Guest of the ilb 2001
Günter Kunert was born in Berlin in 1929. As his
mother was Jewish, he was not allowed to complete his education.
After the Nazi authorities rejected him as "unfit for military
service", he began a short-lived apprenticeship at a clothes shop.
When the war was over, he commenced a course in Graphic Design at
the Academy of Applied Arts in Berlin-Weißensee. Kunert financed
his education by writing satirical poems and stories for the magazine
"Ulenspiegel". After five semesters he abandoned his studies to
concentrate on his writing. In 1950 Kunert’s first volume of
poetry, 'Wegschilder und Mauerinschriften', appeared. Johannes R.
Becher, who subsequently became the East German Culture Minister,
recognized the talent of the young author, a member of the Socialist
Unity Party, and encouraged him. However, his acquaintance with
Bertolt Brecht (around 1951/52) had a more marked affect on his
creativity.
During the 1960s Kunert’s sceptical, pessimistic verse clashed
increasingly with the cultural authorities’ prescriptions for wholesome
literature. Meanwhile, the widely read author was awakening
interest in West Germany. His only novel, 'Im Namen der Hüte',
was published there in 1967. Nine years passed before it was
printed in the GDR. Kunert gained an international reputation and
obtained permission to travel abroad. In 1972 he accepted a guest
lectureship in Austin, Texas, and spent a year as 'Writer in Residence'
in Warwick, U.K., in 1975. After signing the writers’ protest
against Wolf Biermann’s extradition in 1975, he was ejected from the
Party. In 1979 he acquired a several-year visa, which enabled him
to move to West Germany. Kunert and his wife settled in
Schleswig-Holstein. He is now a freelance writer and lives in
Kaisborstel near Itzehoe.
Kunert, a prolific author, maintains, "Writing is a kind of obsessional
neurosis." He has published around twenty books in the last five
years. His extensive catalogue of works testifies to his attempt
to "renounce his pathological existence through writing." It
includes poems, short stories, fairytales, essays, photographic
satires, travel journals and children’s literature. The author
manages to look back on his life under two German dictatorial regimes
without bitterness. East Germany, at least, did have good points:
"Arguments in the GDR were always ruthless and direct. That keeps
you on your toes, and I feel it helped my writing."
Kunert’s memoires, published as 'Erwachsenenspiele' in 1997, are as
laconic and concise as his poems. Two years later the poetry
collection 'Nachtvorstellung' was published to mark his 70th
birthday. This compilation of both free and rhyming verse
expresses the experience which comes with age without a trace of
weariness. Reviewer Kurt Drawert explains, "On the coordinates of
myth and modernity, longing and futility, history and guilt, the poems
move with a beauty which is their actual structure, their whole
essence." Kunert is President of the P.E.N. Centre of German
Speaking Writers Abroad.
© international literature festival berlin | 
