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 about the fired editor-in-chief Daniel Käfer and the gendarme Simon Polt, which were also made into films.
January 27, 2024, 5:43 p.m
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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. “Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Komarek tried to exploit the possibilities of this young medium and also to design the written word specifically for the requirements of radio,” the author once outlined the situation on his website.
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.
ORF
Erwin Steinhauer played the character Simon Polt in six TV films.
Breakthrough at the end of the 1990s
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 about landscapes from Ausseerland to Hungary. But Alfred Komarek’s big breakthrough came at the end of the 1990s.
The Polt figure was cult
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 about 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.
Several awards
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.
Text: APA/Red.