She has lived in Berlin since 1976 and works as a freelance translator of English, American and Italian literature into German. She has translated Dacia Maraini, Dorothy Parker, Tom Rachman and others. She has produced new translations of several Agatha Christie novels, such as Death on the Nile and Das Eulenhaus. Biermann was honoured with the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for his translation of Oreo, the only novel by African-American writer Fran Ross to take its particular tone from Yiddish. The literary critic Antje Rávik Strubel praised it as a "magnificent achievement" by the translator, "that the countless language games, onomatopoeias and richness of word invention are transferred into German and that the linguistic pleasure and great humour of the text are conveyed".[3]
From 1976 onwards, Pieke Biermann was an activist in the Berlin women's movement and was considered a "front woman" of the West German Prostitute movement in the 1980s.[4] Together with Gisela Bock and Barbara Duden, among others, she founded the "Lohn für Hausarbeit" group at the Frauenzentrum Westberlin, which was based on an international feminist movement that emerged in the US in the early 1970s. The group argued that not only housework, but also prostitution was wage labour like any other and that sex work was a way for women in patriarchy to achieve independence.[5] With this approach, Biermann, who herself worked as a sex worker for a time, initiated a prostitute campaign.[6] Her book "Wir sind Frauen wie andere auch!" Prostitutes and their struggles polarised the women's movement. It was republished in 2014, supplemented with five speeches and essays by Pieke Biermann from 1980 to 2007. Biermann was a co-founder and board member of the Berlin prostitutes' organisation Hydra and was one of the initiators of the first German "Prostitutes' Ball", which took place on 6 February 1988 at the International Congress Centrum Berlin.[7][8]
She became known as a writer with crime fiction. Her debut novel was published in 1987 and she has won the Deutscher Krimi Preis three times. Biermann developed her crime stories as private stories against the backdrop of Berlin and created a panorama of ways of life. Modelled on the Expressionistmetropolitan novel.
What Los Angeles was for Raymond Chandler or Amsterdam for Janwillem van de Wetering, Berlin is for me – the unknown metropolis of the Western world: a city that seems to be made up of myths. I want to tell the story of Berlin in novels that tell facts.
Her series of four Berlin novels featuring the detective "Karin Lietze" begins in the Cold War with Potsdamer Ableben. The last novel in the series, Four, Five, Six (the title alludes to Billy Wilder's 1961 comedy One, Two, Three), deals with the "Berlin plagued by unification problems". Murder is a minor matter. Biermann takes a topographical route through the city to "bring the criminal case, contemporary history, the problems of reunification, the dynamics of the big city and the fate of life under the hat of a socio-critical entertainment novel", according to the reviewer Thomas Medicus. He criticised the "egalitarian scene jargon" that pervades the novel.[9]Florian Felix Weyh read the language of her crime short stories Berlin, Kabbala, which appeared in the same year, differently. He felt atmospherically reminded of Döblin'sBerlin Alexanderplatz. The noise of the big city lays itself as an acoustic pattern over and under Biermann's texts. "The reader must be able to hear, sometimes even join in, in order to make sense of dialects and sociolects."[10]
As a journalist, Pieke Biermann wrote court and literary crime reports for print media and radio, political feuilletons and literary criticism. She was an author for Tagesspiegel and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, among others. In 2002, the Jüdische Allgemeine commissioned her to comment on Jewish life from a non-Jewish perspective. Her column appeared for over a year and a half under the title Gojisch gesehen. The collected texts were published as a book in 2004.[11]
Der Asphalt unter Berlin. Kriminalreportagen aus der Metropole. Pendragon Verlag, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-86532-104-6.
Als Herausgeberin
Mit Zorn, Charme & Methode. Oder: Die Aufklärung ist weiblich. 13 Kriminalgeschichten, Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-10839-X.
Wilde Weiber GmbH. Kriminalgeschichten. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11586-8.
Translations
Maria Rita Parsi: Abfall. Marco und Maria, zwei Jugendliche aus dem Großstadtghetto erzählen ihre Geschichte. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979
Rosetta Froncillo: Confusa Desio. Eine Reise in Abschweifungen. Frauenoffensive, München 1983
Francesco Alberoni: Erotik. Weibliche Erotik, männliche Erotik, was ist das? Piper, München 1986
Dacia Maraini: Isolina. Die zerstückelte Frau. Rotbuch, 1988
Dorothy Parker: Eine starke Blondine. New Yorker Geschichten. Haffmans, 1989
mit Ursula-Maria Mössner: Dorothy Parker, Dämmerung vor dem Feuerwerk. New Yorker Geschichten. Bertelsmann, Rheda-Wiedenbrück; Buchgemeinschaft Donauland, Wien 1998; wieder New Yorker Geschichten. Kein & Aber, 2003 (The portable Dorothy Parker)
Stefano Benni: Die Bar auf dem Meeresgrund: Unterwassergeschichten. Wagenbach, 1999
Biermann in the translator database of the VdÜ, 2020
Related Research Articles
Sarah Kirsch was a German poet.
Karl Wolf Biermann is a German singer-songwriter, poet, and former East German dissident. He is perhaps best known for the 1968 song "Ermutigung" and his expatriation from East Germany in 1976.
Julia Franck is a German writer.
Libuše Moníková was a Czech writer, publishing in the German language. In 1968, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, she left to Western Germany.
Günter Kunert was a German writer. Based in East Berlin, he published poetry from 1947, supported by Bertold Brecht. After he had signed a petition against the deprivation of the citizenship of Wolf Biermann in 1976, he lost his SED membership, and moved to the West two years later. He is regarded as a versatile German writer who wrote short stories, essays, autobiographical works, film scripts and novels. He received international honorary doctorates and awards.
Peter von Matt is a Swiss philologist and author.
Raoul Schrott is an Austrian poet, writer, literary critic, translator and broadcast personality.
Tamara Bach is a German writer.
Wolfgang Benz is a German historian from Ellwangen. He was the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische Universität Berlin between 1990 and 2011.
Andreas Steinhöfel is a German author for children and young adult books, and a translator.
Birgit Vanderbeke was a German writer.
Amelie Fried is a German writer and television presenter. Her father, Kurt Fried, is the creator-publisher of Schwäbische Donauzeitung, nowadays a part of Südwest Presse. She studied journalism and film at university. She has worked extensively in television and has published numerous books. Her 2008 book Schuhhaus Pallas. Wie meine Familie sich gegen die Nazis wehrte deals with her family's persecution in Nazi Germany. The book received significant media attention and has been the subject of much debate.
Brigitte Kronauer was a German writer who lived in Hamburg. Her novels, written in the tradition of Jean Paul with artful writing and an ironic undertone, were awarded several prizes, including in 2005 the Georg Büchner Prize, in 2011 the Jean-Paul-Preis and in 2017 the Thomas Mann Prize.
Stephan Koranyi was a German philologist, author, lecturer, and an editor.
Anna Mitgutsch is an Austrian writer and educator. Her name also appears as Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch.
Gerhard Zwerenz was a German writer and politician. From 1994 until 1998 he was a member of the Bundestag for the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).
Petra Morsbach is a German author.
Milena Moser is a Swiss writer. Her first language is Swiss German. She has emigrated to the United States twice, in 1998 and again in 2015, but German remains the language in which she writes, and in which by 2018 more than twenty of her novels had been published.
Zoë Beck is a German writer, publisher, translator, dialogue book author and dubbing director. She has won multiple awards for her books and translations.
Natascha Wodin is a German writer of Ukrainian origin. She was born in Fürth, Bavaria in 1945 to parents who had been forced labourers under the Nazi regime. She grew up in a camp for displaced persons. Following her mother's suicide, she was raised in a Catholic home for girls. She worked as a telephone operator and stenographer before becoming an interpreter and translator of Russian in the early 1970s.
References
↑ Lebensdaten Pieke Biermann, in: Silvio Vietta (ed.): Das literarische Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert. With current addresses and information. Philipp Reclam jun. publishing house, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-15-010481-1, p. 214
↑ Pieke Biermann: Berufsbild: Herz der Familie. Self-published, Berlin 1977. (=Wages for Housework – Materials for an International Feminist Strategy, No. 1)
↑ Marie Schmidt: Profil. Pieke Biermann. Translator who goes through fire for many a book. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 March 2020 (online behind the paywall)
↑ Almuth Waldenberger: Die Hurenbewegung. Geschichte und Debatten in Deutschland und Österreich, LIT Verlag, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-643-50597-2, p. 198
↑ Ilse Lenz: Die Neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland. Farewell to the small difference. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-14729-1, p. 153 ff.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
