Günter de Bruyn (1 November 1926 – 4 October 2020) was a German author.

Life

Günter de Bruyn was born in Berlin in November 1926; his father Carl was a Catholic from Bavaria. Günter served as a Luftwaffenhelfer and soldier in World War II. Wounded, he was then held in custody by the United States as a prisoner of war; after his release he found a job as a farm worker in Hesse. After his return to Berlin, he trained as a "new teacher" in Potsdam. Until 1949 he worked as a teacher in a village near Rathenow in Brandenburg. Subsequently, he trained as a librarian and worked at the Zentralinstitut für Bibliothekswesen (Central Institute for Library Knowledge) in East Berlin from 1953 to 1961. Since 1961 de Bruyn has lived as a freelance writer. From 1965 to 1978, he was a member of the Zentralvorstandes des Schriftstellerverbandes der DDR (Central Executive Committee of the Literary Association of East Germany); he was a member of the presidency of the PEN Centre of East Germany from 1974 to 1982. In October 1989, Günter de Bruyn declined to accept the National Prize of East Germany. De Bruyn later lived in the village of Görsdorf (part of the municipality of Tauche) in Brandenburg, as well as in Berlin. He was a member of the German PEN Centre. He died in October 2020 at the age of 93.

Literary activity

Günter de Bruyn's works range from the frequently autobiographically colored Realist novels and narratives which explain critiques of the private lives of the artists in East Germany to essays on literary science and historical themes, particularly Prussian history. He edited a series of works from 18th and 19th century authors in Berlin and Brandenburg, which appear under the title Märkischer Dichtergarten. He had great success in the 1990s with the two volumes of his autobiography, Zwischenbilanz and Vierzig Jahre.

Awards

Works

Editorial work

Film adaptations