Wolfgang Borchert

He is one of the most popular authors of the German postwar period; his work continues to be studied in German schools.

• Name — Wolfgang Borchert • Born — 20 May 1921 • Birthplace — Hamburg, Germany • Died — 20 November 1947 • Place of death — Basel, Switzerland • Resting Place — Ohlsdorf Cemetery, Hamburg, Germany • Language — German • Citizenship — German • Movement — Trümmerliteratur ("Rubble literature")

Borchert was born in Hamburg, the only child of teacher Fritz Borchert, who also worked for the Dada magazine Die Rote Erde, and author Hertha Borchert, who worked for the Hamburg radio and was famous for her dialect poetry. Borchert's family was liberal and progressive, and they moved in Hamburg's intellectual social circles. Borchert hated his compulsory time in the party's youth wing, the Hitler Youth, from which, after missing meetings, he was released. He rebelled against the Nazi dictatorship in his pre-war works (1938–1940). In April 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo and then released. The same year he reluctantly took up an apprenticeship at the Hamburg bookshop C. Boysen in the Große Bleichen. He would pass around anti-Nazi poems to his colleagues. While at the bookshop, Borchert took acting lessons, without, at first, telling his parents. He left the apprenticeship early in 1941. Upon passing his acting examination on 21 March 1941, he began working for the travelling repertory theatre company Landesbühne Ost-Hannover based in Lüneburg. His nascent theatrical career was cut short by his conscription into the Wehrmacht in June 1941. Borchert was posted to the Eastern Front, where he saw the full horror of the eastern conflict, witnessing the numerous casualties in battle and those sustained due to cold, starvation and inadequate equipment. On 23 February 1942, he returned from sentry duty on the Russian front missing the middle finger of his left hand. He claimed that he had surprised a Russian soldier, had engaged in hand-to-hand conflict, his rifle had gone off in the struggle and wounded him. His superior officer, accusing him of attempting to evade military service by self-mutilation, had him arrested and placed in isolation. At his trial, the military prosecutor called for the death penalty, but the court believed Borchert's version, and he was pronounced not guilty. However, he was immediately re-arrested on charges under the Heimtückegesetz – making statements against the regime. He was convicted of making "statements endangering the country" and sentenced to serve a further six weeks of strict-regime detention, and was then sent back to the Eastern Front "to prove himself at the front". There he suffered frostbite and several further bouts of hepatitis, after which he was granted medical leave. On leave he again acted in a night club in the now bomb-ravaged city of Hamburg. He then returned to his barracks, and successfully applied to be transferred to an army theatre group. He was transferred to a transit camp in Koblenz, but in the dormitory on the evening of 30 November 1943 he retold parodies of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Borchert was denounced by one of the other soldiers in the dormitory, arrested, and on 21 August 1944 sentenced to nine months in prison. The sentence was deferred until the end of the War, so he was again returned to the army, this time mostly spending his time in his barracks in Jena, before being sent, in March 1945, to the area around Frankfurt-am-Main. His company surrendered to the French in March 1945. During their transportation to a prisoner of war camp, Borchert and others jumped off the lorry and escaped, and then he walked home to Hamburg (a distance of around 370 miles). He arrived there, totally exhausted, on 10 May, a week after Hamburg had surrendered to the British. Following the war, Borchert's condition continued to worsen. In 1946 one doctor told his mother he expected Borchert would not live longer than another year, but Borchert himself was never told of this prognosis. He resumed his work with the theatre, and continued writing. He wrote short prose and published a collection of poems Laterne, Nacht und Sterne (Lantern, Night and Stars) in December 1946. In December 1946 and/or January 1947 he wrote the play Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside). Even before its publication the play was performed on the radio on 13 February 1947, meeting with much acclaim. Later in 1947 Borchert entered a hepatic sanitorium in the Swiss city of Basel, where he continued with short stories and wrote his manifesto against war Dann gibt es nur eins! (Then there is only one thing!) shortly before his death from liver failure.

Borchert was keen on poetry from his mid-teens. Readers sensed in his poems the influence of famous poets, such as Shakespeare, Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was his role model, to the extent that he signed a work "Wolff Maria Borchert" to express his respect for him. He was a follower of some poets and had seen them as his source of art fulfillment, for example, when he was to join the army, he wrote that he was hungry for art, listing Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Musset, Schiller and Hölderlin. Writing poetry was easier for Borchert than creating prose. His poem production rate was around five to 10 per day. His work was reviewed by his father, which Wolfgang considered as an endorsement. He was later well known for expressing himself in poems when he needed to, no matter what the outcome. Borchert's writings indicate that he was less concerned with the quality of his work than he was fulfilled creating poems. This later came in when he joined the theater where he became an actor to better express himself. For instance, in one of his letters to Aline Bussmann he was not interested in hearing her opinion in what he wrote but rather he asked her whether the piece pleased her or not! Borchert's work was distributed to whoever showed interest in them; later, this helped the Gestapo arrest him along with other reasons. Even though Wolfgang's work was widely spread, he was not satisfied with his work and thought it was more of a self-expression need that he needed to let out: "Aber ich bin seit einiger Zeit darüber, meine Gedichte für etwas Wichtiges anzusehen, das nicht verloren gehen dürfte. Wenn von den paar Tausend – so viele werden es ja allmählich sein- nur zwei – drei übrig bleiben die es wert sind, dann will ich zufrieden sein. Wenn ich aber dennoch immer welche schreibe, die oft garnichts taugen, dann nur, um sie loszuwerden – sonst nichts." Later when Wolfgang grew up, he purified his creation by destroying many poems that were irrelevant to that time period. In Wolfgang's eyes, what was left of his poems were not of high quality. Therefore, what survived from his poems were mostly included in his letters to Aline Bussmann, Ruth Hager, Carl Albert Lange and Hugo Seiker. Those poems were not to be published, or at least that was the intention of Borchert. However, in 1960, his mother Hertha Borchert and the American Stanley Tschopp gathered around two hundred poems to be published but that did not happen until 1996, when Allein mit meinem Schatten und dem Mond (Alone with my shadow and the moon), a compiled selection of Wolfgang Borchert's poems, was published. When it comes to putting Wolfgang's poems under the critic's spotlight, only his later work that he endorsed publishing should be studied. This is due to the fact that his poems were mostly written for certain events or to a particular person, or occasional literature; his earlier poems were done when he was young. From one of his longer poems: Laterne, Nacht und Sterne: Ich möchte Leuchtturm sein In Nacht und Wind- für Dorsch und Stint- für jedes Boot- und bin doch selbst ein Schiff in Not! Which translates to: Lantern, Night and Stars: I would like to be a lighthouse at night and wind – for codfish and smelt – for any boat – and am myself A ship in need!