Bicknäse has been an author since the mid-1970s, publishing his own poetry collections, a novel, radio plays, and contributions to numerous literary magazines, city newspapers, and anthologies. He pursued various occupations, mostly as a freelancer. From 1982 onward, he lived and worked as a freelance journalist in Italy (in Treviso, Rome, Milan, and Varese). For an extended period, he lived on a high alpine pasture overlooking Lake Maggiore, opposite Monte Verità. He identifies as an agnostic.

 

In 1985, Bicknäse founded the Society for Cultural Exchange (GfK), a non-profit cultural institute for international understanding and art, together with cultural policy-oriented artists, writers, and publicists (AG Göttingen, VR 1723) in Göttingen and Berlin. As a German intermediary organization for foreign cultural policy, the GfK, as an NGO, is committed worldwide to art without borders and dialogue between civil societies. It also participated in the development process of the German Cultural Council. Until 2007, Bicknäse, most recently as chairman of the institute, curated numerous major art exhibitions. Collaborations existed with the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in Stuttgart, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the art academies in Poland, the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR, and the Academy of Arts of the GDR. In this respect, the GfK's work was also seen as a contribution to overcoming the Cold War in cultural policy. (Financing problems led to the temporary closure of the institute in 2006)

 

Since 1988, he has been involved in a company founded in Poland (with branches in Berlin, Strzegom, and Swidnica) by his wife, the chemist Maria Bicknäse (deceased 2016). A wide range of their own construction chemical products were distributed primarily throughout Poland and Russia until 2006. The development of the distribution network, particularly in the 1990s, necessitated numerous extensive trips within these countries, which he also gladly used for his cultural and political initiatives.

​

Socio-political engagement

 

He was alert to world events from an early age and, as a 15-year-old schoolboy in 1962, founded a group of Young European Federalists (JEF) in Wolfsburg. International seminars, primarily in exchange with France, were organized. This fostered the development of young European experts who networked within politics, civil society, and cultural exchange. In 1967, he founded two Amnesty International working groups in Wolfsburg and Braunschweig, which are among the oldest in Germany.

 

The author considered it both a privilege and an obligation to closely engage with current events, both with commitment and with words. He was deeply concerned with the Holocaust, the lack of rights not only for political prisoners, the prosecution of squatters, professional bans, and later, the persecution of RAF sympathizers. Together with writers from Göttingen, he led a patient literature group at the Moringen Regional Hospital in 1980 and in subsequent years.

 

The “Göttinger Tageblatt” writes: “In his (...) epistolary novel, Bicknäse is concerned with dismantling the myth of ‘private’ and ‘public’.” – The monthly magazine “Kultur & Gesellschaft” assesses the author’s commitment: “He addresses the issue, but doesn’t stop there; he goes further. Again and again, he urges us not to sit on the Rubicon and try to catch fish; again and again, he emphasizes the awareness that the ‘I’ can only assert itself through joint action with the ‘you’.”

 

Mills of justice

 

Bicknäse's letter of January 23, 2021, to lawyer Heinrich Hannover and former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder addresses the political stagnation of the 1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany: "(...) As a 19-year-old in 1967, I was sentenced under Section 100e of the German Criminal Code to four weeks of juvenile detention for alleged 'treasonous relations.' Until then, the term 'relations' encompassed anything that could possibly mean contact with organs of the GDR state. As an upstanding and bright young person with a keen interest in socio-political issues, I believed I could already experience the emerging new Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt (...)."

 

The forgotten West German "victims of Cold War injustice" (ISBN 3-7466-8026-3), convicted with a tendency towards secret justice, remain a suppressed taboo subject in the Federal Republic of Germany to this day.

 

At the Seventh Bremen Literary Conversation, Bremen, January 22, 1981, the author says of himself right at the beginning: "I became aware early on of the mutability of applicable law and of the mutability and relativity of prevailing legal relationships (...)."

Am 24.04.1979 berichtet der NDR in der ‚Umschau am Abend‘: „(...) Der Göttinger Schriftsteller hat am eigenen Leib erfahren müssen, wie schnell man heutzutage zum Terroristen gestempelt werden kann. In seinem Berghaus, nahe der schweizerisch-italienischen Grenze, wurde er dort wie ein Terrorist behandelt und zum ‚Gesandten der Roten Armee Fraktion‘ erklärt. Bundesdeutsche Stellen waren an der Planung und Durchführung beteiligt (...).“

 

ECO Verlag Zurich stated in a press release: “On May 9, 1979, Hendrik Bicknäse was released by the Italian authorities after six weeks of pre-trial detention, having been proven innocent. This followed a political controversy in three countries surrounding this controversial writer, who was arrested and publicly defamed in Italy by Italian and German security services as a ‘star terrorist’ – without these men of the dawn being able to provide the slightest evidence for their claims. It would have been a laughable case had an innocent man not spent six weeks in prison. Bicknäse is the quintessential ‘public’ poet, even when writing deeply personal poems. The purely private aspect of his poetry is not an issue.”

​

Memberships

 

In 1976, the author became a member of the Association of German Writers (VS) and was for a time closely associated with the Democratic Cultural Association. In 1977 and 1978, as a member of the AGAV (Working Group of Alternative Publishers and Authors), he participated in organizing the first and second Frankfurt Counter-Book Fairs. He is a member of the Humanist Union and VG Wort (a German collecting society for authors' rights).

 

Awards

 

1976 November Prize of the Standing Committee of the Cultural Days in Berlin;

1980 Lower Saxony Literature Grant;

1982 Travel Grant from the Federal Foreign Office;

1988 Travel Grant from the Federal Foreign Office to Silpakorn University in Bangkok.

 

Miscellaneous

 

Bicknäse's grandmother was the writer Käte Decker from Dargun in Mecklenburg. Her father, Professor Friedrich Hermann Marquardt (1863–1944), headed the experimental laboratory of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory in Berlin from 1887 to 1920.

 

Wikipedia entry about Hendrik Bicknäse

 

Wikipedia entry about the Society for Cultural Exchange