Fritz Rudolf Fries: writer has died – STAR

D he writer Fritz Rudolf Fries who continued in his books about adventurers, dreamers and time travelers to the magical realism of the Latin American novel is dead. Fries died on 17 December at 79 years, said the Wallenstein Publisher on Friday in Göttingen. He confirmed that appropriate media reports.

Fries, who lived in Peter Hagen in Berlin, was the son of a German businessman and a Spaniard. 1942 came the family moved to Germany. While studying in Leipzig-50s he attended lectures by Ernst Bloch, Hans Mayer and Werner Krauss. Subsequent travels he met important writers of Latin America, including Nicolás Guillén, Miguel Angel Asturias and Julio Cortázar. As an editor and translator, he has made known among other East German readers with the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

Hauptwerk critical GDR literature

debuted Through the mediation of Uwe Johnson Fries as an author in 1966 Suhrkamp. with the novel “The Way Oobliadooh”, with whom he made a name in one fell swoop Because he Leipziger a bohemian and anarchists portrayed in the picaresque book, the work did not pass the SED-censorship. She saw the GDR youth in the book represented ideologically wrong.

In the West, however, raved about the book as a major work of critical GDR literature. Fries lost his job because of this publication at the Academy of Arts. It was not until more than 20 years later, the novel was in the GDR bookstores.

Stasi past catapulted him to the sidelines

Fries also excelled as a translator from English, French and Spanish, as of “Hopscotch”, the main work Cortázar. “The Air Ship,” “Alexander’s new worlds” or “laying a Middle Kingdom” cemented his reputation as a “master of a highly artificial, stylistically sophisticated prose,” as one critic wrote. East Germans were reading at Friesland between the lines to discover the swipes between mythology and history, vision and life.

Fries’ last novel “Last Exit to El Paso,” in which the author includes a bow to his debut, appeared-2013.

to have with his late admission worked as a Stasi IM, Fries catapulted to the sidelines. He was expelled from the Berlin Academy of Arts and the PEN Club. He experienced his situation as a “big break,” he said later. Ten years have the Stasi “processed” him before he entered the “pact with the devil,” Fries told in his memoirs “Diogenes on the park bench.”