Adolf Endler

Adolf Endler (September 20, 1930 in Düsseldorf – August 2, 2009 in Berlin) 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poet, essayist and prose author who played a central role in subcultural activities that attacked and challenged an outdated model of socialist realism in the German Democratic Republic up until the collapse of communism in the early 1990s.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.[1] In 2005 he was made a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt.

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 Leipzig 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 were 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).[2]

Into the seventies, Endler remained steadfastly confrontational. Following the expatriation from the GDR of songwriter 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.

Quotations

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.” [4]

Works

Literary awards

External links

References

  1. ↑ Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion, July 2009
  2. ↑ Fractured Memories: Life Writing in Adolf Endler’s Surrealist Anti-Autobiography Nebbich by Gerrit-Jan Berendse, seminar 45:1 (2009)
  3. ↑ Literary intellectuals and the dissolution of the state: Robert Von Hallberg, Kenneth J. Northcott -University of Chicago Press.
  4. ↑ -Gregor Dotzauer, The Tagesspiegel (Berlin daily newspaper)
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