On the death of the writer Dieter Kühn: A biographer of principle – Tagesspiegel

17:53 clock From Hannes Schwengersbauer <- self.position: -1 -> <- classid: hcf inline-left -> <- position: left -> <- inisprint: false -> <- inhaspic:! true ->

From Parzival to Napoleon: Great Lives were the passion of the immensely productive and versatile writer Dieter Kühn. Now he is 80 years old died in Cologne.

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With 78 years he wrote his “book of life” in 1,300 pages (The heart S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt 2013), now, with 80, he died on Saturday in Cologne in the air: Dieter Kühn, whose fondness as an author of the construction and reconstruction of – was CVs – real and invented. Your bibliography leads from his biographical debut “N” (1973, Napoleon Bonaparte) on the history of financial fraud of historic format (“The President”, 1973) to his bestseller “I Selva”, a biography of the medieval singer, poet and politician Oswald von Wolkenstein.

It is no coincidence that Kühn graduated in German studies as a doctoral thesis on Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”. Meanwhile already theses are written about him and his biographical method (The biography Dieter Kühn’s works, Vienna 1988). What characterized them was the second – or better third – dimension of biographies of its nonlinear abzuschildern CVs but to let be plastically by possible variants and the collection of the drafting process

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And he had even more steps: On his 80th birthday in February he gave under the title “The seventh wave “insight into unrealized projects, aufgebene and those to which he might come back yet. Be trusted, it was the indefatigable poet whose life’s work includes approximately 70 books, nine plays and 60 radio plays. Not to mention his children’s books (“The Lord of the flying fish”, 1979) Winner of the Writers Prize for Literature in 1993, he wrote his only TV film “The trip to Surinam for ZDF. Electronic diary of the town clerk “.

High were praised his congenial translations of Middle High German seals Gottfried von Strassburg, Neidhart von Reuentals and Wolfram von Eschenbach (” Parsifal “, 1994). They were so successful that he sometimes saw stand their shadow be the way work. Wrongly, when he received literary prizes and awards in several literary genres, including the Radio Drama Award of the War Blind, the Grand Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Arts and most recently the Carl Zuckmayer Medal in 2014. He was a member of the PEN Club and Poetik- guest lecturer of University of Frankfurt. That he nevertheless complained to have come too short in terms of public recognition, based on facts as well less on subtle slights that he had learned by juries and publishers. In his “book of life”, he quotes the offhand remark an unnamed juror that he had “just no lobby” and the insulting assessment of his first publishing house Suhrkamp after two decades of cooperation, its “complex spellings, as they were accepted in the seventies” were “no longer ‘in’”. But could this be a reproach? Kühn needed in any event no particular lobby to find the S. Fischer Verlag is a new publisher home, where since its publisher change appeared still more than 20 titles.

From the meaning and purpose of his “complex notation” testifies his most impressive ” book of life “, which includes a span of nearly 80 years with three German polity: A Childhood in the” Third Reich “in constant fear of the parents before the discovery of the Jewish family branch, youth between new beginning and restoration in the Adenauer era, the early detection of Liiteratur and the first successes as an author, political honorary offices and finally the “great festival of reunification”, which celebrate with Kühn in Halle. However, without hiding his surprise when the old and new citizens, the first stanza of the song intoned Germany – “… about everything in the world”

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A rather depressing journey into the past led him to Königsee in Thuringia, on the childhood home and family home earlier Kühn generations. And he would not Dieter Kühn have been if he had not been reconstructed over 60 pages of the book of life of the family tree to a family crest in the 16th century, and then promising to complain: “None of the forefathers in Thuringia has left an autobiography. However, there are templates, according to which such a biography would reconstruct designing. “The temptation must have been great, this omission by its own method. The opportunity and time to do so no longer could he.