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Johannes Bobrowski (originally Johannes Konrad Bernhard Bobrowski; 9 April 1917 – 2 September 1965) was a German lyric poet, narrative writer, adaptor and essayist.
Johannes Bobrowski (originally Johannes Konrad Bernhard Bobrowski; 9 April 1917 – 2 September 1965) was a German lyric poet, narrative writer, adaptor and essayist.
Bobrowski was born on 9 April 1917[1] in Tilsit in East Prussia. In 1925, he moved first to Rastenburg, then in 1928 on to Königsberg, where he attended the Gymnasium. One of his teachers was Ernst Wiechert. In 1937, he started a degree in art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin. As a member of the Confessing Church, Bobrowski had contact with the German resistance against National Socialism. He was a lance corporal for the entire Second World War in Poland, France and the Soviet Union. In 1943 he married Johanna Buddrus.
From 1945 to 1949 Bobrowski was imprisoned by the Soviet Union, where he spent time working in a coal mine. On his release, he returned home to his family in the suburban Berlin district of Friedrichshagen,[2] in the Soviet occupation sector of Berlin. He worked as an editor, first for the Altberliner Verlag, a children's publisher run by Lucie Grosner, and then, from 1959 on, for the Union Verlag publishing house.
Bobrowski's work was influenced by his knowledge of Eastern European landscapes and of the German, Baltic, and Slavic cultures and languages, combined with ancient myths. His first poems were published during the war, in 1944, in the Munich-based journal Das innere Reich.[2]
In 1960 he read his poems at a meeting in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, of the influential West German literary association Group 47 (Gruppe 47).[3] The following year his first book of collected poems, Sarmatische Zeit (Sarmatian Times), was published in both West and East Germany.[2][3] After having missed the fall 1961 meeting of the Group 47, since it took place just after the building of the Berlin Wall,[3] he was able to attend the subsequent meeting, held in October 1962 at the Wannsee, in West Berlin. On that occasion he read seven poems from those that would later appear in his collection Wetterzeichen (Weather signs), and was awarded the group's prestigious literary prize.[2][3]
In 1964, Bobrowski became a member of the PEN Club.
Bobrowski died as a result of a perforated appendix in East Berlin on 2 September 1965,[1] and was buried in the Friedrichshagen cemetery.[2] Since 1992, the Foundation for Prussian Maritime Trade (Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung) has donated funds towards the Johannes Brobrowski Medal.
