Biography – Harry Rowohlt: “God’s blessing and red front!”

“Stories were the most valuable thing he had,” says the biography of Harry Rowohlt. “A free life”, Alexander Solloch, literary editor at the NDR, named the book, which recently has not been published by the Swiss publisher, which also has some of Rowohlt’s works in the program. On June 15th he had tenth anniversary.

On the title of the biography you can see Harry Rowohlt, the gifted storyteller, a cigarette protrudes from the Karl-Marx memory-grassbar, the dark eyes look over the edge of the nickel glasses into the distance. So the author and translator, who died in 2015, are known, whether from one of his legendary readings (“showing with emphasis”) or from the television series “Lindenstraße”, as a formative translator (“Fit yourself!”) Or lover of alcoholic debauchery. But do you also know Rowohlt’s moving life?

Rowohlt did not hide his life from the public, but spread it on the contrary in hundreds of anecdotes and stories. He did not keep the most valuable for himself, but shared it in the Christian-communist sense (“God’s blessing and red front!” Was a common greeting in his letters, which he raised into his own art form documented in several volumes). For a biographer like Solloch, the challenge is not to bring hidden to light-he can only score with a previously unknown love for HSV, whose relegation from the Bundesliga Rowohlt no longer had to experience and which actually succeeded in returning to Rowohlt’s self-expression this spring (as “in swallowing-two spectators” opposite Ralf Socheck). Rowohlt was someone who is called an unreliable narrator in literary studies.

As is well known, Rowohlt believed that a good story should not be spoiled by an excess of fidelity. And so the stories he told about his life were also a literary creation between poetry and truth. Solloch, and that distinguishes him, does not take these stories as a material, not for the whole reality of historical events, and, conversely, does not refer their own reality. Rowohlt’s life was a narrated life – and therefore probably also a free one that did not submit to the silent compulsion of the situation. Solloch puts Rowohl’s self -counting at numerous other stories at his side, which he recovered in conversations with Rowohl’s wife Ulla, with friends and companions or out of the estate. This creates your own picture.

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In six chapters, as Rowohlt – shortly before the end of the war in 1945 as an illegitimate son of the actress Maria Pierenkämper and the famous publisher Ernst Rowohlt (who later married) – born successfully, but ultimately freed itself without difficulties from the feasts of family expectations. A career in the publisher? Is not for the young man who is even sent to the USA to familiarize himself with the business (which ended with a spectacular expression of unrest foundation). In Rowohlt there is something like an idiosyncratic dislike against the large business world of publishers, which sharpens his gaze to the anti -spiritual, which is necessarily part of this world. So, as Solloch describes, he can develop his ingenious talent for translation – from children’s books such as “PU der Bär” to Robert Crumb and Kurt Vonnegut up to half a shelf of Irish authors.

Rowohlt later discovers further talents: he reads in front of the audience and delights above all bookstores in the province, speaks audiobooks, writes the irregular column “Pooh’s corner” for the weekly newspaper “Zeit” (luckily the “opinions of a bear of very little mind” have long been collected as a book) and, as an improvising, brings more social realism into the “Lindenstrasse”. Despite all the activities and mixingness, a few pearls from the late work, such as “Marx & Engels intimate”, should also be read from the letters of the communist original fathers together with Gregor Gysi. The political Harry Rowohlt in the fights of his time always sounds in Solloch’s legible biography, but would have also deserved its own chapter. Regardless of this, the book may be considered a merit and valuable contribution to the bear science.

Alexander Solloch: Harry Rowohlt. A free life. No & but, 320 pages, born, 26 €.