Franz Fühmann


Franz Fühmann was a German writer who lived and worked in East Germany. He wrote in a variety of formats, including short stories, essays, screenplays and children's books. Influenced by Nazism in his youth, he later embraced socialism.

Life

Fühmann was the son of an apothecary in Rochlitz an der Iser in the Karkonosze in Czechoslovakia. After Volksschule he attended the Jesuitenkonvikt Kalksburg near Vienna for four years, leaving in 1936 to attend the gymnasium in Reichenberg, northern Bohemia. Fühmann took his Abitur exams in Vrchlabí. After the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany, he joined the Sturmabteilung.
Fühmann was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941, and was a communications soldier in Greece and the Soviet Union. He was captured by Soviet forces in 1945 and sent to a communist rehabilitation school in Noginsk, near Moscow.
Fühmann returned from Soviet captivity to East Germany, where he lived for the rest of his life in Märkisch Buchholz and Berlin. He joined the National Democratic Party of Germany, one of the bloc parties, was active until 1958 and resigned from the party in 1972.
From 1952 until his death, Fühmann was a freelance writer. He mentored young writers, and spoke for those under East German repression. In 1976, Fühmann was among the first to sign a letter protesting the exile of Wolf Biermann. He received the 1956 Heinrich Mann Prize, the 1957 and 1974 National Prize of East Germany, the 1977 German Critics' Award and the 1982 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis, and was a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.

Work

Fühmann's work includes poems, translations of Czech and Hungarian poems, books for children and young adults, essays, stories, a ballet and a collaboration with a photographer about the developmentally disabled. He also compiled a volume of poems by rearranging parts a rhyming dictionary and furnishing it with headings.
Works for children and young people were important to Fühmann throughout his life, and he published his first children's book at the wish of his daughter Barbara. Among Fühmann's children's books are fairy tales, puppet plays, plays on the German language and retellings of classical literature, and he corresponded with many young readers.
Many of Fühmann's early short stories are autobiographical, and in Das Judenauto he describes memories of his childhood and youth. He later dealt with his involvement in Nazi Germany. The concept and the possibility of "change" were especially important to Fühmann, and play a leading role in Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens.
In his work, Fühmann emphasized fairly tales, sagas and myths. This preoccupation penetrates many of his books, from his children's books to his short stories and essays. With the latter, Fühmann encouraged the publication of authors whose work had rarely appeared in East Germany.
Beginning with Zweiundzwanzig Tage, Fühmann increasingly criticized the socialist society of East Germany. In a number of letters and later speeches, he attempted to convince East German politicians to change their policies regarding culture. This attitude became more visible in his work, especially in Saiäns-fiktschen. He withdrew from his connections to cultural politics in East Germany, such as the Schriftstellerverband der DDR and the Akademie der Künste. In later life he began to despair of the political conditions in East Germany, and was unable to finish his long-planned magnum opus. It was published posthumously in 1993 as Im Berg, with the subtitle Fragments of a Failure. Fühmann said a year before his death, "I have cruel pains; the bitterest is having failed in literature and in the hope for a society as we all once dreamt it."
The Academy of the Arts in Berlin has administered Fühmann's literary estate. His library is part of the :de:Historische Sammlungen der Stiftung Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin|Historische Sammlungen of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin. His work still interests young artists, and the Franz Fühmann Freundeskreis Märkisch Buchholz in Berlin illustrates its extent.

Literature for children and young adults

Films based on Franz Fühmann's works, or for which he wrote the script: