Hermann Kant always so narrowly on the truth by – ZEIT ONLINE

Content

1. page 1 – Always so narrowly on the truth by
2. page 2 – Cold ridicule

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Hermann Kant had long been a, internationally, acclaimed author. As his passport was ten years after the first great novel The Aula as a profession still electrician. The craftsman had respect for the craft. In 1962 he published the short story collection A bit of South Seas , barely a year after the Wall a paradoxical game that showed him as the master of the short form, the irony in the tradition of American narrator years ago Rolf Dieter Brinkmann , The title story A bit of South Seas passes on the north German country. His hero indulges in “a little extra”: precious Bantams, exotic rabbit, a Persian cat with afraid of mice and an aquarium with exotic fish. The neighbors climb him on the roof until it brings the exotic to Hamburg and returned with the shaggy mongrel of a sharp dog.

In 1965, the novel The Aula appears. His narrator, journalist Robert Iswall, trained electrician should abide by the Workers’ and Peasants Faculty Greifswald the closing speech to the epoch of ABF, a eulogy to an education policy that the war-torn youth, the survivors can offered something even decades in the West should remain bourgeois privilege. The education policy of the former GDR could be – very postheroisch – reactivate good reasons again to help the war-torn refugees today and German precarious unemployment duration on the jumps: Education for All.

In contrast to the Departure Sentiment in East affects Kant the Federal Republic as a strangers who appear as characters in the novel, a grotesque panopticon in succession Doblin Alexanderplatz . Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote: “The old collapses, times change, and a new life from the ruins blooms Herrlich is the workers ‘and peasants’ government, though not free of guilt and error, because everything is hard..” He summed up: “This Hermann Kant from East Berlin to be proud of, he is capable of much He knows, he knows the literary Commercial exactly he knows his craft An intelligent, a clever fellow, a versatile, an agile… journalist, a professional and spirited polemicist, a funny brother of the sad feature of the new Germany, one of the swiftest horses of the elite stable of SED press. ”

In 1972 appeared, according to a preliminary pressure in the journal forum , a three-year delay in the novel The Contacts . The first sentence provides the exposure: “I do not want to be minister!” Kant’s hero David Groth has made career: from messenger boy to chief editor of a magazine. this novel also portrays with wit and feeling for language GDR history. Popular literature as entertainment. Among the curiosities of the publication history heard that you accused the author Semitism and philo and also pornography.

Kant masterpiece was the 1977 published novel Stay . In it, he processed the four years of captivity as a young soldier in Poland. He is to undermine the stencil of victims and perpetrators succeed. His protagonist Mark Niebuhr, something spun, is suspected of having murdered a Polish girl in an SS raid in Lublin. In addition, we confuse it with a concentration camp guard. So he sits in prison in the Warsaw Ghetto to the task of writing his biography again and again. Niebuhr learns the Germans and to see themselves through the eyes of their victims.

Fritz J. Raddatz wrote in the TIME : “His guards to take the young prisoners through a desert of stone powder, and crumbling ruins . this was once a part of Warsaw this part was called ‘the ghetto’. ‘as the uprising was, you have caught and blown up, and as the uprising was done, one has blown up and ausgesäubert flamethrowers holes hundred percent. you have made a new world record. ‘ There are only twenty-two pages – but for these twenty-two pages must thank Hermann Kant you are unparalleled in contemporary German literature, not because they are breathtaking; no – Kant is here arrived at a literary intensity “…

Also in the novel Ocarina (2002) tells Kant of the transformation of the young German Wehrmacht soldiers Mark Niebuhr for antifascists. In the fall of 1947 Niebuhr drinks with Stalin in the Kremlin tea, Stalin plays for him on a clay flute, the ocarina, and appoint him his viceroy. The novel shows a panorama of German postwar history up to the present. On the one hand a masterpiece, on the other hand an attempt at justification.