Peter Rühmkorf:Poet and left-wing essayist

The Büchner Prize winner Peter Rühmkorf is one of the most important authors of the post-war period. Political commitment and grotesque humor distinguished him.

Critics describe his often cynical poems as cheeky but virtuoso. He quoted, satirized and varied what already existed. In the poem he saw a "representation of the interests of the ego" and believed that poetry "belongs to our human household stock". Peter Rühmkorf is considered one of the most important contemporary German-speaking authors. He wrote poetry, essays, plays and fairy tales. He became known, among other things, through the publication of his diaries ("Tabu I" and "Tabu II") and his confessional book "The Years You Know". Rühmkorf has received numerous awards, including the "Georg Büchner Prize".

Rühmkorf:"Learned poetry from my mother"

Rühmkorf was born on October 25, 1929 in Dortmund. His mother is a teacher, his father, whom he never gets to know, is a traveling puppeteer. He grew up in Hemmoor-Warstade near Stade in Lower Saxony. Even as a small boy, he was fascinated by what can be achieved with the magic of words. "I actually learned poetry from my mother," he says later. "My mother was a school teacher in the village and she wrote poems for all sorts of occasions, rhyming poems, and these poems always found public approval." From 1940 Rühmkorf attended high school in Stade, which he left in 1950 with his Abitur. He then began studying in Hamburg - initially education and art history, later German studies and psychology. In the winter semester of 1956/57 he dropped out without a degree.

Aversion to false authority

Born in 1929, Rühmkorf was only used for military training and digging trenches during the Second World War. According to Rühmkorf, it was "quite a bit of carrion-maloching around". The experience shapes him for life - throughout his life he harbors an intense aversion to false authorities.

In the 1950s, Rühmkorf stood not only for his poems but also for political commitment. As the author of various socio-critical and mostly left-wing magazines, he already took up many topics of the later student movement.

Beginnings as a writer:From the school newspaper to "concrete"

Rühmkorf published the school newspaper "Die Pestbeule" while he was still at school, and in 1951 he published the literary magazine "Z Zwischen den Kriegen" together with the poet Werner Riegel, in which he published articles under several pseudonyms. From 1953 he wrote, again under a different name, the column "Lyrikschlachthof" for the "Studentenkurier" (renamed "konkret" from 1958) in which he sharply criticized modern poetry. During his studies, Rühmkorf was also a co-founder of the "Neue Studentenbühne". With his friend Klaus Rainer Röhl, later "konkret" editor and husband of Ulrike Meinhof, he founded the student cabaret "Die Pestbeule". Rühmkorf and Röhl also run the jazz and poetry cellar "Die Anarche".

Peter Rühmkorf:opponent of nuclear power, 1968, literary critic

From 1958 to 1964 Rühmkorf worked as an editor at the Rowohlt publishing house. There he also published his first volumes of poetry, "Earthly Pleasures in G" (1959) and "Art Pieces" (1962). After that he became self-employed as a freelance writer. At the end of the 1960s, Rühmkorf campaigned against nuclear power and was associated with the 1968 student movement. He continues to write literary criticism for the magazine "konkret". Rühmkorf once described his work as a poet and "sober prose enlightener" as "schizography". The "professional Hamburg native", as he liked to call himself back then, teaches as a guest lecturer at numerous German, British and US universities.

Rühmkorf's reckoning with Reich-Ranicki

Rühmkorf's volume "Tabu I. Diaries 1989-1991", published in 1995, attracted a great deal of public attention. In the book he settles accounts with the critic pope Marcel Reich-Ranicki and breaks his friendship because he tore up the Grass novel "A Wide Field". He later parodies Reich-Ranicki's willingness to reconcile:"I've never turned away a hand that I've cut off a couple of fingers."

The second volume of his diaries, “Tabu II see the revolutionary epoch caught in a fool's mirror".

Last award after death

Rühmkorf has lived for several years with his wife Eva, a qualified psychologist who was Minister in the Schleswig-Holstein state government from 1988 to 1992, in the Övelgönne district of Hamburg. When he fell ill with cancer, the couple left their house on the banks of the Elbe in Hamburg and moved to a cottage in Lauenburg in Schleswig-Holstein.

Rühmkorf's last work:"Paradiesvogelshit"

In the spring of 2008, Rühmkorf, already terminally ill, published the volume of poems "Paradiesvogelschiß". On June 8, he died of his illness at the age of 78 in Roseburg, Schleswig-Holstein. His former antagonist Reich-Ranicki had rather ambiguous words of praise for the poet at the time:"He was a sensitive esthete, a refined esthete, an exquisite ironist. But at the same time he was a plebeian poet, a downright jester, an administrator of the literary underground, a poet of the alley and the crowd, one who brought the lyric to the market."

In 2009 Rühmkorf received the Kassel Literature Prize for grotesque humor posthumously for his work.