Gerhard W. Menzel

Through his father, who was active in the SPD, he came into contact with the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft der Kinderfreunde [de] and the Socialist Youth of Germany – Falcons at an early age.

He had to abandon the renewed attempt to study at university because in the same year he began working as a radio playwright at Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, Sender Leipzig.

In May 1952, his play Marek im Westen, a Schwejkiade, was premiered at the Kammerspiele des Deutschen Theaters, directed by Wolfgang Langhoff.

Menzel's play very soon no longer fit into the political landscape because it was characterised by deep Pacifism and in the GDR the Kasernierte Volkspolizei was founded in preparation for the Nationale Volksarmee.

In the meantime, Menzel had become chief dramaturge of the radio drama department of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, but he retired from the station in 1952 for health and political reasons.

For this reason, Menzel later successfully resisted years of attempts to recruit him to set up the entertainment department of the GDR television in Berlin.

In prose, Menzel was still searching for his subject and his niche, because he could not and did not want to comply with the cultural-political ideas and desires of the time for contemporary material that was, as far as possible, set in production.

However, Menzel found a very strict teacher in the field of great prose in the literary editor of the Leipzig Paul List publishing house, Walter Franke.

His work stood on broad foundations, he conducted correspondences with archives, libraries and publishers all over Europe in order to gain as much knowledge as possible about contemporary sources.

The novel Ein Stern weicht nicht aus seiner Bahn about Schiller's youthful years at the Karlsschule until his flight to Mannheim and to Thüringische Bauerbach was published in 1962.

He firmly believed that Germans could find the examples and role models for upright action and democratic life among themselves and in their own history - this is what he wanted to show.

Menzel succeeded for the first time in showing the painter Bruegel as an artist who took a stand in the Fight of the Dutch against Spanish foreign rule with his pictures.

These surprising results in Menzel's first work in art history earned him the respect of the experts, especially as the book was very soon also published in Switzerland and Poland.

Gerhard Keil, the then publisher of Seemann Verlag, suggested to Menzel that the material for the extensive preparatory work should also be used for a novel about Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The Troupe of Molière, a novel about the bold comedy poet, actor, director and principal in Louis XIV France, has a similarly long genesis.

The process of developing responsible citizens and self-determined individuals between the 16th and 18th centuries seemed to him to have been particularly difficult in Germany compared to other European countries and to have required the greatest personal commitment.

For Menzel, the lives of these writers, who differed greatly in their style and writing, had something in common: he found it in the intellectual courage with which they stood up to their environment and wanted to change it for the better.

The parts of the cycle that Menzel completed, namely the stories about Christian Reuter, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Novalis and Georg Forster, are formally very sophisticated.