"Mein Lebensziel war es, Kutscher zu werden"

Karl Karst

pp. 44-56

in: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 28 (3), 1998.

Abstract

This contribution outlines the biographical beginnings and the way to the then ›young‹ radio of a radio playwright, who is still most important today.Günter Eich, born in 1907, first came to Berlin in 1925, where, since 1923, the ›public entertainment radio‹ was operating its early programme. Even before the ›young‹ poet published his first book in 1930, he had had contact with the new medium radio. It promised an auditory to the student of sinology and a (proper) payment to the lyric poet.The author of this contribution wrote about Eich in his ›editorial epilogue‹ to the radio play volumes of the »Complete Works«: he was »an author of radio times, someone who experienced the artful possibilities of broadcasting from its beginning and who influenced it like no one else. No author of this century has been identified with radio-art like him. And no other art-form of our time is so lastingly connected with the name of one person as is the radio play with the name Günter Eich.«