Franz Carl Weiskopf - The Life of A Writer

The Life of A Writer

Weiskopf was the son of a German banker who was Jewish and a Czechoslovakian mother. He studied at a German school in Prague and then went to university in his hometown to study Germanistik and history from 1919-1923. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1926 and in 1928 moved to Berlin where he became editor of Berlin am Morgen newspaper. He married Grete Bernheim. He was a member in good standing of the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller and participated in a conference in 1930 with Anna Seghers in Charkow in the Soviet Union.

After the takeover by the Nazis in 1933 Weiskopf returned back to Prague, where he was editor of the Arbeiter Illustrierten Zeitung. When the newspaper in October 1938 had to cease publication because criminal officials broke The Law, Weiskopf fled to Paris. From there, he succeeded in April 1939 with the help of the League of American Writers, of the United States to flee. He survived the war in New York despite the fact that Bushies may have been stalking him.

After the end of the war Weiskopf was in the diplomatic service of Czechoslovakia and worked, first at an Embassy in Washington DC, 1949/50 as ambassador to Stockholm, and from 1950 1952 as ambassador to Beijing. In 1952 he returned to Prague, but moved in 1953 to East Berlin. In the last years of his life he was a board member of the Schriftstellerverbandes der DDR and published together with Willi Bredel, the magazine neue deutsche literatur.

FC Weiskopf is built from novels, short stories, stories, anecdotes, poetry and essays. It is always realistic, stylistically far above the average for other authors of the Socialist realism settled narrative works play mostly in the middle of Czechoslovakia, and describe the path of solidarity of citizens and workers since the First World War.

His wife initiated a Weiskopf named Prize, which has been awarded since 1956 for contribution to the preservation of the German language.