"Man is a destructive being," says a woman in Dieter Forte's last book. It was published in February and is called "When the sky was not named yet". Roman could no longer be called this collection of prose sketches, essays and phrases; Forte's work ended with a touch on the origins of culture, creativity, and humanity. On Easter Monday, the German writer died in a hospital in Basel, as his publisher S. Fischer reported in Frankfurt am Main. Forte was 83 years old.
Born in Dusseldorf in 1935, Dieter Forte created a comprehensive body of plays, novels, television and radio plays, which won numerous awards. His play "Martin Luther & Thomas Münzer or The Introduction of Accounting" became a world hit in 1970, followed by the stage dramas "Jean Henry Dunant or The Introduction of Civilization" and "The Labyrinth of Dreams or How to Separate the Head from the Body", in which Forte dealt with the emergence of the modern world.
Focus on war and post-war period
But only in the exploration of his own story, he found his literary voice, because how destructive the human being in his essence, he had witnessed as a child in the bombing of the Second World War: In the eighties, he began with "The Pattern" (1992 published) one "Tetralogy of Remembrance," which covers the novels "Equinox" (originally: "The Boy with the Bloody Shoes") and "In Memory" - and outlines a story of two families, focusing on the war and post-war period. The first three volumes were summarized in 1999 under the title "The House on My Shoulders", 2004 ended the cycle with "On the other side of the world".
His autobiographical impressions described Forte once as a work, "lurking behind the language of a no more legendary horror". The bombing of his hometown had shaped him for his entire life. In 2013, Forte broke away from personal narratives with "The Labyrinth of the World" and began searching for validity in freer literary form in the early days of culture. As a research and inspiration space, which he visited on a daily basis, the library of the "Allgemeine Lesegesellschaft Basel" with its 75,000 books served him in recent years.