2024-01-27 18:39:55
The cult author Alfred Komarek died in Vienna at the age of 78, as the “NÖN” reports online. His list of works includes around 80 books and ranges from “The Easter Bunny Eberhard in Love” to “Weird Birds”, where he also portrayed himself – as a caveman. What made him particularly popular were the iconic book series regarding the fired editor-in-chief Daniel Käfer and the gendarme Simon Polt, which were also made into films.
Alfred Komarek was born on October 5, 1945 in Bad Aussee. He studied law and began writing as a student because he “urgently needed money”: he wrote glosses and reports for newspapers, but soon also texts for the radio. “Komarek tried to exploit the possibilities of this young medium back in the 1960s and 1970s and also to design the written word specifically for the requirements of radio,” the author once outlined the situation on his homepage.
He wrote features, radio plays, essays, feature articles, stories and TV scripts for ORF, but also for Bavarian and Hessian Radio. For example, he worked on documentaries for the “Universum” series.
The first volumes of stories were created with names such as “The Fallen Christmas Angel”, “The Easter Bunny Eberhard in Love” and “Otto, the Christmas Raven”. He contributed texts to numerous non-fiction books – for example regarding landscapes from Ausseerland to Hungary. But Alfred Komarek’s big breakthrough came at the end of the 90s.
In 1998, the village policeman Simon Polt came to life in Komarek’s first crime novel “Polt Must Cry” – the beginning of a success story. The book was awarded the “Glauser” Prize as the best German-language crime novel of the year. This was followed by “Flowers for Polt”, “Heaven, Polt and Hell”, “Polterabend”, “Polt.” and at the end of 2015 “Old, but Polt”. Not least thanks to the film adaptations with Erwin Steinhauer in the title role, Polt became a cult figure.
Like the Polt novels, the books regarding Daniel Käfer (“The Villas of Frau Hürsch”, “The Shadow Clock”, “Fool’s Winter” and “Doppelblick”), a newly dismissed editor-in-chief following in the footsteps of his childhood, were also successful. Here too, Peter Simonischek, an audience favorite, gave the character his face in the lead role.
Both characters are closely connected to Komarek’s own life. Polt is inextricably linked to the Weinviertel, where Komarek owned an old press house in the Pulkautal for decades. The ex-editor-in-chief Käfer learned a lot from Komarek’s homeland, the Styrian Salzkammergut. Komarek also demonstrated that he was a specialist in unusual characters, not least with the collection of stories “Alfred”, in which he made a Viennese garbage can the protagonist and had him meet a wise man on a mountain of rubbish.
This literary work did not go unappreciated. In 2011, Alfred Komarek, who lived in Bad Aussee, Vienna and the Weinviertel, was awarded the Austrian Book Trade’s Honorary Prize for Tolerance in Thought and Action. “For Polt, as for me, being tolerant is a way of getting along to some extent with the world and people,” the essayist and narrator said at the time. The “Great Josef Krainer Prize” followed in Styria in 2017.
The Lower Austrian governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner (ÖVP) emphasized that Komarek was not only a great writer and wonderful person, but also an ambassador for Lower Austria. “With his ‘Polt’ novels and the film adaptations of his works, he has carried the beauty of the Weinviertel far beyond the borders of Lower Austria. In fact, with his ‘Polt’ novels, he has even created an unmistakable monument to the Weinviertel and was closely linked to his adopted home of Lower Austria “, said the state governor in a broadcast on Saturday.
Art and Culture State Secretary Andrea Mayer (Greens) said in a broadcast: “Alfred Komarek was a writer through and through. As a young man, he began writing for the newspaper and working for the radio and has written a wealth of popular non-fiction books regarding his favorite regions Austria, the Weinviertel, the Waldviertel, the Wachau, and authored children’s books, features, feature articles, essays and screenplays.” Mayer also paid tribute to the deceased that he was a gifted judge of character.
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