Hermann Kant

• Born: June 14, 1926
• Birthplace: Hamburg, Germany
• Died: August 14, 2016
• Place of death: Neustrelitz, Germany

Biography

Hermann Kant was born June 14, 1926, in Hamburg, Germany. He attended Arbeiter-und Bauernfakultaet (Workers’ and Farmers’ College), studied German at the University of Greifswald from 1949 through 1952, and then attended Humboldt University in Berlin from 1952 through 1956. Kant was a freelance writer and journalist prior to World War II. During the war, he apprenticed as an electrician. He served in the German army from 1944 through 1945, and was a prisoner of war in Poland from 1945 until 1949.

During the 1950’s, he worked as a research assistant. Kant served as the president of the East German Writers’ Union from 1978 through 1989. A politician and writer, Kant is often considered the quintessential East German author, and he is frequently criticized for toeing the Communist line and refusing to acknowledge the injustices that occurred in East Germany under the Communist regime.

Kant’s best-known novel is Die Aula, originally published as a magazine serialization in 1963, and published in book form in 1965. Set in postwar East Germany, the novel focuses on vocational colleges that prepared East German youth for positions in a socialist society. Throughout the novel, Kant praises the institutions by highlighting real success stories. Kant, who came from a working-class background, had attended one of these colleges and credited it with his success. Die Aula quickly became required reading for many East German school children.

His novel Der Aufenthalt (1977) follows a German solider in a Polish prisoner of war camp as he experiences self-growth and enlightenment by questioning and finally understanding his country’s history, as well as his own. Semiautobiographical, the novel is Kant’s most honest and emotional work. Throughout the 1980’s, Kant published several collections of short stories, including Der dritte Nagel, and Bronzezeit, which were narrated by well-developed, reoccurring characters. In 1994, Kant published Kormoran, an assessment of the post-Communist era in East Germany. The novel is narrated by a sixty-six-year-old protagonist, Kormoran, strongly resembling Kant, who comes to terms with the devastation wreaked by the Communist regime. Although the novel may have been too little too late, Kormoran is an acknowledgment and criticism of the travesties that occurred under Communism.

He continued to publish novels in the twenty-first century, incuding Okarina (2002), Kino (2005), and Kennung (2010). His final novel was Ein strenges Spiel, published in 2015.

He received the Heinrich Heine Prize in 1963; the Erich Weinert Medal in 1966; the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1967; and the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic in 1973 and 1983. Although controversial for his support of, and involvement in, the East German Communist party, Kant was a leader in East German postwar literature and, as such, heavily influenced cultural policy.

Kant died on August 14, 2016, in a hospital in Neustrelitz, Germany, at the age of ninety.

Bibliography

Jones, Sara. Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere. De Gruyter, 2011.

Reid, J. H. "Monkey-Business in the GDR: Hermann Kant and Kafka." German Life and Letters, vol. 38, no. 4, 2007, pp. 417–26.

Williams, Rhys W., Stephen Parker, and Colin Riordan, editors. German Writers and the Cold War, 1945–61. Manchester UP, 1992.