Zofia Nałkowska

Zofia Nałkowska's grave

Zofia Nałkowska (born November 10, 1885 in Warsaw , Russian Empire ; died December 17, 1954 there ) was a Polish writer .

biography

Zofia was the daughter of the geographer and literary critic Wacław Nałkowski . She dealt early on with literary movements shaped by socialism . She herself studied history , geography , economics and linguistics at the so-called "Flying University" (Uniwersytet Latający), an educational institution of underground culture during Poland's membership of the Russian Empire .

After long trips with her father, she made her writing debut with the novel Women ( Kobiety ) . Her subsequent novels and stories also dealt with the fate of women and feminism .

In addition, her works were characterized by patriotism and the regaining of Poland's sovereignty on November 11, 1918. In 1933 she was one of the founding members of the Polska Akademia Literatury . She was also a member of the PEN , the Literary Society Związek Literatów Polskich and from 1933 to 1937 the literary group "Zespół Literacki Przedmieście". Due to her own patriotic convictions, she was hit particularly hard by the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in Poland at the beginning of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, as well as the renewed factual " partition of Poland " resulting from it . Nałkowska was considered the writer of independent Poland during the occupation .

After the end of the Second World War, she took part in tours of concentration camps as a member of an international commission of inquiry into the crimes of the Wehrmacht in Poland (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce) and also processed these experiences about the Holocaust in her work Medaillons ( Medaliony ). , to which she prefixed the following formative and much-quoted sentence in a memento : "That is what people did to people." ( Taki los zgotowali ludzie ludziom ).

The prose collection of eight short stories and a total of 50 printed pages, published immediately after the war, became a major literary event in Poland, inversely proportional to its small size, and has been part of the compulsory canon of school reading to this day. Against the background of the atrocities detailed therein, this is certainly not a matter of course. Breysach named medallions against the background of Nałkowska's activity in the investigative committee, which made it possible for the texts to be “documentary literature” and “not to be attributed to the realistic narrative tradition”. The content aims at confrontation and shock, thus breaking with the classic, realistic narrative tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that Nałkowska had been associated with up to now. In addition, the work is the first literary form of criticism of Polish society with its anti-Semitic tradition before the occupation.

Between 1945 and 1947 she was a member of the National Council of State, the Krajowa Rada Narodowa , chaired by Bolesław Bierut and after the fraudulent Sejm election in Poland from 1947 to 1952 a member of the National Constituent Assembly ( Sejm Ustawodawczy).

Jiří Kolář later processed some of her texts, as did Ladislav Klíma in his book In the Sex of the Genor (Rod Genorův), forming them in verse and connecting them to a story about a woman who was shot while fleeing in the war .

While she was always part of the literary elite in her home country, she remained largely unknown in German-speaking countries - with the exception of the GDR publishers, who translated some of her works several times. It wasn't until the late 1990s that this gradually changed. Magdalena Marszałek examined the autobiographical project of the author, who from her earliest youth undertook a meticulous self-examination and examination of her social environment with special emphasis on the role of women in diary entries . Unlike some contemporary feminists, Zofia Nałkowska did not call for a strategy to transgress gender boundaries, but rather its opposite; the “demonstrative and triumphant affirmation of femininity.” Nałkowska noted in her diary as early as 1899: “A man can lead a fulfilled life because a man and a person live in him at the same time. (...) Only a fraction of the life is left for the woman - she has to be either a person or a woman. "

After a visit, the Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz owed Zofia Nałkowska the decisive support for the publication of his debut volume of stories Die Zimtläden by personally campaigning for the publication after the first conversation.

Works

Short stories, novels and short stories

• Kobiety . 1906.
• Książę . 1907.
• Rówieśnice . 1909.
• Narcyza . 1911.
• Noc podniebna . 1911.
• Węże i róże . 1914.
• Hrabia Emil . 1920.
• Na torfowiskach 1922. (first incomplete version of Domu nad łąkami )
• Romans Teresy Hennert . 1923.
• Dom nad łąkami . 1925. (autobiographical story describing childhood in Wołomin )
• Choucas . 1927.
• Niedobra miłość . 1928.
• Granica . 1935.
• Niecierpliwi . 1938.
• Kobieta Cmentarna . 1943/44. (In Die Friedhofsfrau the author processed almost identically entries from her diary at the time of the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto)
• Węzły życia . 1948.
• Mój ojciec . 1953

Dramas

• Dom kobiet . 1930
• Dzień jego powrotu . 1931
• Renata Słuczańska . 1935 (based on the novella Niedobra miłość from 1928)

Collection of short stories, short stories and sketches

• Koteczka czyli białe tulipany . 1909.
• Lustra . 1914.
• Między zwierzętami . 1915
• Tajemnice krwi . 1917.
• Character . 1922.
• Małżeństwo . 1925.
• Księga o przyjaciołach . 1927. (together with Maria Jehanne Wielopolska)
• Ściany świata . 1931.
• Medaliony . 1946.
• Characters dawne i ostatnie . 1948.
• Widzenie bliskie i dalekie . 1957.

In German translation

• Doomed love. Polish novel . German edition by A. von Guttry. Schröder Verlag, Hamburg 1937.
• Medallions . Translated from Polish by Henryk Bereska. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1956.
• Bad love . Translated from Polish ( Niedobra miłość ) by Elske Däbritz, Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1958.
• The barrier . Translated from Polish by Caesar Rymarowicz . Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1958.
  • The barrier . Translated from Polish by Caesar Rymarowicz. Afterword by Eberhard Dieckmann , Reclam, Leipzig 1966.
• Medallions . Translated from Polish by Henryk Bereska. Suhrkamp , Frankfurt / am Main 1968.
• Country house with ladies . Translated from the Polish ( Dom kobiet ) by Christa Vogel, Kiepenheuer, Berlin 1977 (not for sale typescript of a drama that never came into the book trade).
• The Teresa Hennert affair . Translated from Polish by Kurt Kelm , Reclam, Berlin 1989.
• The impatient . From the Polish by Ursula Kiermeier, with an afterword by Włodzimierz Bolecki , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2000, ISBN 978-3-518-41139-1 .
• Autobiography (1929), in: Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich 1999 [1928], pp. 211–216.

reception

Film adaptations

• House of women . 1978 , ( Dom kobiet . 1930), director: Krzysztof Zanussi , produced by Saarländischer Rundfunk Poland. Actors: Lina Carstens , Brigitte Horney , Eva Maria Meineke , Cordula Trantow , Joana Maria Gorvin and Karin Baal .
• Granica . 1978. ( Granica . 1935) Director: Jan Rybkowski . Actors: Józef Fryzlewicz , Wladyslaw Hancza , Krystyna Janda , Zofia Jaroszewska , Slawomira Lozinska u. a. Production company: Zespół Filmowy “Pryzmat”.

literature

• Magdalena Marszałek: The I incarnated in Zofia Nałkowska's diary. In: Anzeiger für Slavische Philologie 28/29, 2001, pp. 345–355.
• Magdalena Marszałek: Life and Paper . Zofia Nałkowska's autobiographical project. Synchron Wissenschaftsverlag der Authors, Heidelberg 2003. ISBN 3-935025-53-X .
• Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa: Bunt wspomnień. Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy 1961.
• Great women in world history . Neuer Kaiser Verlag 1987, p. 354.

Web links

• Literature by and about Zofia Nałkowska in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Zofia Nałkowska at perlentaucher.de
• Muzeum Nałkowskich w Wołominie (Polish).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Barbara Breysach: Schauplatz und Gedächtnisraum Poland: the annihilation of the Jews in German and Polish literature , Wallstein Verlag 2005, p. 211.
2. ↑ See also: Joachim Neander , Marzena Dabrowa Szatko: Auschwitz and the Germans in the Mirror of Polish School Readings . In: German Studies Review , Vol. 27, No. 1 (Feb. 2004), pp. 103-112.
3. ↑ Barbara Breysach: Schauplatz und Gedächtnisraum Poland: the annihilation of the Jews in German and Polish literature , Wallstein Verlag 2005, p. 212.
4. ^ Adam Daniel Rotfeld : Search for Identity. About Poland's handling of history . In: Der Spiegel , 23/2009, May 30, 2009. Here, by the way, tellingly, It was people who prepared this lot. quoted by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski .
5. ↑ Kazimierz Brandys: Medaliony Zofii Nałkowskiej. In Kuznica, No. 4, 1947, quoted from Helena Zaworska: Medaliony Zofii Nałkowskiej. Warszawa 1969, p. 41.
6. ^ Slavic literary and cultural studies / focus on Polish studies
7. ↑ Magdalena Marszalek "Zycie i paper": Autobiograficzny project Zofii Nałkowskiej: Dzienniki 1899-1954. Kraków 2004.
8. ↑ Quoted from www.literaturkritik.de
9. ↑ Arno Lustiger : Reality is a shadow of the word . Magician to be rediscovered: Jerzy Ficowski's biography of the Polish-Jewish poet Bruno Schulz and the new translation of his legendary collection of stories, “The Cinnamon Shops”. In: Die Welt, March 29, 2008
10. ↑ Zofia Nałkowska's entry on April 29th: “On top of that, this is a disgrace, not just a torture. A terrible shame, and not just compassion, arises. Every effort to endure and not go crazy, somehow to keep oneself safe in this horror, is felt to be guilty. ”Quoted from: www.neuewelt.at ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Issue 2/3, 2003. 
11. ↑ House of Women. Retrieved January 10, 2019 . 
12. ↑ Short TV review . In: Die Zeit , 10/1978.
13. ↑ Granica. Retrieved January 10, 2019 .