Volker Braun

Background

Volker Braun was born on May 7, 1939, in Dresden, German on the eve of World War II. His father, a soldier, was killed in the war when young Volker was only five years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his four brothers alone.

Education

Braun attended school in Dresden, graduating from high school in 1957, but in the political climate of the time he was unable to go directly on to university. After spending three years working at various places he was finally granted the opportunity to study philosophy at Karl Marx University in Leipzig (now the University of Leipzig) in 1960. In that same year, he joined the Socialist Unity Party, the East German version of the Communist party.

Career

Braun worked in many places before his career of writing such as ground construction worked from 1957-60. In 1961 he was working for Dresdner Druckerei der Sächsischen newspaper. Upon leaving university, Braun took time off for travel, visiting Siberia in 1964. When he returned home he became involved with the Berliner Ensemble, a theatrical group, for which he wrote and produced plays from 1965 to 1966. During this period, he also began publishing the poetry that he had begun writing while still a student at the university. His first volume of verse, Provokation fur mich: Gedichte, already discloses one important aspect of his personal philosophy - the confrontation between the aspirations of the individual and the social and political processes of the state.

While still working in verse form, Braun soon brought out his first play, Kipper Paul Bauch, published in 1967. Herbert Arnold, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, attributed the delay between composition and production - a recurrent problem with Braun’s early dramatic works to ideology: “Braun ran afoul of the political or aesthetic categories of judgment prevalent in the GDR establishment.” Arnold noted that it took GDR’s “cultural thaw” in the 1970s, when Honecker took office, for Braun’s critical positions to be allowed expression on the stage.

In the 1980s, Braun produced Lenin's Tod, followed by T. These plays are thematically linked by their treatment of the contributions and ultimate failure of the father of Russian Communism. The first play had been written more than a decade earlier, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. In it, an ailing Lenin presents the rationale for his struggle for power in the Soviet Union and the conflicts that threaten his goals - particularly as they are embodied in the person of Joseph Stalin. The second play takes up the tale of the USSR after Lenin’s death and is highly critical of the direction the Russian Communist Party took under Stalin’s leadership. Its critical tone made it politically impossible to be performed until after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Braun’s play Dmitri, in which the title character succeeds Ivan the Terrible to the Russian throne, was first performed in 1982 (it was published in 1983). At the end of the decade, Transit-Europa: Der Ausflug der Toten saw successful production. Transit-Europa, as well as Die Übergangsgesellschaft, were both published in 1989, as was a play based on the Nibelungen myth, Siegfried Frauenprotokolle Deutscher Furor. Braun’s more recent works include Die Zickzack brucke: Ein Abrisskalender, Das Nichtgelebte: Eine Erzählung as well as the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century.

Achievements

• Braun's personal history and ideology both have contributed importantly to the themes he has taken on and to the cultural history of his country. During his lifetime Volker earned great critical respect for his works, which considered powerful and original.

Works

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  • Die Kipper 1965
  • Provokation für mich 1965
  • Gegen die symmetrische Welt 1974
  • Es genügt nicht die einfache Wahrheit 1975
  • Unvollendete Geschichte Und Ihre Ende 1977
  • Training des Aufrechten Gangs 1979
  • Hinze-Kunze-Roman 1985
  • Verheerende Folgen mangelnden Anscheins innerbetrieblicher Demokratie 1988
  • Trotzdestonichts oder Der Wendehals. 1995
  • Lustgarten, Preussen 1996
  • Wir Befinden Uns Soweit Wohl. Wir Sind Erst Einmal Am Ende 1998
  • Tumulus 1999
  • Das unbesetzte Gebiet 2004
  • Das Mittagsmahl 2007

Politics

Braun in his works often goes throughout his deep dissatisfaction with the smothering mediocrity of the former East Germany’s bureaucracy. But even in his critique, Braun by no means expresses any real disenchantment with the principles of Marxist-Leninism that underlay the political system under which he lived. Indeed, his works are more appropriately seen as a realist’s appraisal of the vast gulf between the ideals of a communist society in theory and the way that same ideology plays out in the real world, where he is promoting a more enthusiastic acceptance of socialism.

Membership

Before in 1973, Volker was a member of the German Democratic Republic Committee of the Association of Writers until 1976. As of today, he is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature.

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  Academy of Arts , Germany

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  German Democratic Republic Committee of the Association of Writers

  1973 - 1976

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  Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature , Germany

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• “His open, frank, and critical examination of contemporary problems, his gift for creating effective satire, and his open advocacy of cultural reform combine to make him one of the most significant and interesting writers to emerge in East Germany after 1960.” - Lowell A. Bangerter

Connections

Volker is married and has one daughter named Arne Braun.

Daughter:

Arne Braun

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, ... Motion Pictures, Television, & Other Fields
  2010