Horst Bienek was a central figure in West German cultural life from the 1960s to the 1980s. As an editor for dtv, a successful freelance writer, and head of the literature department at the Bavarian Academy of Arts, he was well connected and traveled extensively: he knew Fassbinder, Hockney, Ingeborg Bachmann, Koeppen, Salomé, Ripploh, Julien Green, and Stephen Spender. In 1951, as a young author, he almost became a master student of Bertolt Brecht, but shortly before that, a false accusation of espionage got in the way – with traumatic consequences. He was arrested and sentenced by the Soviet War Tribunal in Potsdam to 20 years of forced labor in the coal mines of Vorkuta, between the Arctic Circle and the Arctic Ocean. He was released after four years and went first to Frankfurt and then to Munich in 1965. In 1994, four years after his death, he was rehabilitated by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation: it turned out that Bienek had been arrested without cause for political reasons.

Bienek did not allow his homosexuality to influence his successful novels. He repeatedly wanted to write explicitly about it, but never did so before his death from AIDS in 1990. However, he wrote very openly about his cruising adventures in Munich, New York, and many other places, about his short and long-term relationships, and about his feelings of isolation in heterosexual male literary circles in his diaries, which became increasingly detailed in the 1980s. At some point, AIDS appears in them. Bienek sees himself at risk but does not dare to take an HIV test until 1987. “I’m positive! This is devastating!” he wrote on March 20. Even before that, he had been recording how prejudice, rumors, fears, and increasing numbers of illnesses and deaths were ravaging the gay scene. In a 1988 questionnaire for the FAZ newspaper, he answered the question about his “greatest misfortune” with: “AIDS” – and made his own homosexuality public for the first time. When he died in December 1990 at the age of 60, the SZ obituary read: “Bienek became lonely like all those who are condemned to die slowly and in agony” (quoted from a text in Bunte magazine, which is in our archive) – this is how AIDS was written about in the media at the time.

Thanks to a donation from Hanser Verlag, which published Bienek’s diaries under the title “Es gibt nur die Kunst, die Liebe und den Tod. Dazwischen gibt es nichts” (“There is only art, love, and death. There is nothing in between”), this record of the growing uncertainty and isolation of a prominent figure in conservative West Germany in the 1980s can now also be read at Schwules Museum. “Hanser Verlag is pleased to donate a copy of the Bienek diaries to Schwules Museum’s library in order to highlight the author’s unique perspective on the West German literary scene and his struggle with his homosexuality and HIV infection in the context of queer cultural history research. We believe that it would have been in Horst Bienek’s spirit for his diaries to be discovered and read by visitors to the library of Schwules Museum,“ writes Christina Knecht from the publishing house. For writer Hans Pleschinski, the diaries are ”a furioso of gay self-realization and a grand revue of German cultural life”.

Visual (c) Hanser Verlag