Adolf Endler
Encyclopedia
Adolf Endler was a lyric poet
, essayist and prose
author who played a central role in subcultural activities that attacked and challenged an outdated model of socialist realism
in the German Democratic Republic
up until the collapse of communism
in the early 1990s. Endler drew attention to himself as the “father of the oppositional literary scene” at Prenzlauer Berg
in the eastern part of Berlin. In 2005 he was made a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt
.
from 1955-57. An acclaimed poet
, he was well respected in the East and West, but at the same time was marginalized and degraded by party functionaries who controlled the fields of cultural practice, conspired to guard their concepts of aesthetics, and went as far as to extend their influence into the writer’s private life.
Even though socialist realism
had spread over most of Eastern European cultural life, it was successfully undermined by writers and artists like Endler. His defiance involved ignoring orders from cultural politicians and finding alternative ways of communicating with peers. In 1978 he coined the term Sächsische Dichterschule to describe the group of German writers who where born in the 1930s and were influential in the areas of poetry, such as, Karl Mickel, Heinz Czechowski, Sarah Kirsch
and Volker Braun
. This sentiment is shared by Michael Hamburger
, who, before the group had been named, applauded those that they had been creative in an artistically hostile environment. Hamburger recorded the traffic of correspondence between individual poets -a secret project that held the young writers together in a state that promoted the exact opposite, i.e. the isolation of individual deviants. His colleague in exile, the Austrian
Erich Fried
(Fried and Hamburger went into exile in Great Britain
during Hitler's Third Reich), documented some of this writing for the BBC
in his review of the anthology
In diesem besseren Land (1966).
Into the seventies, Endler remained steadfastly confrontational. Following the expatriation from the GDR of song-writer Wolf Biermann
in 1976, Endler was expelled from the Writers’ Association of the GDR in 1979, having declared his solidarity with his previously reprimanded colleague Stefan Heym
. Throughout the 1980s he contributed to various Berlin and Leipzig
underground
magazines.
In the 1990s, Adolf Endler became known to a wider public through a volume of memoirs entitled Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg (i.e. Tarzan at Prenzlauer Berg) and from 1991 to 1998, with Brigitte Schreier-Endler, he organised the legendary “Orplid&Co.“ readings in Café Clara in Berlin-Mitte. Mr. Endler died after a long illness.
and Alfred Jarry
, astute minds like Karl Kraus
and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
and great epic writers like François Rabelais
and Hans Henny Jahnn
. It was only after the political turnaround of 1989 that people noticed that he does not compare at all unfavourably with them – but not too late, thank goodness.”
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, essayist and prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
author who played a central role in subcultural activities that attacked and challenged an outdated model of socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
in the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
up until the collapse of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
in the early 1990s. Endler drew attention to himself as the “father of the oppositional literary scene” at Prenzlauer Berg
Prenzlauer Berg
Prenzlauer Berg is a locality of Berlin, in the borough of Pankow.Until 2001, Prenzlauer Berg was a borough of Berlin; in that year it was included in the borough of Pankow....
in the eastern part of Berlin. In 2005 he was made a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt
Darmstadt
Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...
.
Early life and career
A communist as a young man, Endler moved to East Germany in 1955 and studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature in LeipzigLeipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
from 1955-57. An acclaimed poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, he was well respected in the East and West, but at the same time was marginalized and degraded by party functionaries who controlled the fields of cultural practice, conspired to guard their concepts of aesthetics, and went as far as to extend their influence into the writer’s private life.
Even though socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
had spread over most of Eastern European cultural life, it was successfully undermined by writers and artists like Endler. His defiance involved ignoring orders from cultural politicians and finding alternative ways of communicating with peers. In 1978 he coined the term Sächsische Dichterschule to describe the group of German writers who where born in the 1930s and were influential in the areas of poetry, such as, Karl Mickel, Heinz Czechowski, Sarah Kirsch
Sarah Kirsch
Sarah Kirsch is a German poet.She was born Ingrid Bernstein in Limlingerode, Prussian Saxony. She changed her first name to Sarah in order to protest against her father's anti-semitism. She studied biology in Halle and literature at the Johannes R. Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig. In...
and Volker Braun
Volker Braun
Volker Braun is a German writer. His works include Provokation für mich -- a collection of poems written between 1959 and 1964 and published in 1965, a play, Die Kipper , and Das ungezwungne Leben Kasts .-Life:Volker Braun, who worked in...
. This sentiment is shared by Michael Hamburger
Michael Hamburger
Michael Hamburger OBE was a noted British translator, poet, critic, memoirist, and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism...
, who, before the group had been named, applauded those that they had been creative in an artistically hostile environment. Hamburger recorded the traffic of correspondence between individual poets -a secret project that held the young writers together in a state that promoted the exact opposite, i.e. the isolation of individual deviants. His colleague in exile, the Austrian
Austrians
Austrians are a nation and ethnic group, consisting of the population of the Republic of Austria and its historical predecessor states who share a common Austrian culture and Austrian descent....
Erich Fried
Erich Fried
Erich Fried , an Austrian poet who settled in England, was known for his political-minded poetry. He was also a broadcaster, translator and essayist....
(Fried and Hamburger went into exile in Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
during Hitler's Third Reich), documented some of this writing for the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
in his review of the anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
In diesem besseren Land (1966).
Into the seventies, Endler remained steadfastly confrontational. Following the expatriation from the GDR of song-writer Wolf Biermann
Wolf Biermann
Karl Wolf Biermann is a German singer-songwriter and former East German dissident.-Early life:Biermann's father, who worked on the Hamburg docks, was a German Jew and a member of the German Resistance....
in 1976, Endler was expelled from the Writers’ Association of the GDR in 1979, having declared his solidarity with his previously reprimanded colleague Stefan Heym
Stefan Heym
Helmut Flieg was a German-Jewish writer, known by his pseudonym Stefan Heym. He lived in the United States between 1935 and 1952, before moving back to the part of his native Germany which was, from 1949–1990, German Democratic Republic...
. Throughout the 1980s he contributed to various Berlin and Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
underground
Underground press
The underground press were the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other western nations....
magazines.
In the 1990s, Adolf Endler became known to a wider public through a volume of memoirs entitled Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg (i.e. Tarzan at Prenzlauer Berg) and from 1991 to 1998, with Brigitte Schreier-Endler, he organised the legendary “Orplid&Co.“ readings in Café Clara in Berlin-Mitte. Mr. Endler died after a long illness.
Quotations
- A lot of people connect liberalizationLiberalizationIn general, liberalization refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. In some contexts this process or concept is often, but not always, referred to as deregulation...
with the fact that the GDR for international reason didn't want to have any trouble. The GDR wanted to be thought of in the international community as something very decent and without blemish. That was something we went along with. Our only means of power was to threaten to make an international fuss. If a book had been published in the west, and then the author had been sent to jail, there would have been a fuss. There must have been five hundred of us who had written letters or who had collected signatures. There weren't three hundred thousand people, but there were always ten or twenty thousand refractoryRefractoryA refractory material is one that retains its strength at high temperatures. ASTM C71 defines refractories as "non-metallic materials having those chemical and physical properties that make them applicable for structures, or as components of systems, that are exposed to environments above...
people who as a rule wanted to stay in the GDR, but who, out of some sort of defiance or whatever, weren't ready to put up with it. They weren't the people who had left because they were fed up to the teeth." -March 15th, 1992.
Quotes about
“He admired those who play with language like Kurt SchwittersKurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
and Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side....
, astute minds like Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is regarded as one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century, especially for his witty criticism of the press, German culture, and German and Austrian...
and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German scientist, satirist and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany...
and great epic writers like François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
and Hans Henny Jahnn
Hans Henny Jahnn
Hans Henny Jahnn was a German playwright, novelist, and organ-builder.As a playwright, he wrote: Pastor Ephraim Magnus , which The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes as a nihilistic, Expressionist play "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs"; Coronation of Richard III ;...
. It was only after the political turnaround of 1989 that people noticed that he does not compare at all unfavourably with them – but not too late, thank goodness.”
Works
- Erwacht ohne Furcht, Gedichte 1960
- Weg in die Wische, Reportagen und Gedichte 1960
- Das Sandkorn, Gedichte, Mitteldeutscher Verlag 1974/1976
- Die Kinder der Nibelungen, Gedichte 1964
- In diesem besseren Land, Lyrik-Anthologie gemeinsam mit Karl Mickel 1966
- Nackt mit Brille, Gedichte 1975
- Zwei Versuche, über Georgien zu erzählen, Reisebericht 1976
- Verwirrte klare Botschaften, Gedichte 1979
- Nadelkissen, Prosa 1980
- Akte Endler, Gedichte aus 30 Jahren 1981/1988
- Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg, Tagebuch 1984
- Ohne Nennung von Gründen, Prosa 1985
- Schichtenflotz, Prosa 1987
- Nächtlicher Besucher, in seine Schranken gewiesen. Eine Fortsetzungszüchtigung, Berliner Handpresse, Berlin 1989. Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0331-7
- Vorbildlich schleimlösend, Prosa 1990
- Den Tiger reiten, Essays 1990
- Die Antwort des Poeten, Roman 1992
- Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg. Sudelblätter 1981–1993, Reclam Leipzig, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-379-01565-2
- Warnung vor Utah, Reisebuch 1996
- Der Pudding der Apokalypse. Gedichte 1963–1998, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-41056-3
- Trotzes halber, Gedichte 1999
- Das Greisenalter, voilà 2001
- Schweigen Schreiben Reden Schweigen. Reden 1995–2001, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-12299-1
- Uns überholte der Zugvögelzug. Alte und neue Gedichte, UN ART IG, Aschersleben 2004, ISBN 3-9808479-8-5
- Nebbich. Eine deutsche Karriere, Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-839-6
- Krähenüberkrächzte Rolltreppe. Neunundsiebzig kurze Gedichte aus einem halben Jahrhundert, Wallstein, Göttingen 2007 ISBN 978-3-8353-0165-8
- Nächtlicher Besucher, in seine Schranken gewiesen. Eine Fortsetzungs-Züchtigung, Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 3-8353-0331-7 (editierte Neuauflage)
Literary awards
- 1978: Literatur-Förderpreis zum Kunstpreis der Akademie der Künste West-Berlin 1978: Literature Prize for the Art Academy of the Arts West Berlin
- 1990: Heinrich-Mann-Preis der Akademie der Künste Ost-Berlin – zusammen mit Elke Erb 1990: Heinrich Mann Prize of the Academy of the Arts East Berlin - together with Elke Erb
- 1994: Brandenburgischer Literaturpreis 1994: Brandenburgischer Literature Prize
- 1995: Kritikerpreis der SWF-Bestenliste 1995: Critics Award of the SWF Leaderboard
- 1995: Brüder-Grimm-Preis der Stadt Hanau 1995: Brothers Grimm Prize of the City of Hanau
- 1996: Rahel Varnhagen von Ense-Medaille – gemeinsam mit Brigitte Schreier-Endler 1996: Ense Rahel Varnhagen by Medal - together with Brigitte Schreier-Endler
- 1998: Ehrengabe der Deutschen Schillerstiftung 1998: Ehrengabe the German Schiller Foundation
- 2000: Peter-Huchel-Preis 2000: Peter Huchel Prize
- 2000: Literaturpreis der Stadt Bremen 2000: Literature Prize of the City of Bremen
- 2001: Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. 2001: German Federal Cross of Merit 1st Klasse Class
- 2003: Hans-Erich-Nossack-Preis 2003: Hans-Erich Nossack Price
- 2008: Rainer-Malkowski-Preis gemeinsam mit Kurt Drawert 2008: Rainer Malkowski Prize jointly with Kurt Drawert
External links
- Texte und Hörtexte von Adolf Endler bei lyrikline.orgLyrikline.orglyrikline.org hosts contemporary international poetry as audio and text , plus bibliographies and biographies for each poet.lyrikline.org was started in November 1999 as a German-language site...