57 results
Contents
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Foreword
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp vii-viii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE IDEA FOR THIS VOLUME originated with Undine Griebel, a visiting faculty member in our department from 2001 through 2003. She was intrigued by the list of outstanding authors who had taken up temporary residence in a small Ohio college town in order to begin new and often unfamiliar academic and personal routines. One by one, she contacted our former writer-colleagues, inquiring about their activities since Oberlin and how they remembered their stay among us. Her inquiries were facilitated by our file of brochures on each writer. Prepared toward the end of a writer's Oberlin tenure, each brochure announced the concluding event, which was the author's public reading from his or her work. The individual brochures provided information about the author's life and work, activities while in Oberlin, and a list of his or her publications.
Understandably, not all of our authors were ready or able to recall this chapter of their lives, which for some may have seemed quite distant. But most obliged, and promptly sent us texts that are in one way or another related to Oberlin. The response from so many of our authors and the many fascinating contributions, both original and published, were such that we began to think of publishing them in book form.
Our plan has now been realized through the collective efforts of all the members of the German Department. Undine Griebel, Dorothea Kaufmann, and Heidi Thomann Tewarson contributed energy, imagination, and devotion without which this volume would not have reached fruition. Steven R. Huff and Elizabeth C. Hamilton added their ideas and enthusiasm and also wrote sections on individual authors. Michele Ricci, our Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, similarly helped to bring the project along. We are grateful to our emeritus colleague Sidney Rosenfeld for frequent advice, and also to our — by now former — students, Gabriel Cooper, Robin Ellis, and Alison Dennis, for their good work in researching several of the authors. Their participation was made possible by two Oberlin College faculty-student research grants. Above all, we owe warm thanks to all our former writers who have so generously sent us their contributions and patiently answered our queries. We also would like to express our special appreciation to Susanne Hochwälder, Christine Becker, and Eva Hofmann for their help in locating and sending us materials and information about their deceased husbands.
Introduction
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp ix-xii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THIS BOOK BRINGS TOGETHER thirty-five German-language writers of quite varied backgrounds who nonetheless share the common experience that underlies this retrospective volume. All were writers-in-residence at Oberlin College. Annually since 1968, Oberlin's German Department has invited a distinguished writer from Germany (before 1989 East and West Germany), Austria, or Switzerland for a semester of teaching, writing, and a public reading. For each author who joined the Oberlin community, the experience was different. Each was met and welcomed by his or her own group of students, and each became attentive to different issues on campus and the larger American political, cultural, social, and even geographical landscape. And, although the German Department faculty remained fairly stable, it too changed over time, as the gradual disappearance of certain names and the appearance of others indicate. The writer-in-residence program, although well established, begins anew with each arriving author. The unique and diverse impressions with which each author returned home are reflected in the great variety of contributions sent to us and featured in this volume.
Some of the contributions were written in Oberlin and reflect the authors’ thoughts and observations of that time, while others describe the college and the town and its surroundings, or incorporate them into a literary work as its setting. Many contributions were new, of a personal nature and written expressly for this occasion. We received stories, excerpts from novels, newspaper reports, interviews, memoirs, diary entries, poems, essays on poetics, and letters. Letters were indeed a favorite way of responding; this genre seemed best suited to express the often very personal effect the Oberlin visit had on an author. In one case, that of poet Johannes Schenk, we received a series of nostalgic letters written from the famous artist colony Worspwede, where he lives and works in two circus wagons. A few writers, including Anna Mitgutsch, Hanna Johannsen, Gert Loschütz, and Karl-Heinz Jakobs, are represented by essays on fundamental issues of writing presented at the conclusion of their stay.
This heterogeneous collection offers a surprisingly comprehensive image of Oberlin — the town, the college, its people, even its flora and fauna — from various points of view. It also tells about the writers’ psychological disposition, their first teaching experiences, love affairs, attitudes towards American history and politics, and their newly critical and distanced views of their own countries.
Max von der Grün 1977
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 77-84
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE GERMAN NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER Max von der Grün was born in Bayreuth on May 25, 1926. There was nothing in his background or education to indicate a future literary career. The son of simple factory workers, he first attended grade school and then a commercial secondary school, before becoming a mercantile trade apprentice. During the Third Reich his father, a religious fundamentalist and conscientious objector, was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. Von der Grün himself was drafted, taken prisoner in Normandy and from there to a POW camp in the American South. In 1948 he returned to Germany, worked as a bricklayer and then, after resettling in the Ruhr, from 1951 to 1963 in the coal mines. Together with Fritz Hüser, director of the Dortmund Municipal Library, he founded the “Dortmunder Gruppe 61 für künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit der industriellen Arbeitswelt.” Since 1963 he has lived in Dortmund as a freelance writer.
Although Max von der Grün's fiction is set almost exclusively in the milieu of industrial workers, most particularly among the coal miners of the Ruhr, he rejects the label of a “workers’ writer.” His prime aim, he stresses, is to portray — as concretely as possible — human problems and conflicts, as they arise, to be sure, within the modern industrial system. His social criticism, however, is bound by neither political nor literary ideology. In subjecting the realities of the industrial world to critical examination, he is concerned above all with justice and human dignity. In his first novel, Männer in zweifacher Nacht (1962), he depicted the helplessness of the miners to cope with their political and social oppression. His next novel, Irrlicht und Feuer (1963), is set among the same Ruhr miners, but — as Franz Schonauer has emphasized — it more aggressively and directly attacks those in the industrial hierarchy who are responsible for such oppression. The political uproar occasioned by this novel within the mining industry gained widespread attention. Also, it cost the author his job and led him to devote himself primarily to writing.
Von der Grün's most successful novel to date has been Stellenweise Glatteis, which appeared in 1973.
Helga M. Novak 1973
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 45-50
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Kinderfrage
ich spiele Puppentheater
nicht aus pädagogischen Gründen
sondern aus reinem Vergnügen
eines Tages spiele ich das alte
Puppenspiel vom Doktor Faust
der seine Seele verschachert
— warum spielst du den Bösen
so gut — fragt mein Sohn
— und der Gute hat so häßliche Haare —
— das kommt weil mein Volk
in diesem Jahrhundert noch
keinen Faust gespielt hat immer
nur einen Mephisto —
WITH SUCH SIMPLE DIRECTNESS Helga Novak conveys the earnestness of her message, whether it be social, political or human.
Born September 8, 1935 in Berlin, Helga Novak was reared by elderly foster parents in a capital which knew Russian occupation. She studied philosophy and journalism at the University of Leipzig. In 1961 she married and moved to Iceland, where she was variously employed in a carpet factory and in the fisheries. There she assumed Icelandic citizenship, which she still maintains, although she now lives and works in Frankfurt on the Main. In 1965, she returned to the German Democratic Republic to study for a year at the Johannes R. Becher Literaturinstitut in Leipzig. Subsequently, she traveled in France, spent a year in Sicily and several months on the Greek island of Ios. This is Mrs. Novak's second visit to the United States; in 1966, she attended the meeting of the Gruppe 47 in Princeton.
As a school-girl, Helga Novak was a voracious reader of Schiller — he was the only writer of quality represented in the library of her modest home. Later in life she avidly read Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Maxim Gorki.
Helga Novak first published two slender volumes of verse, Ballade von der reisenden Anna (1965) and Colloquium mit vier Häuten (1967). For the second of these she was awarded the Literaturpreis der Freien und Hansestadt Bremen in 1968. Her poems are the products of experience, of fantasy, free of formal tradition, couched in simple, straightforward, often earthy and elemental language: they are devoid of affectation yet rhythmically appealing, “gesagt gesungen.” Postwar Germany, East and West, and Iceland, with its life by the sea, its fjords, and its codfish, provide her with most of her settings. She is inclined to write ballads, some of which appear in rhythmical prose, as do both poems from which these volumes take their titles.
Kuno Raeber 1968
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 3-10
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE SWISS POET, NOVELIST, ESSAYIST, and dramatist Kuno Raeber was the first guest author to come to Oberlin. His title was Max Kade Visiting Lecturer in German and in that capacity he joined the regular faculty in teaching German language and literature courses. During this first year of the program, the position and obligations of the guest author were not yet clearly defined. Kuno Raeber was instrumental in further shaping the program, which, beginning in the second year, took on the form it was to have more or less up to the present. This meant that the guest author's tasks entailed teaching a seminar that focused on his or her own work and giving a reading or lecture at the end of his or her stay. The second year also saw the publication of the first accompanying brochure, which provided information on the author's life and work. Since no such brochure exists for Kuno Raeber, we, the editors, provide a brief biographical sketch.
Kuno Raeber was born in 1922 in Klingnau (Aargau) and grew up in Lucerne. He studied history, literature, and philosophy in Basel, Zurich, Geneva, and Paris, receiving a Ph.D. in history in 1950. In 1958 Raeber moved to Munich, where he spent most of his life. He left Munich to initiate Oberlin's Writer-in-Residence program in 1967/68, and again in 1977/78, when he lived in Rome as a member of the Swiss Institute there.
He was awarded the following prizes: the Ehrengabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste (1968); the Turkanpreis der Stadt München (1973); the Luzerner Literaturpreis (1979); the Preis der Schweizerischen Schillerstiftung (1989); and the Kunstpreis der Stadt Luzern (1991).
Kuno Raeber died in 1992 in Basel after a serious illness. He is considered by many as “der große Unbekannte.” However, the new fivevolume edition of his works by Matthias Klein and Christiane Wyrwa serves as proof that Kuno Raeber belongs to the significant authors of the second half of the twentieth century.
While at Oberlin, Raeber was at work on Mißverständnisse. 33 Kapitel, a volume of short prose, which he completed and published later that same year. At the end of his stay, he gave the unfinished manuscript, which then comprised sixteen of the thirty-three chapters, to Peter Spycher and his wife Colette as a farewell gift.
Zafer Şenocak 2000
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 351-358
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
BORN IN 1961 IN ANKARA, Zafer Şenocak immigrated to Germany with his parents in 1970. The family settled in Munich, where Mr. Şenocak continued his education and completed the Abitur in 1981. He studied German literature, politics, and philosophy at the Ludwig- Maximilian University in Munich until 1987. During the 1980s, at the dawn of German migrant literature, Şenocak began to publish his lyric poetry, winning the Literary Prize of the City of Munich in 1984 and the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize in 1988. The same year, together with Eva Hund, he translated a novel by Aras Ören into German, titled Eine verspätete Abrechnung. Translations of works by Aras Ören, an established author living in Germany but writing in Turkish, had appeared since the 1970s; they played an important role in making the migrant experience more accessible to German-speaking audiences. Şenocak also translated older Turkish poetry into German, including the works of Yunus Emre, a fourteenth-century mystic, and of Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth-century folk poet. Zafer Şenocak moved to Berlin in 1990, where he has worked as a freelance writer ever since. In the course of the 1990s, Zafer Şenocak has emerged as one of the most influential and incisive commentators on Turkish-German cultural interrelations.
While he initially became known for his poetry, Mr. Şenocak has since become more prominent as an essayist and social critic, focusing on the societal and cultural challenges Germany faces following its reunification. Şenocak's essays target the stereotypes and assumptions made of Turkish Germans, especially in light of negative views of Arabs and Islam in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Atlas des tropischen Deutschlands (1993) addresses the question of the assimilation of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and War Hitler Araber? (1994) is a collection of essays challenging the notion of Islam as an anti-Western conspiracy. These essays appeared in the wake of deadly attacks against Turkish immigrants in Mölln and Solingen and thus represented a brave confrontation with the tumultuous times in which they were published.
In the mid-nineties, Şenocak turned to fiction as the vehicle of his criticism. His tetralogy begins with Der Mann im Unterhemd, a collection of short stories, published in 1995. Gefährliche Verwandtschaft appeared in 1998 and continues the tale of Sascha Muhteschem, begun a year earlier in Die Prärie (1997).
Fritz Hochwälder 1969
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 11-22
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE WELL-KNOWN DRAMATIST Fritz Hochwälder was born in Vienna on May 28, 1911. Like his father, he learned the trade of upholstery, but unlike him, he began, on the side, to write plays: first a tragedy, Jehr (1933), and then a comedy, Liebe in Florenz (1936), both of which were performed on the stage. Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938 caused Hochwälder to emigrate. He settled in Zurich, Switzerland, where he has lived ever since, while proudly retaining his Austrian passport.
In Zurich he resolutely turned to writing dramas because, as a refugee, he was not permitted to engage in his previous occupation. He wrote Esther (1940), then Das heilige Experiment (1943), a tragedy which subsequently became an international success and established his reputation. Under its English title The Strong Are Lonely, it was produced on Broadway in 1953.
Hochwälder's chief theme, in this play and in others, is the conflict between individual morals and religious responsibility on the one hand and obedience to the dictates of the powers-that-be, or abdication before the evils of the world, on the other.
Many of his works have been performed by the Vienna Burgtheater and by other leading theaters; some have been adapted as television productions. A radio play, Vier Paragraphen, was broadcast in 1951; Der Befehl was originally conceived as a television play and was telecast on a program with the general title of “The Largest Theatre in the World” by the television networks of Austria, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain in 1967.
Among the prizes Hochwälder has received are the Prize of the City of Vienna (1955) and the Grillparzer Prize (1956).
Hochwälder is Austrian and Viennese to the core. He aims for solid craftsmanship, well-constructed and suspenseful plots, vital characters, and genuinely theatrical effects. He addresses himself not to an esoteric elite but to a broad public. He is deliberately conservative in form and style, carrying on the tradition of the Viennese popular theater and its great nineteenth-century representatives — Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy.
It was probably Fritz Hochwälder's intent not to draw attention to the drama and tragedy of his biography in the brochure of 1969. Today we know the extent to which he and his family became victims of the Nazi terror and feel the need to provide some additional information.
Christa Wolf 1974
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 51-60
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
CHRISTA WOLF, THE SEVENTH Max Kade German Writer-in- Residence at Oberlin College, differs in several ways from her predecessors. She is a novelist, while those who came before her were primarily poets, playwrights, and short-story writers. She is also the first East German writer, from whom we hope to gain valuable insight into that other German culture. And she is only the second female guest author to come to Oberlin. Christa Wolf is here with her husband, the critic and author Gerhard Wolf.
As an East German, Christa Wolf has known a life very different from an American’s. Born in 1929 in Landsberg/Warthe (today: Golzów Wielpolski in Poland), about one hundred miles east of Berlin, she spent her childhood years under Hitler and in time of war. When the war finally ended in 1945, she, along with millions of others, fled westward, ending up in what became initially the Soviet Zone and, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic. She worked for some time as the secretary to the mayor of a village in Mecklenburg. In 1949, she moved to Jena and then to Leipzig, where she studied literature, receiving her diploma in 1953. She then became editor for the magazine Neue Deutsche Literatur and for the youth publishing house Neues Leben, and later of the publishing house Mitteldeutscher Verlag Halle, which published her Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella) in 1961. For this first work she received the Kunstpreis der Stadt Halle, and for her next, Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963), the Heinrich-Mann-Preis. The motion picture made from her second book was awarded the Nationalpreis III. Klasse der Akademie der Künste der DDR and was rated “especially valuable” in 1964 by the Wiesbaden (West Germany) film evaluation board because, as the citation read, “no West German film since the war has reacted so sensitively to problems of conscience faced by young people.” Christa Wolf's third book, Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968), not only represented a milestone in the development of East German literature, but has become a bestseller in its West German original and paperback edition. Christa Wolf has also published articles and literary criticism.
All three of Christa Wolf's major works concern the inner development of their central character. In all three, a heroine finds herself through increasing self-awareness.
Bernd Jentzsch 1982
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 143-154
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
BERND JENTZSCH WAS BORN IN Plauen (Vogtland) in 1940. His parents, social democrats, had previously lived in Chemnitz (Saxony), where his father worked as a typesetter at one of the city's newspapers. In 1933, he was dismissed by the Nazis and banished to Plauen, where he worked at a factory. During those years, both parents lived and suffered under the constant surveillance and harassment of the Gestapo. After the war the family moved back to Chemnitz (1953–90 named Karl-Marx-Stadt), where they were automatically integrated in what was to be the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1946. Bernd Jentzsch attended the Gymnasium (1954–58) and served in the National People's Army (1958–60). He studied German literature and art history at the Universities of Leipzig and Jena (1960–65). In 1965 he moved to East Berlin, where he took a position as editor for the Verlag Neues Leben, which he held for nine years. He married — his wife Birgit was a high school teacher of German and Russian — and had a son, Stefan. In 1974 Bernd Jentzsch became a freelance writer.
Not long afterward, his fortunes took a dramatic and unexpected turn. In the fall of 1976, while doing research for an anthology of Swiss poetry in Switzerland, he learned about the expulsion of fellowwriter Reiner Kunze from the GDR Writers’ Union and the expatriation of the prominent poet-singer Wolf Biermann on the order of the GDR government. Stunned and angered by these actions, he wrote a scathing and detailed open letter to head-of-state Erich Honecker, in which he made the demand that the regime reconsider and reverse its decisions. He submitted it for publication to several newspapers in the GDR, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Switzerland, without considering possible negative consequences. The reprisals against Jentzsch, his family, his widowed mother, and his friends were not long in coming. His open letter did not appear in any GDR newspaper but was instead turned over to the State Security Service, which promptly indicted Jentzsch for “hostile agitation against the State.” Faced with the prospect of a mock trial and two to ten years’ imprisonment, he decided to remain in Switzerland. His wife, her brother, his son, and even his retired, staunchly and actively socialist mother were harassed, humiliated, and ostracized by the GDR authorities.
Thomas Rosenlöcher 1995
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 295-302
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THOMAS ROSENLÖCHER WAS BORN IN 1947 in Dresden, where, with his family, he still makes his home today. In 1970, after completing his obligatory military service, he attained his diploma from the Arbeiter- und Bauernfakultät in Freiberg. From 1970 to 1974, he studied business management in Dresden and then, as he puts it, suffered for two years working at a lumber company. His discontent with the everyday aspects of this job led him to explore writing as a creative outlet.
Thomas Rosenlöcher's first formal study of literature came when he was admitted to the Literaturinstitut in Leipzig, where he was enrolled from 1976 to 1979. It was here that he realized that writing was something that resisted formal study and had to be personally explored and experienced. After working for three years as playwrightin- residence at a children's theater in Dresden, he launched his career as a freelance writer in 1983 by publishing his first book of poems, Ich lag im Garten bei Kleinzschachwitz. Other works followed, including a second volume of lyric poetry, Schneebier (1989) and Die verkauften Pflastersteine (1990). In this “Dresden diary,” as he subtitled it, Thomas Rosenlöcher documented his view of the momentous changes that came about during Germany's Unification. It marked his first appearance in the West and brought him into the literary limelight throughout the Federal Republic. A year later, in another humorously critical prose work, Die Wiederentdeckung des Gehens beim Wandern. Harzreise (1991), he described his experiences as a “stranger in [his] own land, which, in truth, had never belonged to [him].” In addition, he regularly publishes stories, essays, and literary translations, and he has also written children's books.
Rosenlöcher's passion for writing began in childhood. Later, as he readily states, he was influenced by, among others, the Romantic poets Eichendorff, Mörike, Shelley, and Keats. He writes with an intriguing blend of emotion and objectivity, seriousness and humor, and considers poetry to be the most refined mode of expression. It allows him, he explains, to realize and express personal visions that for him are incompatible with prose. He finds it critical that his creative process maintain a “balance between naïveté and awareness.” Thus, he takes great pleasure in inventing words and playing with language. A successful poem, he believes, permits a temporary union between the author's private feelings and those of the reader.
Richard Wagner 1992
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 285-290
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
RICHARD WAGNER GREW UP IN A German-speaking community in western Romania, in a region called Banat. Upon completion of his studies in German literature at the university in Temeswar, Romania, Wagner taught German as a foreign language to Romanian school children. After three years of teaching he began work as a correspondent for a German language newspaper in Transylvania. Wagner lost his position after five years with the newspaper, because, as he puts it, he would not write what the communist editor-in-chief wanted to print. In 1985, he formally petitioned to leave Romania and, in 1987, was finally permitted to emigrate to West Berlin.
Wagner began to write at approximately the age of fifteen and in 1973, when he was 21, his first book of poems was published. By this time Wagner was already active in the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a literary group that he and six other students of German literature at the university in Temeswar founded in 1972. Their primary aim was to write serious modern literature in the same vein as that of their freer Western contemporaries, while working within the context of a communist society. The members of the group understood themselves as critical, reform-minded socialists, drawing their inspiration from the Prague Spring. The Aktionsgruppe Banat was tolerated for three years under the watchful eye of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, until 1975, when the group was disbanded and its members arrested. Wagner was released after preliminary investigations, whereupon he left Temeswar and began to work as a German teacher.
Wagner considers his involvement with the Aktionsgruppe Banat to be the literary and political basis of his later work. The former members of the group, save three whose mysterious deaths have yet to be satisfactorily explained, currently live in Germany, and some, like Wagner, are still writing.
In his highly autobiographical Ausreiseantrag, Wagner chronicles the struggles and observations of a disillusioned and often cynical German-Romanian writer, Stirner, living in the bleak environment of communist Romania. Stirner sees a society that is only deceptively functional, repressed by its dictatorial regime and the petty corruption of its citizens. He writes for a German language newspaper in a country where most people do not even bother to read between the headlines on the front page, but instead flip to the back for the less propagandistic sports section.
Werner Söllner 1998
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 331-336
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
WERNER SÖLLNER WAS BORN IN 1951 in the Romanian village of Horia, where his family belonged to the small German minority in the country at the time. After graduating from high school in 1970, he began the study of physics in the city of Cluj in Transylvania. However, he soon dropped this course of study, and from 1971 until 1975, when he completed his M.A. degree, he majored in German and English language and literature. In 1975, his years of writing as a student culminated in the appearance of his first collection of poems, Wetterberichte. Two more volumes of poetry followed, Mitteilungen eines Privatmannes in 1978 and Eine Entwöhnung in 1980. For a short time thereafter, he taught at a Bucharest senior high school, before moving on to work as an editor at a publishing house for children's books.
During his early years and as a student, Söllner lived under a communist dictatorship. As a youth, when the regime was still relatively liberal, he experienced a certain degree of freedom, but during his student years his thinking and writing were burdened by increasingly repressive governmental policies. In 1981, as the political situation worsened, Söllner and a few other writers tried to articulate their political opposition and protest the oppression. Meeting secretly, they read and discussed their own works and those of others.
In 1982, Söllner applied through the Romanian Writers Union for an exit pass to attend a conference of the German Writers Union in Cologne. He planned to remain in Germany and surprisingly was neither threatened nor particularly hindered by the otherwise intrusive Romanian secret police. Nonetheless, Werner Söllner did not return to Romania until after the communist dictatorship was brought down in 1989. He has since gone for visits several times but continues to reside in Frankfurt.
In 1985, Söllner published a book of prose in Germany, Es ist nicht alles in Ordnung, aber ok, yet he remained unknown to a wider audience. His first real success came from his poetry. In 1988, he was “discovered” by Germany's largest publishing house, Suhrkamp, who brought out his new volume of poems, Kopfland. Passagen. Since then, praise from leading critics has gained Söllner a place among the leading German poets. His more recent work has included several translations and a new collection of poems, Der Schlaf des Trommlers (1992).
Rainer Malkowski 1985
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 183-190
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
RAINER MALKOWSKI's DESIRE TO write poetry was long eclipsed by his involvement in the business world. Born in Berlin in 1939, he had the ambition to be a writer throughout his childhood and his years at the Gymnasium there. But he admits that he became “troubled because my ability to view my works critically was far better than my ability to write in a way that met my critical demands.” He also wanted to live independently “and of course needed money for that.”
From 1959 till 1971 he held numerous positions with newspaper publishers and advertising agencies, including that of creative director in the German office of the American advertising firm Young and Rubicam and, from 1967 on, of co-owner of Germany's largest advertising agency. This brought about some travel through Germany, leading him to Frankfurt in 1961 and Düsseldorf in 1967.
“I left my company,” Malkowski says, “because I was becoming increasingly ill at ease with the business world and because my desire to write was growing too strong to ignore. A day came when I no longer worried about what might happen if I gave up my regular income; I just wanted the freedom to write.”
After his change of career Malkowski moved to Brannenburg, a small town near Munich, to try his hand at freelance writing. “At that point,” he says, “I didn't have a stack of manuscripts lying around.”
Numerous publications in newspapers and magazines, as well as radio broadcasts of Malkowski's work, resulted in his first poetry volume, Was für ein Morgen, published by Suhrkamp in 1975. The book was called “the poetry discovery of the year” and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung claimed that “anyone who wants to list the essential lyricists now in middle age will not get by any longer without naming Rainer Malkowski.” In 1976 he received the Förderpreis des Bayerischen Staates, the first in a series of several prices and fellowships awarded to Malkowski.
Between 1977 and his current Oberlin College residence, Malkowski has produced three further volumes of poetry and a children's book and has edited two anthologies. He received the Leonce-und-Lena-Preis für Lyrik in 1997 and the Villa-Massimo-Stipendium, which enabled him to study in Rome for a year. A similar fellowship last year from the Stiftung für deutsch-holländischen Schriftsteller-Austausch enabled him to work in Amsterdam.
Peter Stephan Jungk 2003
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 377-384
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
A MAJOR THEME IN THE LIFE OF Peter Stephan Jungk is that of not belonging. Born to Austrian Jewish parents in Santa Monica, California and educated in Vienna, Berlin, and Salzburg, he is currently a resident of Paris, although not officially registered to live there. Jungk has, as he puts it, “always been looking in from the outside.” Not surprisingly, this experience has been most important in shaping him as a person and a writer.
Born in 1952, he spent his first five years in Austria, Munich, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, before his parents made a permanent move to Vienna, not wishing that their son would become “a football player who only spoke English to them.” There he first attended an American school with children of diplomats, then an Austrian high school where he and his family were viewed as too leftist — because his father, later to become a figurehead of the Green Party movement, was a supporter of détente between the Soviet Union and the West. In Berlin, however, where his family moved next, the opposite was true. At the school he attended there in the late sixties, run by Anthroposophists (a group that believes in reincarnation and a close relationship with nature as well as disliking right angles in buildings), he was considered almost too apolitical and not liberal enough. Eventually, the family moved to Salzburg, a provincial, conservative city still tainted by the Nazi era.
Jungk did not have a real sense of “belonging,” of “being part of a community,” until he lived in Israel for a time and studied Judaism. Though his parents did not deny their Jewishness during his childhood, they did not stress it either — the family celebrated Christmas and Easter rather than Jewish holidays. As a child he knew only vaguely about the Holocaust — he remembers mistaking the sign “Jugendverbot” (no young people allowed) at the movie theater for “Judenverbot” (no Jewish people allowed), but his parents did not speak openly about it. Thus even in Israel, where he came closest to belonging, he remained an outsider.
This sense of both “belonging” and “not belonging” carries over into his work. For example, when writing his biographical novel about Walt Disney, Der König von Amerika (The Perfect American), he felt a strong affinity to Walt Disney (hearing stories about Disney had been an important part of his childhood).
Walter Helmut Fritz 1981
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 133-142
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
WALTER HELMUT FRITZ WAS BORN IN Karlsruhe in 1929. He studied literature, philosophy, and modern languages at the University of Heidelberg, then returned to teaching, first at the secondary level, more recently at the university in his native city. Meanwhile, he has achieved an impressive record as a freelance writer. In 1963–1964, he was awarded the prestigious fellowship for study at the Villa Massimo in Rome, and his writing has been recognized by a number of significant prizes. This is his second visit to the United States. He presented a series of readings along the West Coast in the spring of 1978.
Fritz's first volume of poems, Achtsam sein, appeared in 1956. The title hints at what has subsequently been Fritz's cardinal admonition to his readers: Recognize the worth of the simple people, occurrences, and objects in the daily life about you; they want, need, and deserve your concern. Armed with such awareness, you can live more meaningfully and share yourself with others.
Six volumes of poetry have followed the first: Bild und Zeichen (1958), Veränderte Jahre (1963), Die Zuverlässigkeit der Unruhe (1966), Aus der Nähe (1972), Schwierige Überfahrt (1976), and Sehnsucht (1978). His Gesammelte Gedichte appeared in 1979.
Fritz has also published several collections of shorter prose works and four novels, each of which deals with some aspects of the uncertainty of human existence: the first three are Abweichung (1965), Die Verwechslung (1970), Die Beschaffenheit solcher Tage (1972). These are not really novels in the traditional sense. They are rather somewhat loosely connected series of narrative units with periodic breaks, during which more questions may arise in the mind of the reader than answers appear in the text. In the diary-like notations of his most recent novel, Bevor uns Hören und Sehen vergeht (1975), which recounts the day-to-day experiences of a student at the University of Heidelberg in the early days following the Second World War, the theme of transitory existence emerges as the unifying element, accompanied by Fritz's firm yet gentle message that life can have substantial meaning for those who earnestly seek it:
Jeder, der die Sehnsucht hat, daß etwas in Sicht kommt.
Wer einen Weg freischaufelte.
Wer die Vorurteile hinter sich ließ.
Wer die Unruhe in sich wachhielt.
Wer dem anderen half.
Wer neue Ufer suchte.
Wer hörte und sah und wußte, wie wichtig es ist,
zu sehen und zu hören, bevor uns Hören
und Sehen vergeht.
Barbara Neuwirth 1996
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 303-310
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE AUSTRIAN PROSE WRITER Barbara Neuwirth made her literary debut in 1990 with In den Gärten der Nacht, a volume of short stories that was published by Suhrkamp in its series “Phantastische Bibliothek.” Two years later, she published a second book, Dunkler Fluß des Lebens, which along with the first, established her reputation as one of today's most original contributors to the genre of fantasy fiction. Its stories are set intriguingly and at times indeterminately in an archaic past or a darkly envisioned future, in landscapes and cities that are at once familiar and magically alien. As with Kafka, whom Neuwirth resembles most closely in the precision and vividness of her descriptions, seemingly everyday events are drastically inverted to reveal the scary underside of human inner reality.
While Barbara Neuwirth acknowledges her debt to the Austrian tradition of fantasy literature as shaped by such writers as Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Kubin, and Leo Perutz, her work is thoroughly original. It derives from a modern feminist perspective and, further, incorporates no supernatural forces in order to explain its bizarre or unnatural motifs. Permitting her sixth sense to determine the direction of a story, she draws the reader into the depths of her elemental human conflicts and romantically seductive landscapes (which, as she relates, are inspired by the Waldviertel of her native Lower Austria). She prompts her readers to find creative answers to the questions she poses by exploring their own inner life and the forces that emerge from it.
Barbara Neuwirth's overarching theme is man's betrayal of life's nurturing and preserving powers — above all, love. Among the forms in which such betrayal arises in her stories are modern science demonically unbound from morality, totalitarianism, and the brutal male exploitation of woman's love (which is typically infused with a delicate eroticism). The visions Neuwirth reflects are unsettlingly dark, yet her work suggests that amid tragic betrayal there exists an opening toward hope and moral action.
An academically trained social anthropologist, Barbara Neuwirth works in Vienna as science editor of the Wiener Frauenverlag, the sole feminist publishing house in Austria. In interviews, she has stressed the importance for her of remaining active as a social scientist who places the highest moral demands on science as well as art.
— Amy Durica and Sidney Rosenfeld
Peter Rosei 1983
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 155-174
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE AUSTRIAN WRITER Peter Rosei was born in Vienna in 1946. In 1968 he was awarded the Doctor of Law degree at the University of Vienna. After completing military service he worked as private secretary to the painter Ernst Fuchs and later directed a textbook publishing house. Since 1972 he has been a freelance writer, residing near Salzburg and, presently, in Vienna.
Peter Rosei's early collection of narrative prose Wege contains these reflections on the seemingly prosaic phenomenon of “unterwegs sein,” of going or moving, the simple negation of standing still: “Opinions on going can differ. While some claim to be constantly leaving various places, others say they are always on the way to various places. These two views of the nature of going premise a tie, the one a tie with the past, the other a tie with the future. But there is still a third manner of going, that is: simply to be on the way, from Nowhere to Nowhere, going for the sake of going. This manner of going, too, has an underlying intent. It can be summed up by saying that motion, even if purposeless and senseless, is preferable to standing still.”
From the start of his literary career to the present, motion (going, traveling, moving) has permeated Rosei's fiction. Its thematic prominence is reflected in the titles of his books, from the first, Landstriche (1972) and Wege (1974), to the more recent Von hier nach dort (1978) and Reise ohne Ende (1983). The early works depict an agonized going amidst somber, threatening landscapes whose portrayals are doubly imposing: in the vivid evocation of their physical presence as well as the force with which they conjure nature's hostility to the values and meanings that render life humane. Rosei's landscapes abound in decay, violence, and misery. They resist cultivation and are sparsely peopled. (A book of his “middle” period bears the half-title Entwurf für eine Welt ohne Menschen (1975). Those who trudge and labor in their barren, forbidding spaces are, in the main, abject creatures, amoral and prone to cruelty and violence. The wanderer's going is aimless, an ordeal without meaning.
In later works — Wer war Edgar Allan? (1977), Von hier nach dort (1978), and Das schnelle Glück (1980) — the journey goes on without goal or sense, but it has become markedly subjectivized.
The Writers-in-Residence
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 1-2
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Ulrich Plenzdorf 1975
- Edited by Dorothea Kaufmann, Oberlin College, Ohio, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Oberlin College, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Willkommen und Abschied
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2005, pp 61-68
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
ULRICH PLENZDORF, AUTHOR, SCREENWRITER, AND PLAYWRIGHT, is the second outstanding contemporary writer from the German Democratic Republik to come to Oberlin. Mr. Plenzdorf is accompanied by his wife, Helga, who is editor of an East German periodical concerned with the problems of handicapped children. The Plenzdorfs are visiting this country for the first time.
Ulrich Plenzdorf was born in Berlin in 1934. After completing his Abitur in 1954, he studied philosophy in Leipzig, then served as stagehand for the DEFA from 1955 to 1958. Following 18 months of military service, he completed a four-year training course at a film academy in 1963. Since that time he has worked as a scenarist for the DEFA Studio Babelsberg, and has written seven scenarios, five of which have been produced.
Karla (1965), one of his early scenarios, tells of a young substitute teacher who downgrades the compositions of a senior class written on the subject, “Was mir die Schule gegeben hat!” In her judgment, they have not only mouthed socialist doctrines without genuine sincerity but also have failed to exhibit any potential for independent opinion.
Perhaps Plenzdorf's best known film scenario is Die Legende von Paul and Paula (1974), which is currently enjoying considerable popularity in Western Europe. It depicts the long rocky road of a specialist in a foreign trade authority in his quest for a great love, which ends tragically. The film book concludes with one of Plenzdorf's few attempts at verse:
Unsre Füße, sie laufen zum Tod
Er verschlingt uns und wischt sich das Maul
Unsre Liebe ist stark wie der Tod
Und er hat uns manch Übels getan.
Jegliches hat seine Zeit
Steine sammeln, Steine zerstreun
Bäume pflanzen, Bäume abhaun
Leben und Sterben und Friede und Streit.
Ulrich Plenzdorf has not published extensively, but he quickly achieved international acclaim for his controversial yet highly regarded short novel, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., which propelled him to the top among young writers of the German Democratic Republic (Der Spiegel). It is a short novel with obvious roots in Goethe's Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). It presents the case of a young “Aussteiger,” or deserter from the socialist society.