Heinz Czechowski
Nude
I wanted to give up, but
then the post came:
the past,
the cursed smell of brown coal, the
unofficial informant “Bredel”, who
was once my
friend.
And suddenly
I’m afraid.
I, a piece of history and
naked.
Heinz Czechowski, lyric poet, essayist and critic, was born in Dresden in February 1935. In the late Fifties he studied at the Johannes R Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig, then became an editor for the Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle. In the early Seventies he worked in the theatre in Magdeburg. Since 1995 he has lived in Schöppingen. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been awarded several prizes, including the Heinrich Heine Prize (1977), the Heinrich Mann Prize (1984) and the Hans Erich Nossack Prize (1996). His more recent verse collections are: Nachtspur (1993), Wüste Mark Kolmen (1997), Mein westfälischer Frieden (1998) and Das offene Geheimnis (1999). A Selected Poems (Die Zeit steht still. Ausgewählte Gedichte; Düsseldorf) will be published in 2000.
Ian Hilton, born like Czechowski in February 1935, is a Germanist, onetime editor of Modern Languages and author of Peter Weiss: A Search for Affinities (1970), Peter Huchel: Plough a lonely Furrow (1986) and Peter Weiss. Marat/Sade (1990). He has written widely on contemporary German literature, including several essays on Heinz Czechowski.
Translated by Ian Hilton
Page(s) 59
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