Hermann Kant: executioner of GDR literature died at the age of 90 – RP ONLINE

Neustrelitz. The writer Hermann Kant died at the age of 90 years. By Peter Mohr

“villain you may be, but you can write quite well”, Hermann Kant had once accurately described his own role as a writer and party functionaries in the GDR. Hardly any other author was highly controversial and still respected.

Was it a satire on Stasi methods, an autobiographical sound attempt at justification prose? Or merely an abortive novel? These questions set themselves up after reading of Kant’s last novel “identifier” (2010), in which he sent the figure of literary Linus Cord through the stubborn Stasi Anwerbemaschinerie. That was the date last daring Kantian split between literature and politics.

As a writer and official of the association Kant walked many years a fine line between art and politics and got it between the millstones of those in power. Under his aegis, the GDR Writers’ Union was rigid so-called anti-state members cleaned.

“state servant” and “executioner” was later Central Committee member of the SED after entrained by him Biermann expatriation and the association called exclusion proceedings against renowned colleagues (Stefan Heym, Adolf Endler and Klaus Schlesinger). Insight or even repentance was not Kant’s thing. On the contrary: The maligned distributed in his 1991 autobiography again strong verbal blows and tried the persecuted in the GDR authors from the victim to press in the perpetrator role

Kant, who in June 14 1926th Hamburg was the son of a gardener, reached after the electrician teaching and Polish prisoners of war in a paradigmatic way the socialist career ladder. The studies at the workers’ and peasants faculty in Greifswald followed a German Studies at Alfred Kantorowicz in East Berlin. In 1969 he was elected to the Academy of Arts and later honored with all the major awards in the GDR and in 1986 with the Order of Friendship of Peoples of the USSR Supreme Soviet

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From these people we took in 2016 farewell PHOTO: aP, RF PH

His literary debut of talented thoroughbred narrator Hermann Kant, whose works have been translated into twenty languages, in 1962 with the volume of prose “A little South Seas”. Three years later, that followed probably still important literary work, the novel “The Great Hall” (1965). From the perspective of the protagonist Robert Iswall carrying autobiographical accounted Kant (not uncritically) the early years of the GDR and appeals open to a keen sense of history.

Hermann Kant, who yesterday at the age of 90 years in a hospital died in Neustrelitz, belonged – his political trials and tribulations defiance – still among the most important voices of the German post-war literature

source: RP

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