Helge Malchow: The most secret of reading the books in spring

they pulled him to the reading material. The two gentlemen, conservative-minded servants of the state did not meet, even the social profile of the audience for Helge Malchow, then Editor, and even up to the last day of this year, the managing Director of the Cologne publishing house, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, for 37 years the program has made. The two reading hunger overwhelmed officials declined Malchow, however, no books and paid nothing. Two Leitz folder with publisher correspondence confiscated, the people’s policemen who had brought him during his return journey from the Leipzig book fair from the train. This Chapter of the autobiography, which did not want to write, Helge Malchow, by his own admission, he told at a discussion evening, with him, the Cologne house of literature, honored as a farewell to the television presenter Bettina Böttinger.

Patrick Bahners

feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and is responsible for “Humanities”.

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1985 published Malchows publishing an anthology of new literature from the GDR, edited by Sascha Anderson and Elke Erb. Anderson was later unmasked as a spy. “He had all the tell, stupidly to me.” In 1950, on a farm, born in Malchow and his parents had been a Republic of refugees, who moved in front of the building of the Berlin wall from Germany to the lower Rhine. The two days in prison under the eyes of the Honecker-portraits went off the hook – because of the Arrested suspected his guards correctly and you immediately the abgeheftete records from his Luggage and presented. Anyone who has not already experienced, that you are in the reading zeal everything? The Border guards to forgot, Malchows suitcase rummage.

The surreal world of the Cold war

Undetected, the notebook, the the was for the business of the publishing house of the GDR-literature contained really valuable information: records of interviews with the authors of the new Opposition from the Prenzlauer Berg, which is no longer argued as the Generation of Wolf Biermann’s Marxist, but the political discourse adopted and had, therefore, for the power of the state is particularly puzzling, and dangerous, remained. Malchows conversation partner Katja Lange-Müller would be able to get the state to Read the Booklet in big trouble. As your Lecturer, of pages of its author: “The would have beat me up left and right.”

This Vignette from the surreal world of the late Cold war, you had to understand metaphorically, as well as Malchows characteristic of 1967, the late publisher, founder, Johann Caspar Witsch, whose son-in-law, Reinhold Neven DuMont hired him: “he is an anti-Communist, the blood of his enemies ran out of the mouth.” After Witschs death, the appearance of the publishing program “suddenly” changed to “style-forming” was Günter Wallraff. So was able to invade in the Institution Kiepenheuer & Witsch, a man who says that he has been socialized from the late sixties movement, and still today, behind the Protest against emergency laws, and retrofitting. 1969 Malchow took up his studies at the University of Cologne who, in an act of engaging fiction in Rosa-Luxemburg-University renamed. For five years he worked as an English teacher; as a temporary member of the DKP, he could also be a case for the radical.

Against the resistance of this newspaper

In school, he was not bothered by the Canon – but because it was prescribed books, but because the bureaucrats had made the rules. He had, as he is known with the massive self-irony of his Rhenish second home, “the snooty idea” to make themselves on the search for authors, which “in the textbooks of schools and universities populate”. In the form of Christian Kracht this enforcement of a also in the curricular sense, canonical author had succeeded, in his view, against the resistance of this newspaper.