Yaak Karsunke – think of the names!

Yaak Karsunke, that was one of these poets and writers who stood out with their name alone, from the German wasteland, which was only politically and culturally revived by so -called young people in 1967/68. Karsunke was at the start in Munich in the early 1960s, when the gentrification in Schwabing was invented, but this was all good because the dreary Adenauer State at least moved on the edges.

“It is better to make new mistakes than to constitute the old up to the general unconsciousness”, with this quote from Karsunke “Katzelmacher”, the second feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, begins in productivity and artistic penetration in 1969. Karsunke was friends with him and also played in a few of his films.

Born in 1934 in Berlin-Pankow as the son of a factory director, he and his family moved to the western part of the city in 1949, graduated from high school, studied a bit of law and then acting. In 1964 he went to Munich and founded the literary magazine “Pumpkin seeds” with Martin Walser and Christian Geissler in 1965, intended as a forum for texts from East and West, a subversive and bold idea in the anti -communist economic miracle. The name comes from Karsunke. When he expressed it, Walser is said to have almost swallowed and proclaimed his wine, according to Friedrich Hitzer: »› Kerle! It is – a hard core in a huge water head! “

Karsunke, whose first name “Yaak” went back to his nickname “Jörg”, although he was actually called Georg, spokesman for the Easter March movement for disarmament and was editor-in-chief of the “pumpkin seed” when he and Geissler overwritten with the others because they were against the Soviet invasion in Prague, but the magazine from the East in 1987 was co -financed. As soon as the Communist Party was legal again, she had already embarrassed herself politically, also a reason why it never became a serious force in this country.

Karsunke moved back to West Berlin, where there was nothing going on, except for the revolting students at the university, but it was said that it would start a new time. The intellectuals, from the sizis to the old and new communists, and the young people, including FC Delius, Nicolas Born, Hans Christoph Buch and Karsunke, met in pubs and drank on upcoming upheavals. In avert from group 47, in which Karsunke had also imagined, there was an attempt to initiate a new left-literary association, the group “ass”, such a blatant name, here thought as an abbreviation for “Association of Revolutionary Writers”. But after a year it was over again. The revolution did not go ahead either, but if Karsunke recommended a volume of poems by Jürgen Theobaldy in the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, then the 400 copies sold more, so strong was the belief in the printed word at the time.

He worked for newspapers and radio and his wife Ingrid for the “course book”, in the 1970s even more important for the left than “concrete”. He wrote prose and plays, also a award -winning crime novel about a bored literary editor who is suddenly blackmailed (“dead man”, 1989), but above all poems that remain precisely because they are about a subsequent time of the reinvention and self -powered. After the death of Dizzy Gillespie, he wrote: »ladies and gentlemen: this / was the massey hall quintett / 1953 im mai /the greatest bebop concert ever / With Charlie ›Bird‹ Parker / John Birks ›Dizzy‹ Gillespie / Bud Powell & Charles Mingus & / Behind the drums Max Roach / still alive Now plays the last chorus blues March / for drum alone. “

Gillespie died in 1993, Max Roach 2007 and Yaak Karsunke on May 13th at the age of 90.