wolfgang Borchert for voice and piano, 1972.
  • Enjott Schneider : That your dear love was - Wolfgang Borchert songbook for soprano (tenor) and strings, 1987.
  • Bernd Lange and Bayon : Conversation over the roofs. Literary sound images by Wolfgang Borchert , 1997.
  • Marc Pendzich: Borchert. Encounters with the cycle of poems "Laterne, Nacht und Sterne" for alto voice and small orchestra, 1997.
  • Bertold Hummel : Fantasia poetica in memoriam Wolfgang Borchert for viola and dulcimer , 2001.
  • Jörn Arnecke : See again (opera based on the text of Wolfgang Borchert's “Outside in front of the door” ), 2001.
  • Christian Geissendörfer / calm: Hamburg! - Songs and music based on poems by Wolfgang Borchert , 2002.
  • Norbert Linke : Borchert songs. Cycle for voice and piano , 2006.
  • Johannes Kirchberg : My soul is still on the move , 17 chansons based on poems by Wolfgang Borchert, 2012.
  • Christoph Nils Thompson: The Borchert Quintets , 5 movements for wind quintet, 2015.
  • Frederic Rzewski : Say no! for 4-st. Choir, 2015.
  • Martin Schmeding : Improvisation on Traumszene from Wolfgang Borcherts Draußen vor der Tür for organ, 2017.
  • Wolfgang Friederich: I say yes (Text: Wolfgang Borchert), (n.d.)
  • Arthur Furer : Album sheet (“Was Morgen ist”) for solo voice and piano, (undated; performance in 2006 verified).

literature

Biographies

Biographical novel

About Borchert's work

  • Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective. Dölling and Gallitz, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930802-33-3 .
  • Gordon JA Burgess (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert. Christians, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-7672-0868-7 .
  • Kåre Eirek Gullvåg: The man from the rubble. Wolfgang Borchert and his poetry. K. Fischer, Aachen 1997, ISBN 3-89514-103-8 .
  • Alfred Schmidt: Wolfgang Borchert. Speech formation in his work. Bouvier, Bonn 1975. (= treatises on art, music and literary studies ; 186), ISBN 3-416-01085-X .
  • Götz Fritz Adam Seifert: Wolfgang Borchert - The music in his life and work (diss.), University of Louisiana 1978.
  • Rudolf Wolff (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert. Work and effect. Bouvier, Bonn 1984, ISBN 3-416-01729-3 .

English language secondary literature

  • Gordon JA Burgess: The life and works of Wolfgang Borchert. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Camden House, Rochester 2003, ISBN 978-1-57113-270-3 .
  • James L. Stark: Wolfgang Borchert's Germany. Reflections of the Third Reich. Univ. Press of America, Lanham 1997, ISBN 0-7618-0555-9 .
  • Erwin J. Warkentin: Unpublishable works. Wolfgang Borchert's literary production in Nazi Germany. Camden House, Columbia 1997, ISBN 1-57113-091-8 .

Web links

Commons : Wolfgang Borchert  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Wolfgang Borchert  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 7-18, who was in contact with his mother.
  2. ^ Schröder: Wolfgang Borchert. The most important voice in German post-war literature, pp. 49–50, 54.
  3. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 282.
  4. ↑ Alexandre Marius Dées de Sterio: “Civis Sum!” Wolfgang Borchert's ethical and political maturation: stages and stations in his unpublished youth work. In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective, pp. 117–119.
  5. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 168.
  6. ↑ Kajetan Rodenberg: The pubertal genius: Wolfgang Borchert's emotional change in his youth work. Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 1999, p. 98 .
  7. ↑ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , p. 36, for the whole section, p. 30–38.
  8. ↑ Borchert: Reiterlied. In: The Complete Works. 2007, p. 434.
  9. ^ Schröder: Wolfgang Borchert. The Most Important Voice of German Post-War Literature, pp. 64–65.
  10. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 174.
  11. ↑ Quoted from Schröder: Wolfgang Borchert. The Most Important Voice of German Post-War Literature , p. 83.
  12. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 38.
  13. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , pp. 34–36.
  14. ^ To section: Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , pp. 64–71.
  15. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 80.
  16. ↑ Lutz Wendler: Heidi Pulley-Boyes died at the age of 99. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , December 5, 2016, accessed March 11, 2017.
  17. ^ Gumtau: Wolfgang Borchert , p. 23; to the section: Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , pp. 75, 88-95.
  18. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 51–52.
  19. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 107–111.
  20. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 64–65.
  21. ↑ Borchert: The many, many snow . In: The Complete Works. 2007, pp. 200-202.
  22. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 112–113.
  23. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 114–118.
  24. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 119.
  25. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 76-77.
  26. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 106.
  27. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 124-125, 128.
  28. ↑ Borchert: Letter from Russia. In: The Complete Works. 2007, p. 472.
  29. ↑ Borchert: Billbrook . In: Das Gesamtwerk , p. 81; on this Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert (2007), p. 93.
  30. ^ Letter to Hugo Sieker from October 10, 1943 ( Memento from May 12, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on the library system of the University of Hamburg .
  31. ↑ Borchert: Hamburg . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 84–85. Regarding the Burgess section: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 131–132.
  32. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 114.
  33. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 133–136.
  34. ^ Schröder: Wolfgang Borchert. The Most Important Voice of German Post-War Literature , p. 232.
  35. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 140.
  36. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 141–149.
  37. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 155.
  38. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 154–165.
  39. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 172.
  40. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 175, for the whole section, p. 166–175.
  41. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 175, for the whole section, p. 177–180.
  42. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 117–118.
  43. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 169.
  44. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 183.
  45. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 191.
  46. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 192.
  47. ↑ a b Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 132-133.
  48. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , pp. 193–194 and footnote 43.
  49. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , pp. 182-183.
  50. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 204.
  51. ↑ Borchert: Lantern, Night and Stars. Poems about Hamburg . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 7.
  52. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 201-202, 209-211.
  53. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 213–215.
  54. ↑ Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 210.
  55. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 219–220, 223.
  56. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , p. 154.
  57. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 223–225.
  58. ↑ Michael Töteberg: Unknown Borchert letters surfaced. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , May 15, 2021, p. 15.
  59. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 227–228.
  60. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 229–233.
  61. ↑ Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (1949), p. 284.
  62. ↑ Borchert: Then there is only one! . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 527.
  63. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 236.
  64. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 236–237.
  65. ↑ Hamburger Friedhöfe AöR (ed.): Selected celebrity graves at the Ohlsdorf cemetery. 10th edition. 2008. See graves of well-known personalities ( memento from September 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Hamburg cemeteries.
  66. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert at knerger.de
  67. ↑ In the public interest. In: Hamburger Wochenblatt, local newspaper Barmbek of April 21, 2010, p. 2.
  68. ^ Gordon JA Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert, Person und Werk . In: Burgess (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert , p. 37.
  69. ↑ Hans Mayer: On the German literature of the time . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1967, p. 302.
  70. ^ Burgess: The life and works of Wolfgang Borchert , p. 162 and note.
  71. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon , p. 40.
  72. ^ Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 242.
  73. ↑ Alfred Andersch: The grass and the old man . In: Frankfurter Hefte , Volume 3, Issue 1 (January 1948), pp. 927–929, here p. 928.
  74. ↑ Werner Bellmann: Wolfgang Borchert: On this Tuesday . In: Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Classic German short stories. Interpretations . Reclam, Stuttgart, 2004, ISBN 978-3-15-017525-5 , p. 40.
  75. ↑ Kerstin Möller Osmani: In another country: Ernest Hemingway and the "young generation". Possibilities and limits of the reception of an American author in early West German post-war literature . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1996, ISBN 3-8260-1094-9 , conclusion: pp. 98, 196.
  76. ↑ Peter Rühmkorf: Afterword . In: Borchert: The sad geraniums and other stories from the estate , p. 122.
  77. ↑ Manfred Durzak: The German short story of the present. Author portraits, workshop discussions, interpretations . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2074-X , pp. 117–118.
  78. ^ Heinrich Böll : The voice of Wolfgang Borchert . In: Burgess (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert , p. 18.
  79. ↑ Borchert: This is our manifesto . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 519.
  80. ↑ Borchert: This is our manifesto . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 522–523.
  81. ↑ Borchert: The writer . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 516.
  82. ↑ Borchert: In May, in May the cuckoo cried . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 270.
  83. ↑ Borchert: In May, in May the cuckoo cried . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 270–271. See the section: Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short stories . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 978-3-637-88629-2 , pp. 25-32.
  84. ↑ Urs Widmer: 1945 or the “New Language”. Studies on the prose of the "young generation" . Pedagogical Publishing House, Düsseldorf 1966, pp. 91–93.
  85. ↑ Cf. Horst Ohde: "Because the last, the last, the words do not give." Text connotations of the language difficulty in the work of Wolfgang Borchert . In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 127–139.
  86. ↑ Borchert: Voices are in the air - in the night . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 50.
  87. ↑ a b Borchert: Schischyphusch or My Uncle's Waiter . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 410–411.
  88. ↑ Borchert: Outside the door . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 121.
  89. ↑ Cf. on the chapter and on the detailed use of stylistic devices in selected texts: Schmidt: Wolfgang Borchert. Speech formation in his work .
  90. ↑ Károly Csúri: Semantic fine structures: literary aesthetic aspects of the form of composition with Wolfgang Borchert . In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 156–157
  91. ↑ Borchert: Generation without parting . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 67.
  92. ↑ Borchert: In May, in May the cuckoo cried . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 269.
  93. ↑ Borchert: Over. Over . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 77.
  94. ↑ Borchert: Conversation over the roofs . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 64. See the section: Bogdan Mirtschev: Delivered to the Unspeakable: Daseinkrise und inner conflicts of the returning figure in the literary work of Wolfgang Borchert. In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 171–181.
  95. ↑ Cf. to the chapter: Joseph L. Brockington: Ein Ja in das nothing into building: Possibilities and forms of hope in the literature of the post-war generation. Wolfgang Borchert and the "young generation" . In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 29–30
  96. ^ Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 208-209.
  97. ^ Gumtau: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 70–71.
  98. ↑ Is there no answer? Premiere after death . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1947, pp. 16 f . ( online - November 29, 1947 , here p. 16).
  99. ↑ Winfried Freund , Walburga Freund-Spork: Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door. Explanations and documents . Reclam, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-15-016004-9 , p. 33.
  100. ^ Gordon JA Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert, Person und Werk , pp. 34–35.
  101. ↑ Jan Philipp Reemtsma : And also Grandpa's MG Wolfgang Borchert as a veteran. In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 238–249, here p. 239.
  102. ↑ Ernst Schnabel : Outside the door . In: Hörzu from February 9, 1947; see also Bernd Balzer : Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door. Basics and Thoughts . Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-425-06087-2 , pp. 9-11.
  103. ^ Bernhard Mayer-Marwitz: Wolfgang Borchert . Epilogue in: Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (1949), p. 343.
  104. ^ Günter Blöcker : Kritisches Lesebuch , Leibniz, Hamburg 1962, p. 307.
  105. ↑ Bettina Clausen: Declining youth. Comments on Borchert and on Borchert's early success. In: Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 224–237, here pp. 225–230.
  106. ↑ Köpke: In the matter of Wolfgang Borchert . In: Wolff (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert. Work and Effect , p. 86.
  107. ^ Gordon JA Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert, Person und Werk , pp. 35–36.
  108. ↑ Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 13-14.
  109. ↑ Rolf Michaelis : A scream? A sob! In: The time of October 31, 2002.
  110. ^ Institute for social sciences at the Central Committee of the SED (ed.): Theater in der Zeitenwende. On the history of drama and theater in the German Democratic Republic 1945–1968 . Volume 1. Henschelverlag, Berlin 1972, p. 132. See Bernd Balzer : Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door. Basics and Thoughts . Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-425-06087-2 , pp. 37-38.
  111. ↑ Alexandre Marius de Sterio: Wolfgang Borchert: A sociological interpretation of literature . In: Wolff (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert. Work and Effect , pp. 34–35.
  112. ↑ Michael Töteberg: Afterword . In: Wolfgang Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 566.
  113. ↑ Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , p. 11.
  114. ↑ Böll: The Voice of Wolfgang Borchert , p. 16.
  115. ↑ Töteberg: Afterword . In: Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 568–569.
  116. ^ Jan Philipp Reemtsma: The process of deafening after the Big Bang , Haffmans, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-251-00302-X , p. 28.
  117. ↑ Borchert: This is our manifesto . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 517.
  118. ↑ Töteberg: Afterword . In: Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 570.
  119. ↑ Borchert: Try it . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 434.
  120. ↑ Subbühne - Another memorial to Wolfgang Borchert May 1995 on the website of Gerd rod .
  121. ↑ Burgess, Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , p. 9.
  122. ↑ Peter Zerbe: HADAG has a ferry widened . In: Die Welt from March 12, 2007 and
    Commons : Wolfgang Borchert (ship, 1993)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
    .
  123. ^ Curriculum vitae HADAG ferry Wolfgang Borchert elbdampfer-hamburg.de, August 26, 2017, accessed May 27, 2020.
  124. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert Archive on the website of the Hamburg State and University Library .
  125. ↑ International Wolfgang Borchert Society e. V., Hamburg
  126. ^ "Hamburg reads Borchert." A literary festival for the 100th birthday , ndr.de, April 26, 2021 (video, available until April 26, 2022).
  127. ^ "Hamburg reads Borchert." A literature festival for the 100th birthday of the Hamburg writer Wolfgang Borchert , hamburg.de, April 8, 2021.
  128. ↑ "Cheese" in the Wasserburg theater. Article in the Wasserburg Voice of February 26, 2015.
  129. ↑ Noble Little Soldier's Wife: for baritone and xylophone. Retrieved November 15, 2019 .
  130. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert - Bernd Lange (2) Bayon - call the roofs - Literary Klangbilder By Wolfgang Borchert Overview and track list on the website discogs.com . Retrieved May 20, 2021.
  131. ↑ Lieder & Chants by Wolfgang Friederich Overview on the website Klangheilzentrum.de . Retrieved May 20, 2021.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on January 12, 2010 in this version .
personal data
SURNAME Borchert, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1947
PLACE OF DEATH Basel