Ota Filip

Ota Filip ( born March 9, 1930 in Silesian Ostrava ) is a tschechischsprachiger writer who has lived since his expatriation in 1974 from Czechoslovakia in the Federal Republic of Germany and writes in German.

Life

Ota Filip was born the son of a Czech pastry chef in Ostrava, his mother was of Polish origin. He spent his youth in Ostrava and Prague and worked after high school (1948) and correspondence courses in literature and journalism at Charles University in Prague as an editor at various newspapers and on the radio. In 1959 he joined the Communist Party, but was in 1960 already excluded because of critical remarks from the party. 1960 and 1969, he was sentenced to imprisonment and hard labor for " subversion of state and society " and worked as miners, truck drivers and construction workers. Although forbidden to write, he wrote novels whose manuscripts circulated among political sympathizers in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria. During this time, inter alia, his novel Cafe was on the road to the cemetery, for which he received the Grand Prize of the City of Ostrava 1967. 1968, during the Prague Spring, he worked as a publisher's reader. A year after the Soviet occupation of the country 1969, he was again arrested for allegedly system-critical publications and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He then worked as a furniture assembler, truck drivers and construction workers.

In 1974 he was expatriated with his family and has since lived as a freelance writer and political journalist in West Germany, where, inter alia, as an editor for the publishing house S. Fischer worked. In 1977 he received the German citizenship. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, he is devoted to essays and books, especially the issue of the Czech-German reconciliation. He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the German PEN Centre and the Czech Writers' Union.

Filip wrote, among other things, satirical short stories from Czechoslovakia the communist era. One of his characters is the worker Josef Nowak, who fights against the adversities of socialist everyday life.

Due discovered in 1997 in Prague documents a public discussion because of Filip's work for the communist secret police in the 1950s and 1970s emerged. Filip did not deny his involvement, but turned against the accusations to have this added persecuted by the regime personally damage. He pointed to the constraints of a totalitarian system, specifically to the conditions of his solitary confinement, which is difficult to escape, and admitted to have failed under these conditions, which he very much regretted.

Awards

Ota Filip received, inter alia, 1986 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for German -speaking immigrant literature awarded the 1991 Andreas Gryphius price and the lions paw ( Munich metropolitan Prize for Literature ), 1999, the scholarship of the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2010 he has held the Chamisso poetics lecturer at the Technical University of Dresden. On October 28 2012 he the President of the Czech Republic awarded the medal for outstanding services in the field of fine arts.

Works

  • The café on the road to the cemetery: the novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1968.
  • A fool for any city: Roman. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  • The Ascension of the Lojzek Lapáček from Silesian Ostrava: novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1973.
  • May devotion: novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1980 ( original title " Poskvrněné Početi " 1976)
  • Grandfather and the cannon: novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1981.
  • Tomato thieves in Azerbaijan and other satires. Fischer paperback publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1981.
  • The silent dead under Klee: reunion with Bohemia. Langen -Müller, Munich 1992.
  • Café Slavia: novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985; Re: Herbig, Munich 2001.
  • The seventh CV: autobiographical novel. Herbig, Munich 2001.
  • The Russians' House: A Novel by Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky. Long Müller, Munich 2005.
  • OsmY čili nedokončený životopis. Host, Brno 2007.

Secondary literature

  • January Kubica, spisovatel Ota Filip, Větrné mlýny ( Prague) 2012, ISBN 9788074430466
  • Late accounts of Ota Filip, with a contribution by Walter Schmitz and a bibliography. Dresden: Thelem, 2012 ( published 9th Dresdner Chamisso lectures on poetics ).
  • Kliem, Alfrun: The Silent Country: exile work of Libuse Monikova, Jirí Gruša and Ota Filip, Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Bern; Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Vienna: Lang, 2003
  • Massum Faryar, window to contemporary history: a monographic study of Ota Filip and his work, Berlin, Man and Book Verl, 2005.
  • Critical Dictionary of contemporary German literature. Edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Munich: edition text kritik
Unfree labour Military occupation Andreas Gryphius Prize Integrated Authority File
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