POLITICAL REALISM” BY UWE TIMM (ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S EARLY PROSE)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the early works of one of the most famous German writers of the present time, U. Timm. In the 70s of the last century, Timm formulated his super-task as the creation of a new creative method – “political realism”. According to the writer’s definition, “political realism differs from bourgeois realism in that its characters not only take a critical position in relation to social reality, but also consciously seek to change this society”. The article analyzes the ideological and conceptual, as well as artistic and stylistic features of the early novels “Hot summer” (“Heißer Sommer”) in 1975 and “Flight of Kerbel” (“Kerbes Flucht”) in 1980, a kind of artistic chronicle of the 60s. The researcher traces significant changes that both the author’s artistic method and the image of the hero undergo within a few years. If the first novel is an “exemplary” work in the spirit of the concept of “political realism”, then in the “Flight of Kerbel” the author finds other ways of mastering the theme. In Timm’s later work, political bias is replaced by the “aesthetics of everyday life”, which the researcher explores using historical, often autobiographical material. There is a stylistic community in Timm’s prose of different periods of creativity. The article analyzes the content and stylistic features of Timm’s works: the realism of the image with a bright subjective color; autobiography, the principle of collage, the aesthetics of oral speech, the combination of the comic and tragic.