Horst Bienek

Horst Bienek ( born May 7, 1930 in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, † December 7, 1990 in Munich) was a German writer.

Life and work

Horst Bienek was expelled in 1946 from Upper Silesia, first he lived in Köthen (Anhalt), and later in the house No. 11 of the Russian colony in Potsdam Alexandrovka. During his volunteer time at the Potsdamer days post he came forward with his poems and in 1951 brought by Bertolt Brecht as a master student at the Berliner Ensemble.

In November of the same year the State Security Service, the Soviet NKVD arrested Bienek and sentenced him a year later, together with other relevant interrogations after a show trial for " anti-Soviet agitation " and alleged spying for the United States to 20 years of forced labor. He worked underground in a coal mine in Vorkuta labor camp above the Arctic Circle, part of infamous Gulag. After four years, he came in the wake of an amnesty free and went in 1955 in the Federal Republic of Germany. Bertolt Brecht had used before and during the process, not for his pupil.

Bienek worked, among others, from 1957 to 1961 as a cultural editor at the Hessischer Rundfunk and from 1959 to 1961 as Associate Editor of leaves images, from 1961 as a publishing editor at dtv and since 1968 as a freelance writer in Munich, where he settled. In addition to his own literary work, he was responsible for the new series at dtv, published in the primary texts are difficult to sell. With a large number of pre-or afterwords he accompanied the work of many very dedicated, well not yet an established writer colleagues. Until 1990 he was also head of the literature department at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Friends and colleagues had Bienek asked in 1990 why he did not write about his experiences in Vorkuta. Then he set about this work, but which remained unfinished because of his death. Nevertheless presented his publisher Michael Krüger together the fragments and gave them to 2013 with an epilogue provided out in Göttingen Wallenstein -Verlag.

Horst Bienek died in December 1990 in Munich at the consequences of AIDS. He should have known of the disease since 1987. His tomb is located on the Park Cemetery in Ottobrunn.

In general, the works Bieneks are written in a cool, disciplined language and strongly influenced by the war and postwar period. They circle around the inner and outer self-assertion of man against an all-powerful state. Especially for his translated into numerous languages ​​Gliwice novel tetralogy Horst Bienek received numerous international literary awards. His literary estate is located in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hanover. The rights to his works he bequeathed to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, which gives now two per year of the emerging Horst- Bienek Foundation to Horst- Bienek Prize for Poetry.

Awards

  • Scholarship of the Villa Massimo in Rome (1960 )
  • Literature Prize of the city of Bremen ( 1969)
  • Hermann Kesten Prize ( 1975)
  • Wilhelm Raabe Prize (1978 )
  • Culture Prize of Lower Saxony Silesia (1978 )
  • Nelly Sachs Prize (1981 )
  • Andreas Gryphius Prize ( 1983, 1967 the " gift of honor " )
  • Merit 1st class of the Federal Republic of Germany (1983 )
  • Friedrich Schiedel Literature Prize (1987 )
  • Jean- Paul Award (1989 )
  • Mainz city clerk (1989 )

Works selection

  • Dream Book a prisoner (1957 )
  • Night Pieces (1959 )
  • Gliwice Childhood (1965 )
  • Workshop discussions with writers (1962 )
  • The cell ( 1968)
  • Bakunin. An Invention, Carl Hanser, Munich, 1970
  • Solzhenitsyn and other essays (1972 )
  • The aftermath (1974 )
  • Gliwice. An Upper Silesian Chronicle in four novels The first Polka ( 1975)
  • September Light (1977 )
  • Time without bell (1979)
  • Earth and Fire (1982 )

Selected poems

  • Report ( The Purgazerstört the peacock, the rose, the sun )
  • The Myth Time ( The Myth time shatters into shards )

Radio plays

  • Six grams Caratillo (HR 1960), solo radio play Klaus Kinski
  • Single cell (DLF 1966)
  • The face that imprisons my face (WDR 1982)

Films

  • The Cell (1970), written and directed by Horst Bienek
  • The first Polka ( 1978), directed by Klaus Emmerich
  • Castle King Forest ( 1987) Written by: Horst Bienek, directed by Peter Schamoni
Unfree labour Vorkuta Gulag Friedrich-Schiedel-Literaturpreis Deutschlandfunk Screenplay Klaus Emmerich (director) Integrated Authority File
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