Yaak Karsunke | Remember the names!

Yaak Karsunke was one of those poets and writers whose name alone made him stand out from the West German wasteland, which was only politically and culturally revitalized by so-called young people in 1967/68. Karsunke had already been around a little earlier, in Munich in the early 1960s, when gentrification was invented in Schwabing, which everyone initially welcomed because the dreary Adenauer state was at least moving on the fringes.

"It's better to make new mistakes than to perpetuate old ones to the point of general unconsciousness." This quote from Karsunke begins "Katzelmacher," the 1969 second feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Munich film director who remains unsurpassed in productivity and artistic impact to this day. Karsunke was a friend of his and also acted in a few of his films.

Born in 1934 in Berlin-Pankow, the son of a factory director, he and his family moved to the western part of the city in 1949, graduated from high school, studied law for a bit, and then acting. In 1964, he went to Munich and founded the literary magazine "Kürbiskern" (Pumpkin Kernel) in 1965 with Martin Walser and Christian Geissler , among others. It was intended as a forum for texts from East and West, a subversive and bold idea in the anti-communist economic miracle country. The name comes from Karsunke. According to Friedrich Hitzer, when he uttered it, Walser almost choked on his wine and exclaimed: "'Guys! That's it – a hard core in a huge bloated head!'"

Karsunke, whose first name "Yaak" was derived from his nickname "Jörg," although his real name was Georg, became a spokesman for the Easter March movement for disarmament and was editor-in-chief of "Kürbiskern" (Pumpkin Seed) until 1968, when he and Geissler fell out with the others because they opposed the Soviet invasion of Prague. The magazine, however, was co-financed from the East until its closure in 1987. The Communist Party had barely become legal again when it had already embarrassed itself politically, which is also one of the reasons why it never became a serious force in this country.

Karsunke returned to West Berlin, where nothing was happening except for the revolting students at the university, but people felt a new era was beginning. The intellectuals, from the Socialists to the old and new Communists, and the young talent, including FC Delius , Nicolas Born, Hans Christoph Buch, and Karsunke, met in bars and toasted the coming upheavals. Turning away from Group 47, to which Karsunke had also introduced himself, there was an attempt to initiate a new left-wing literary association, the "ARSCH" group, another bold name, intended here as an abbreviation for "Association of Revolutionary Writers." But after a year, it was over. The revolution didn't make any progress either, but when Karsunke recommended a volume of poetry by Jürgen Theobaldy in the "Frankfurter Rundschau," it immediately sold 400 more copies, so strong was the belief in the printed word at that time.

He worked for newspapers and radio, and his wife Ingrid for the Kursbuch, even more important for the left in the 1970s than Konkret. He wrote prose and plays, including an award-winning crime novel about a bored literary editor who is suddenly blackmailed ("Dead Man," 1989), but above all, poems that endure precisely because they speak of a bygone era of reinvention and self-empowerment. After the death of Dizzy Gillespie, he wrote: " Ladies and gentlemen: this / was the Massey Hall Quintet / 1953 in May / the greatest bebop concert ever / with Charlie 'Bird' Parker / John Birks 'Dizzy' Gillespie / Bud Powell & Charles Mingus & / behind the drums Max Roach / still alive now plays / the last chorus blues march / for drum alone."

Gillespie died in 1993, Max Roach in 2007 and Yaak Karsunke on May 13 at the age of 90.