Adolf Endler

Adolf Endler (20 September 1930 – 2 August 2009) was a lyric poet, essayist and prose author who played a central role in subcultural activities that attacked and challenged an outdated model of socialist realism in the German Democratic Republic up until the collapse of communism in the early 1990s.

Endler drew attention to himself as the "father of the oppositional literary scene" at Prenzlauer Berg in the eastern part of Berlin.

A communist as a young man, Endler moved to East Germany in 1955 and studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature in Leipzig from 1955–57.

An acclaimed poet, he was well respected in the East and West, but at the same time was marginalized and degraded by party functionaries who controlled the fields of cultural practice, conspired to guard their concepts of aesthetics, and went as far as to extend their influence into the writer's private life.

Even though socialist realism had spread over most of Eastern European cultural life, it was successfully undermined by writers and artists like Endler.

His defiance involved ignoring orders from cultural politicians and finding alternative ways of communicating with peers.

His colleague in exile, the Austrian Erich Fried (Fried and Hamburger went into exile in Great Britain during Hitler's Third Reich), documented some of this writing for the BBC in his review of the anthology In diesem besseren Land (1966).

Into the seventies, Endler remained steadfastly confrontational.

Following the expatriation from the GDR of songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976, Endler was expelled from the Writers’ Association of the GDR in 1979, having declared his solidarity with his previously reprimanded colleague Stefan Heym.

In 1978 he coined the term Sächsische Dichterschule to describe the group of German writers who were born in the 1930s and were influential in the areas of poetry, such as, Karl Mickel, Heinz Czechowski, Sarah Kirsch and Volker Braun.

This sentiment is shared by Michael Hamburger, who, before the group had been named, applauded those that they had been creative in an artistically hostile environment.

Hamburger recorded the traffic of correspondence between individual poets -a secret project that held the young writers together in a state that promoted the exact opposite, i.e. the isolation of individual deviants.

Throughout the 1980s he contributed to various Berlin and Leipzig underground magazines.

It was only after the political turnaround of 1989 that people noticed that he does not compare at all unfavourably with them – but not too late, thank goodness.”

In the 1990s, Adolf Endler became known to a wider public through a volume of memoirs entitled Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg (i.e. Tarzan at Prenzlauer Berg) and from 1991 to 1998, with Brigitte Schreier-Endler, he organised the legendary “Orplid&Co.“ readings in Café Clara in Berlin-Mitte.

Mr. Endler died after a long illness.

"A lot of people connect liberalization with the fact that the GDR for international reason didn't want to have any trouble. The GDR wanted to be thought of in the international community as something very decent and without blemish. That was something we went along with. Our only means of power was to threaten to make an international fuss. If a book had been published in the west, and then the author had been sent to jail, there would have been a fuss. There must have been five hundred of us who had written letters or who had collected signatures. There weren't three hundred thousand people, but there were always ten or twenty thousand refractory people who as a rule wanted to stay in the GDR, but who, out of some sort of defiance or whatever, weren't ready to put up with it. They weren't the people who had left because they were fed up to the teeth.' -March 15th, 1992."

“He admired those who play with language like Kurt Schwitters and Alfred Jarry, astute minds like Karl Kraus and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and great epic writers like François Rabelais and Hans Henny Jahnn.

In 2005 he was made a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt.