Werner Bräunig

Werner Bräunig ( born May 12, 1934 in Chemnitz, † August 14, 1976 in Halle an der Saale ) was a German writer.

Bräunigs father was a laborer and later driver, his mother a seamstress. Bräunig operational after 1945 black market, began an apprenticeship as a locksmith and came up with 16 years in a reform school. In 1953 he worked as a delivery man at SADG bismuth in Johann George Town and was sentenced in the same year for smuggling to West Berlin to a three-year prison sentence. After his early release in 1954, he worked until 1955 in the VEB paper and board mill Niederschlema, 1956 briefly as a full-time instructor of the FDJ district leadership Schneeberg and from 1956 to 1958 as a fireman in the city of Schneeberg laundry. In this time were first attempts at writing. Bräunig was also popular correspondent of Karl- Marx-Stadt newspaper " People's Voice ".

In 1957 he was admitted to the Association of Young authors ( AJA) of bismuth AG and had his first publications. In 1958 he joined the SED. He studied from 1958 to 1961 at the Literary Institute " Johannes R. Becher ". In 1959 he wrote in preparation for the first Bitterfeld Conference with Jan Koplowitz calling » Pick up your pen, pal! ".

1961-1967 Bräunig was an assistant for distance education and director of the undergraduate seminar at the Literary Institute " Johannes R. Becher ," where he occasionally also came to the attention of the Ministry of State Security for alleged "enemy grouping ".

In 1960 he began working on the realistic novel fairground on the bismuth AG, which has the initial stages of development in East and West on the topic and ends with June 17, 1953, which he describes controlled in accordance with the opinion of the SED as the West. Literature History and literature aesthetically it is therefore of great relevance and importance in order to understand the literary politics of the GDR. In the course of the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in 1965, the Culture strictly proclaimed by socialist ideology and socialist image of man, and after a sharp criticism in the SED newspaper " New Germany " for alleged "insulting the working people and the Soviet partner ," broke Bräunig in 1966, the work on the text. In GDR times, his novel was never published, it only came to an advance copy in the " new German literature " ( ndl, Issue 10, 1965) and a censored reprint of 170 pages from the manuscript in the anthology "A crane in the sky " which appeared in the Central German publishing house in 1981. From this conflict with the SED " fairground " he has never recovered, despite advocates such as Christa Wolf and Anna Seghers; he was an alcoholic and died in 1976 ( 42 years ) in it. A novel no longer wrote Bräunig; he wrote in the aftermath essays, short stories and film scenarios, reports and portraits.

" Fairground " was nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair ( Fiction ) 2007.

Since 2010, awarded by the Textmanufaktur and the Aufbau-Verlag, endowed with 5,000 euros Werner Bräunig Prize for Literature.

Works

• This summer. Narratives., Halle 1960.
• Materna. 1967 ( part 3 of the episode film stories that night. Screenplay, along with Frank Vogel )
• Write prose. Notes to the realism. Means German publisher, Hall 1968, DNB 750 340 878 ..
• Ordinary people. Narratives. (1969, awarded the Literature Prize of the fdgb. ), Newly published: Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-351-03230-2.
• Cities make the man. Hall in 1969.
• Heinz Sachs ( ed. ): A crane in the sky. Unfamiliar and familiar. Means German publisher, Halle 1981.
• Fairground. Novel. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-03210-4. EBook: ISBN 978-3-8412-0422-6
• Fairground ( audiobook ) read by Jörg Gudzuhn, Audio Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89813-674-7 ( Reading, 6 CDs, 476 min)

Anthologies and literary journals (selection)

• Ralph Green Berger (ed.) / Society for contemporary poetry. Poesiealbum new. Issue 2 /2009.