Adolf Endler

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Adolf Endler (10 September 1930 – 2 August 2009) was a lyricist, poet, essayist, and prose author who played a central role in subcultural activities that opposed the model of socialist realism in the German Democratic Republic, up until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s. Endler was recognized as a leading figure of the oppositional literary scene at Prenzlauer Berg, in the eastern part of Berlin.[1][clarification needed] In 2005, he became a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (in English German Academy for Language and Literature) in Darmstadt.

Early life and career

Endler was born in Düsseldorf in 1930. A communist in his youth, Endler moved to East Germany in 1955 and studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature in Leipzig from 1955 to 1957. An acclaimed poet, his work was respected in both the East and the West. At the same time, he was marginalized 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.[2]

Although socialist realism had spread across most of Eastern European cultural life, artists such as Endler sought to undermine it. His defiance involved ignoring directives 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 born in the 1930s who were influential in poetry, including Karl Mickel, Heinz Czechowski, Sarah Kirsch and Volker Braun. This sentiment was shared by Michael Hamburger, who, before the group had been named, applauded those who 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).[2]

During the 1970s, Endler remained confrontational. Following the expatriation of songwriter Wolf Biermann from the GDR in 1976, Endler was expelled from the Writers’ Association of the GDR in 1979, after declaring 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). From 1991 to 1998, with Brigitte Schreier-Endler, he organised the “Orplid&Co.“ readings in Café Clara in Berlin-Mitte. Endler died in August 2009.[3]

Quotations

A lot of people connect liberalization 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 refractory 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.[4]

Quotes about

“He admired those who play with language like Kurt Schwitters 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.”[5]

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

References

External links

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