50 years ago, on September 2, 1965 died the poet Johannes Bobrowski in a Berlin hospital from the effects of appendicitis. He was 48 years old and about to become one of the most important German writers -. In East and West
The memories of his friends describe the dramatic last days before his death. Bobrowski could not tolerate the antibiotics. Also taken from the West across the border smuggled not hit on. Nothing could help him. His funeral was the last meeting of German-German writers for many years. Even Uwe Johnson had received an entry permit. East and West, Stephan Hermlin and Hans Werner Richter, spoke at the grave.
On the small Christopher Cemetery in Friedrichshagen, on the eastern outskirts of Berlin, crosses the cry of a screech owl the noise of an airplane. A man who maintains a neighboring grave, leads us to Bobrowski. He knows what to do with the poet and his relatives, cited freehand from the factory until a call summoned him home.
Designed by Wieland Förster grave has something repellent, which is not at the work of the artist, but at the diagonally over the grave landscaped, trimmed hedge. An oversized brick with the Coat of arms of Berlin and the words “grave of honor” want to keep any of them to be so popular that the city of Berlin takes over the grave care.
Sarmatia, this magical place in Eastern Europe, Johannes Bobrowski has literary packed and thus protected saved to Friedrichshagen. As early as 1938 the family moved from East Prussia, where Bobrowski was born in 1917 in Tilsit, in the 1753, founded at the behest of Frederick the Great colonists village Silesian and Bohemian immigrants, should operate the sericulture. The mulberry trees they did not stand the winters.
Friedrichshagen became a place of summer visitors and the Friedrichshagener poet circle whose members are present as street names today. Two houses next to the house Ahornstraße 26, where the family lived until recently Bobrowski, Erich Mühsam took some time quarters down the road toward railway line lived the Hart brothers. Wilhelm Bölsche and Peter Hille lived nearby. Especially in West Berlin there were pilgrims who often like to visit the home in paid a Ahornstraße. “They were all at Johannes Bobrowski,” Hubert Fichte wrote.
For all the seriousness of his subjects, the poet must have had a disarming sense of humor and have been very sociable. Günter Bruno Fuchs has a common booze at the esteemed poet of Bobrowski Christa Reinig in Milastraße reports:. “About what we laughed, white / I no longer off perhaps quite motivlos on / the word Jannowitzbrücke, … Christa / drank Us guys under the carpet. ” In 1962 she founded together with the also known as a hard-drinking writer Manfred Bieler the New Friedrichshagener poet circle “in the promotion of belles-lettres and the fine drinking” saw his job.
On the Friendship Altar
Christoph Meckel described it ambivalent. The Christian charity forbade Bobrowski, simply kick out too intrusive scroungers and thieves time to continue working. “His hospitality became legendary, and the family table for Friendship altar. That came from Eastern tradition, dominated the life of the family and has been detained at any cost. Where else in German literature, there was this open arms.”
Even after his death, his house remained open for many decades, leaving the family visits the house, who were allowed to look at the study of the poet. It animated Gerhard Wolf one of the finest literary biographies that I have read, marked linguistically equal and of great understanding of the work and its creator: “description of a room 15 chapters on Johannes Bobrowski.”. . The objects of his room to describe the origin of his work
Klaus Wagenbach, however, has tried to describe the person: “Not particularly tall, but broad and overweight – 196 pounds; I remember it because he extensively discussed again, as the four outstanding on the two talents pounds were to acquire well He was movable, was fast, preferred suits of fatherly comfortable cut, where he could literally do gymnastics.. ” An “Eisbären eyes” remembered Bernd Jentzsch to “beautiful hippo eyes” Günter Bruno Fuchs.
Bobrowski had little time to create his work, what Artwork and poetry is concerned, until today is unique. Between his first book publication, the poetry collection “Sarmatian time”, and his death were only four years. He wrote concentrated, with creative breaks in between.
With the novel “Levins mill. 34 sentences about my grandfather,” that in 1874 in the former West Prussia at the Drewenz settled fable of two mill owners, a German and a Jewish, he became famous in 1964. “All his characters, whose no is portrayed without a certain sympathy, stand in the light of the same epic justice,” Carl Zuckmayer wrote in the eulogy for granting the Charles-Veillon Prize.
The novel “Lithuanian Claviere” originated in seven weeks of June 6, 1965. Two days after the end of the manuscript came until July 28 Bobrowski hospitalized, he never left.
Johannes Bobrowski has as Uwe Johnson, fought against, to be called the German-German poet, he was a German poet, recognized in both German states, the works published simultaneously in the GDR in the Union Verlag, in the West at the German publishing house and the Fischer Verlag and later, when the Fischer-editor Klaus Wagenbach founded in West Berlin his own publishing house, there.
“ceremony of the cultural Protestantism”
Each generation must rediscover Bobrowski, not of course he belongs to the canon of German literature, even when his lyrics in some Länder school curriculum are. In March, Federal President Joachim Gauck was seen as a fan, with a literary soiree at Bellevue Palace, the so suspected the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “as a celebration of cultural Protestantism desired” was because Bobrowski was not in the GDR, of course, professing Christian and a lecturer in Christian Union Verlag.
It’s hard to say how it would have continued with Bobrowski and the GDR, if he had survived. He died a few weeks before the 11th plenary, that sweeping blow of the SED against writers, artists and filmmakers from which emerged the least affected, without prejudice.
In his essay “Twenty-two days or half the life” of the poet Franz Fühmann wrote in 1973: “I must confess that I am initially faced his poetry brusquely dismissive:. keeping alive, perhaps reawakening of feelings that had to die … But the history can not pay off, not a single aspect and not a single feeling, they can pick up only in a certain sense. Not a ‘It was never’ and not an ‘as if it had never been’, but only as A ‘It was so and is over’ is the secure base to build a new one. “
” The Germans and the European East “
Uwe Rada, in his 2010 book” The Memel. Cultural history of a European stream “. The significance of the seal of Johannes Bobrowski recognized for this river landscape” on flight and had the SED regime, also out of consideration for the Soviet Union, the cloak of silence down – and remembering the places and rivers of childhood pushed into the private sphere. And suddenly rose as a his voice and sang a current which was mainly known by the first verse of Germany song. “
1961 Bobrowski this loss in an information to the Writers’ Union of the GDR described as follows: “To write, I started on Ilmensee 1941 on Russian landscape, but as a stranger, as a German. This has become an issue, about the Germans and the European East. Because I grew up around the Memel around where Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, German lived together, among them all the Jewry. “
The late antiquity Sarmatia, the landscape along the Memel, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was designed by Johannes Bobrowski for literary landscape where. And she gives him back today much. For years makes you look in Lithuania earned by the author’s work.
As the Friedrichshagener apartment after Death Johanna Bobrowski 2011 despite the efforts of the Johannes-Bobrowski Society no longer tenable and the Land of Berlin was not able and willing to bear the costs (only the library was taken over by the Berlin Central and Regional Library 2008), taken Jörg wet and the Protestant pastor Mindaugas Kayris from the Lithuanian Vilkyškiai (Willkischken) in which Bobrowski had spent as a child his holiday, without further ado, the
Initiative. They made the furniture to pick up and set up in the parish hall of the Lutheran church, an exhibition, a whose centerpiece is the original study room of Johannes Bobrowski. The sun, the desk, the typewriter, even his favorite jacket. Also in Tilsit, today Sowjetsk, belonging in the Russian Federation Kaliningrad Oblast, there is a Bobrowski Society.
100th birthday in two years like the 26 make new owner of the house in Friedrichshagener Ahornstraße the room where there was Bobrowski rooms, accessible again. Whether that makes sense, no furniture, no library and archives, is questionable. Until then has a panel on the famous former residents back.
“It wants the elder die”
Friedrichshagen honors the poet by benefits are: For a few years there is in the main thoroughfare, the Bölschestraße, the reading series “Bobrowski mill”. Financed by the trader and organized by Kai Grehn and the youngest son Bobrowski, Adam, younger writers come here to speak, who appreciate the work Bobrowski.
In addition to the Friedrichshagener library that bears his name, has existed since 1987 Hellersdorf district, a Johannes-Bobrowski-street lined with renovated prefabricated buildings and much Green. Parallel to this runs the Heidenauer road, a name which, unfortunately, is currently for everything despised strangers and helpless.
On the road between Bobrowski- and Heidenauer Street is a wasteland with high-voltage lines and elderberry bushes. Where I can not pass by without thinking about Bobrowski poem “elderflower” which begins: “It comes / Babel, Isaak / he says. In the pogrom, / when I was a child, / my dove / crack one’s head off. ” And ends with: “Guys, it wants the elder / die / on your forgetfulness.”
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