#Stephan Hermlin

[mycstilleblog]

Egon Krenz: Gestaltung und Veränderung. Erinnerungen. Rezension

Egon Krenz, einstiger Staatschef der DDR legt seine Memoiren vor. Meine Rezension zum ersten Teil seiner Memoiren unter dem Titel „Egon Krenz. Aufbruch und Aufstieg“ (»dass ein gutes Deutschland blühe«) leitete ich folgendermaßen ein: „Menschen müssen immer auch im Kontext der Zeit verstanden werden, in welche sie hineingeboren und fortan aufgewachsen sind. Und auf welche Weise sie sozialisiert…

[daughterofhecata]

Reading List 2023

Ocean Vuong: Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Alena Mornštajnová: Hana

Wolfgang Benz: Theresienstadt. Ein Geschichte von Täuschung und Vernichtung.

Jáchym Topol: Die Teufelswerkstatt [org. title: Chladnou zemí]

Ocean Vuong: Time is a Mother

Richard Siken: Crush

Ben Nevis: Die Drei ??? Die Yacht des Verrats

Frank Wedekind: Frühlings Erwachen (reread)

James Ellroy: Die Schwarze Dahlie [org. title: The Black Dahlia]

André Marx: Die Drei ??? und der Puppenmacher

Evelyn Boyd: Rocky Beach Crimes #2. Mord unter Palmen.

Peter Hallama: Nationale Helden und jüdische Opfer. Tschechische Repräsentationen des Holocaust.

Brigitte Johanna Henkel-Waidhofer: Die Drei ??? Späte Rache

Kim Newman: Professor Moriarty. The Hound of the D‘Urbervilles. (reread)

Vera Schiff: The Theresienstadt Deception. The Concentration Camp the Nazis Created to Deceive the World.

Evelyn Boyd: Rocky Beach Crimes #2. Mord unter Palmen. (reread)

Josef Bor: Die verlassene Puppe [org. title: Opuštěná panenka]

Kari Erlhoff: Rocky Beach Crimes #1. Tödliche Törtchen.

Susanna Partsch: Wer klaute die Mona Lisa? Die berühmtesten Kunstdiebstähle der Welt.

Kathy Reichs: Virals #1. Tote können nicht mehr reden. [org. title: Virals] (reread)

Arthur Schnitzler: Reigen (reread)

Evelyn Boyd: Die Drei ??? Teuflisches Foul

Faye Kellerman: Der Zorn sei dein Ende [org. title: The Hunt]

J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye

Władysław Szlengel: Was ich den Toten las [org. title: Co czytałem umarłym]

Hanna Krall: Dem Herrgott Zuvorkommen [org. title: Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem]

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed

Thomas Mann: Der Tod in Venedig

James Oswald: Natural Causes. An Inspector McLean Novel.

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar (reread)

Christoph Dittert: Die Drei ??? Melodie der Rache

Maria Rolnikaitė: Mein Tagebuch [org. title: Ja dolžna rasskazat']

Mark Thompson: Leatherfolk. Radical Sex, People, Politics and Practice.

James Baldwin: Giovanni‘s Room

Christopher Tauber, Hanna Wenzel: Rocky Beach. Eine Interpretation.

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun

Jonathan Kellerman: Unnatural History. An Alex Delaware Novel.

Robert Arthur: Die Drei ??? und die Geisterinsel. [org. title: The Three Investigators in the Secret of Skeleton Island]

Evelyn Boyd: Rocky Beach Crimes #3. Eiskalter Rausch.

André Marx: Die Drei ??? Labyrinth der Götter

John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse

Langston Hughes: Selected Poems of Langston Hughes.

Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows. The Poems of Claude McKay.

Jonathan Kellerman: Exit. Ein Alex Delaware Roman. [org. title: Devil‘s Waltz. An Alex Delaware Novel.] (reread)

David Henry Hwang: M Butterfly

James Oswald: The Book of Souls. An Inspector McLean Novel.

Jonathan Kellerman: Time Bomb. An Alex Delaware Novel. (reread)

Manuela Günter: Überleben schreiben. Zur Autobiographik der Shoah.

Birgit Kröhle: Geschichte und Geschichten. Die literarische Verarbeitung von Auschwitz-Erlebnissen.

Alexander F. Spreng: Der Fluch (reread)

Sibylle Schmidt: Zeugenschaft. Ethische und politische Dimensionen.

Sibylle Schmidt: Ethik und Episteme der Zeugenschaft

Kari Erlhoff & Christoph Dittert: Die Drei ??? und die Salztote

Jeanette McCurdy: I‘m Glad My Mom Died

E.T.A. Hoffmann: Der Sandmann

Hendrik Buchna: Die Drei ??? Drehbuch der Täuschung

Michael Scott: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #2. The Magician. (reread)

Alain Locke: The New Negro

Mascha Kaléko: Großstadtliebe. Lyrische Stenogramme.

Marco Sonnleitner: Die Drei ??? Der Tag der Toten

Georg Heym: Gedichte [herausgegeben von Stephan Hermlin]

Rose Ausländer: Hinter allen Worten. Gedichte. [herausgegeben von Helmut Braun]

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

Paul Celan: Ausgewählte Gedichte. Zwei Reden. [herausgegeben von Günther Busch]

Rich Cohen: Lake Shore Drive [org. title: Lake Effect]

Jan T. Gross: Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.

Kathy Reichs: Virals #2. Nur die Tote kennt die Wahrheit. [org. title: Seizure]

Jonathan Kellerman: Bones. An Alex Delaware Novel. (reread)

Akwaeke Emezi: You made a Fool of Death with your Beauty

Friedrich Schiller: Maria Stuart

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho

Christian Handel: Die Hexenwald-Chroniken #2. Palast aus Gold und Tränen.

Maurice Leblanc: Arsène Lupin und der Schatz der Könige von Frankreich [org. title: L'Aiguille creuse]

E.T.A. Hoffmann: Nussknacker und Mausekönig

Marco Sonnleitner: Die Drei ??? Panik im Park

Ben Nevis: Die Drei ??? Tal des Schreckens

Michael Borlik: Ihr mich auch

Robert Arthur: Die Drei ??? und der grüne Geist [org. title: Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in the Mystery of the Green Ghost]

Barbara Köhler: Niemands Frau. Gesänge.

Christoph Dittert: Die Drei ??? Hotel der Diebe

Cornelia Funke: Tintenwelt #4. Die Farbe der Rache.

DNF:

Thomas Ziebula: Paul Stainer #1. Der rote Judas.

Faye Kellerman: Mord im Garten Eden [org. title: The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights]

[picassopeacescarf]

Origin of the Peace Scarf Design Elements

Picasso's artistic promotion of a dove for peace began at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference, reflecting his personal interest in peace for all of humanity. At the 1949 Peace Conference Picasso met Paul Roberson and became aware of the challenges of the black population - as well as Asian and Indian leaders.   His 1951 Berlin peace scarf was the aggregation of his symbols for peace with the dove at the center surrounded by the four different human races.

When Picasso signed the Nice “Peace scarf against atomic weapons in 1950” he realized the popularity of peace scarves for young people - a revelation that probably led him to design the peace scarf for the Berlin youth festival in 1951.  

In the photo shown below Picasso is signing the 1950 Peace Rally scarf for girl members attending the Communist sponsored International Youth for Peace rally in Nice, France. The young girl with her hand on the table is Alice Hornung, now 86, living in Germany and still active in the peace movement. According to Alice: “we weren't art connoisseurs, we were young people who worked for peace. All had had war experiences in their families or in their own lives. We were shocked by the consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our aim was to do something for peace. Suddenly we were greeted by the great Picasso, whom the whole world worshiped - an amazing experience.”

Picasso Signs for Commies These girl members of the German Communist youth organization, attending the Communist sponsored International Youth for Peace rally at Nice, France, don't seem to mind going against the party line as they push and shove to get Pablo Picasso's autograph. Not only has the Communist Party denounced autograph hunting as "a decadent capitalistic pastime”, it has also labeled Picasso’s ultra-modern art as "the product of corrupt capitalism.”Above photo caption is from from the Palo Alto, CA Peninsula-Times Tribune (August 22, 1950).

Note: According to Julia Friedrich, curator of the Picasso Shared and Divided exhibit at the Museum Ludwig “The communist youth delegation (FDJ) came from Saarland, which did not belong to Germany before the Saar referendum 1955. I'm pretty sure these young people didn’t go against the party line.”

The Nice peace scarf (shown in detail above) from the Picasso signing newspaper photo. This unique scarf was signed by Pablo Picasso, French journalist Pierre Abraham, French Communist party leader Jean Kanapa, French naval officer Louis de Villefosse, Surrealist movement founder Paul Eluard, French novelist Dominique Desanti, French resistance leader André Verdet, British trade union leader Ken Gill (see his video on this site), French- Armenian poet Reuben Melik, German author Stephan Hermlin, Dutch documentary film maker Joris Ivens, and Nobel Prize winning Pablo Neruda.  The scarf has multiple dedications to Lucienne Tilman (1918 - 1977).  Organized by the Mouvement de la Paix, for “prohibition of atomic weapons”. This cloth scarf was made for the International Youth Meetings from August 13 - 20, 1950.

Scarf from the van Zuiden Picasso Scarf Collection

Shown above: Vintage 1950 Second World Congress of the Partisans of Peace scarf with white dove designed by Pablo Picasso. Made from a crepe silk.

[todaviia]

Stephan Hermlin - Ikarus (1944)

[korrektheiten]

Zentrum für Politische SchönheitKritik an Faschismus-Mahnmal reißt nicht ab

JF: Der Sohn des Schriftstellers Stephan Hermlin, Andrej Hermlin, hat die Verwendung des Gedichts seines Vaters „Die Asche von Birkenau“ durch das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS) verurteilt. Das ZPS hat inzwischen begonnen, die Mahnsäulen abzubauen. http://dlvr.it/RKncx9

[todaviia]

Reading list for @kultivovanaperla and whoever else might be interested

This is just some of the books I read over the last two weeks, mostly with Jewish and/or East German connections... titles are all in German tho some of them have English versions:

Kleine Ostgeschichten - Eva Brück

Eva Brück was born in Berlin in 1926, had to flee to England during the Nazi Era because she was Jewish, married a communist with whom she moved to East Germany in 1949 and worked there as a journalist and translator. The book was written in 1996 and is basically a collection of anecdotes mostly about the DDR era. She has a very nuanced view on East Germany and the reunification (and the rise of fascism after reunification). Also she reminds me of my grandma in a lot of ways. The style is very stereotypical East German (Lehrbuchstil lmao) though...

Stephan Hermlin - Gesammelte Gedichte

Stephan Hermlin was also a Jewish communist who emigrated during the Hitler era and was active in the antifascist resistance movement. He returned to East Germany after the war and was friends with many high ranking politicians like Erich Honecker. He was one of the most famous poets in DDR, and known for multiple controversies. At first, he defended the building of the Berlin Wall in an open letter to West German authors, then he initiated the protests against Wolf Biermanns denaturalization (for which he was excluded from the party) and there was also a post reunification debate about his family history. The poems are interesting bc a lot of them were written during the war/emigration and immediate post war era, however I have to say most of them are written in the ~~socialist poetry~~ style that reads a bit weird today. If you like Johannes R. Becher (a friend of his), you’ll like this.

Sag nie du gehst den letzten Weg - Lin Jaldati, Eberhardt Rebling

I love this book!!! It’s a double autobiography by Lin Jaldati and her husband Eberhardt Rebling. Lin Jaldati was a Dutch Jewish communist who married Eberhardt Rebling, a German communist who had emigrated to the Netherlands in 1942. Together, they worked with the Dutch resistance and Eberhardt (who was non-Jewish) tried to hide 20 Jews in a house he rented, among them Lin. However, the Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. After surviving Auschwitz and Belsen (where she met Anne and Margot Frank), Lin finally found Eberhardt again in 1945 and they moved to East Germany, where Lin became the only “official“ DDR singer to perform songs in Yiddish and translate Yiddish texts. Eberhardt was recognized as a Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem and they both worked to promote peace and remembrance internationally.

Und das Meer teilte sich -Yoram Kaniuk

It’s a book about Yossi Harel, the commander of the Exodus, the ship full of mostly Holocaust surviving Jewish refugees that tried to reach mandatory Palestine in 1947, but were stopped by the British. It’s incredibly well-written (Kaniuk also wrote 1948, a really really good book about the Israeli war of independence and his time as a Palmach fighter, Kaniuk also has a wonderful perspective bc he tangentially knew Yossi Harel and worked on other such refugee ships himself). (Also he is famous in Israel for removing the religion from his identity papers in protest of the rules that state his grandson from a mixed Christian-Jewish family must be labeled “no religion”).

Das Leiden Israels - Nelly Sachs

It’s a collection of very good poetry about the Holocaust. It contains multiple pieces that are a mix between drama and poetry. Nelly Sachs was born in Schöneberg (now Berlin), but escaped to Sweden during the Holocaust, where she stayed. She won the Nobel price for Literature. Two of the parts of the book, in den Wohnungen des Todes and Sternverdunkelungen were first published in the late 1940s in East Berlin because of the activism of Johannes R. Becher. At that time, directly after the war, she could find nobody in either Switzerland or West Germany willing to publish these poems that were among the first to explicitly mention Auschwitz.

Jana Simon - Sei dennoch unverzagt

It’s a conversation between Jana Simon and her grandparents, Christa and Gerhardt Wolf. It’s very interesting if (like me) you love Christa Wolfs books bc it adds a lot of background to them, but it’s also interesting as a description of the atmosphere and relationships of DDR writers and politics. She knew pretty much all of the other East German writers personally and there are a lot of anecdotes.

Mitunter sogar Lachen - Erich Fried

This is like the 10th time I’m reading this book because it is very good. It’s basically Erich Fried’s autobiography. He was born in Austria in a Jewish family, but had to emigrate to England where he helped to illegally smuggle in Jewish kids from Nazi-occupied areas. Also imo he’s one of the best poets who ever lived. The book is so incredibly well written, it’s funny and sad and political and personal and poetic at the same time. Read it if you can.

Von Bis Nach Seit - Erich Fried

It’s poems written by Erich Fried in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s very very good.

Wer schmeißt denn da mit Lehm? - Helga Bennemann

It’s a biography of Claire Waldoff, an openly lesbian singer who was one of the most famous performers of the 1920s and basically THE symbol of 1920s Berlin. She’s neither Jewish nor technically East German, but it’s very interesting if you like gay Berlin history.

Rosa Luxemburg in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten - Helmut Hirsch

It’s a Rosa Luxemburg biography. Very nice if you like Rosa Luxemburg. I recently went to Wünsdorf, where her body was hidden and autopsied after her murder and got the book for 1€.

(Wünsdorf is one of the nicest places in Germany: it’s built on top of the former Prussian, then Nazi and later Soviet occupation military administration headquaters, so you can visit A LOT of Bunkers and similar sites, but its mostly run by peace activists in their spare time and the former barracks now house the Bücherstadt. a collection of very cheap used book shops that are LARGE AS FUCK and have EVERY kind of book you can imagine, including English French and Russian language books. Also there’s one shop just dedicated to military history... They often do peace-related or antifascist events too. Oh also during WW1 it housed a POW camp for mostly Muslim prisoners, which is why it had the first mosque ever built in Germany (it doesn’t exist anymore tho). Seriously, if you ever come to Berlin, even though it’s 40km outside, try and go to Wünsdorf.)

Reden über Deutschland 1990 - Bertelsmann

It’s a collection of... speeches about Germany held in 1990, by people like Shimon Peres, French philosopher Andre Glucksmann or Russian poet Jewgenij Alexandrowitsch Jewtuschenko. It’s super fascinating bc it’s a snapshot of different views on Germany taken in the middle of the reunification. Apparently it was a series of events organized by Bertelsmann, but idk about the other events, I got the book 2nd hand for 50 ct.

Jerusalem war immer eine schwierige Adresse - Angelika Schrobsdorff

It’s a very interesting book (that I haven’t yet finished) about her views on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Angelika Schrobsdorff was born in Germany in 1927, emigrated to Bulgaria, briefly returned to West Germany after the war, then lived in France and Israel (she was married to Claude Lanzmann) and returned to Germany from Israel in 2006 because she felt the political situation there was unbearable. I already read her biography of her mom (a polyamorous Jewish Großbürgerin who lived in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s) called Du bist nicht so wie andere Mütter, which I loved.

Oh also I read Die Känguru Apokryphen, which is the 4th in a series of books by Marc Uwe Kling about a guy who lives together with a communist kangaroo, it’s basically THE slightly satiric but overall mostly tame leftist comedy book that all young leftists in Germany have read and reference all the time. It’s very light reading about the left in Berlin today.

Also if you just want to read some other Jewish East German authors just off the top of my head: Louis Fürnberg, Stephan Heym, Arnold Zweig, Waldtraut Lewin (she writes mostly children’s books tho), Anna Seghers, Jurek Becker, Kurt Stern, Friedrich Wolf, Thomas Brasch (though he left the DDR in the late 70s)

[todaviia]

very weird and completely confusing thoughts about east germany and judaism under the cut

i know this is coming from like... the super insular and decidedly non-mainstream experience of my family and social environment re: jewish german communism, but something that makes discussions of ddr antisemitism and ddr in general suuuuuper alienating to me is that the (and please dont kill me for even writing this)... “non-religious jewishness“ of the ddr basically gets completely erased, even tho im pretty sure on a state level it was way, way stronger than in west germany.

i know my own perception of ~~ppl of jewish descent in ddr is VASTLY overinflated bc of my family/social circle, but ppl always act like there were no jewish ppl* in ddr... which is true for religious jews (i know there were times when they were struggling to get a minyan together) but like... i know for a fact that there were significantly more non-religious jews in ddr than is commonly assumed...

dont get me wrong, ddr was german, it was antisemitic, it was strongly antizionist, it was anti-religious and in many many cases, it was plain wrong. but also... ppl dont talk about the fact that on a systemic level it WAS the successor, in both political and personal regards, of the communist German resistance, which throughout the Nazi era was the only space were Jewish and Non-Jewish Germans worked together (and while I dont have any actual numbers, from the anecdotal stuff Im pretty sure that Jews were overrepresented there by orders of magnitude compared to their numbers in the general population). Also from what I heard from my relatives, it was literally the only place in those times where ppl didnt care if you were Jewish or not.

Bc of that, organizations important to the DDR like the FDJ were co-founded by Jewish communists, who (bc of their communist history) were later involved in the ~ higher structure of the state. Ppl of Jewish descent like the Braschs or the Zadeks or Markus Wolf (who headed the East German foreign intelligence service) or Hermann Axen (member of the ZK der SED) achieved high ranking positions within the state. Others like minister of justice Hilde Benjamin were not Jewish themselves, but had stuck with their Jewish spouses through the Nazi era and had “mixed Jewish“ children.

The DDR considered German communism to be its cultural heritage, a movement that had been founded and led by Jews (especially like... Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg who were absolute idols in DDR) and that was considered to be a “Jewish thing” by the Nazis. Also, A LOT of the most famous cultural leaders in DDR were Jewish* like Anna Seghers, Jurek Becker, Helene Weigel, Stephan Heym, Arnold Zweig etc. Wolf Biermann had a Jewish father who was murdered in Auschwitz, something I see mentioned very rarely when he’s discussed, even though it was a major talking point in the intra-DDR conversation when he lost his citizenship and big part of why it was criticized so heavily there. Or Stephan Hermlin, who was Jewish, and one of the most controversial DDR artists.

And on the one hand that didn’t really translate into much sympathy for Judaism as a  religion and even for the Jewish* communists there was (at least from what I know anecdotally) a very deep... schism when it came to their experiences, where many rejected the persecution of the Nazis that they had suffered bc they were Jewish but were proud of the persecution they suffered bc they were Communists (which was reinforced, but imo not completely caused by the East German way of dealing with the Nazi past, which focused on antifascist resistance but treated the racial aspects and the Holocausts like a footnote that was only looked at in the context of class and communism)

But on the other hand I feel like its a side thats completely missing from conversations about the DDR. Like when ppl talk about Jews in the DDR they talk about religious life (and the lack of it). But there was a certain, quite significant, population of communist, non-religious Jews* who did identify with DDR very strongly because they honestly believed in it as an attempt to build a better German society and who were systematically and publicly at the center of the state.

Also nowadays ppl often talk about DDR in general complaining that it was “forcibly imposed“ etc, but dont take into account the fact that it was overwhelmingly the surviving resistance members against fascism who were imposing it (almost all high ranking positions of power were filled with people who had been either in the resistance or in concentration camps) against a population that was to a very high degree former Nazis.

And if you look at the situation in East Germany today, I think there’s a big danger where ppl from West Germany assume the rise of fascism and antisemitism there is bc of DDR. But in reality, AfD etc are very, very anti-DDR and often compare it to occupation etc. Basically, I think there is a continuity there and I just wish this side of DDR would be considered more.

sorry that this is so long and confusing but i cant stop thinking about it

*im also including like.. jewish adjacent ppl... ppl with jewish roots... people formerly known as jewish until the holocaust... its very complicated bc ddr was a very non-religious state