Irena
Vrkljan

Born in Belgrade in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on August 21, 1930, Vrkljan was raised bilingual and attended a German-Yugoslavian school: her mother was originally from Vienna but lived in Belgrade, and her father was a sales representative from Croatia. Following the bombing of Belgrade in 1941, the family decided to move to Zagreb. The city remained central to Vrkljan’s life, along with Berlin, which had an equally strong hold over her in later years.

Vrkljan began publishing poems in Zagreb in the 1950s. She belonged to a group of writers, known as the krugovaši, who contributed to the literary magazine Krugovi (Circles); published in Zagreb between 1952 and 1958, this journal rejected the poetics of social realism and had a major influence on the development of literature in the former Yugoslavia. Even before she relocated to Berlin, Vrkljan translated more than twenty books of contemporary German literature into Croatian and published five volumes of her own poems.  She also wrote screenplays for films and translated radio plays.

At the age of thirty, Vrkljan was given carte blanche to develop a series of cultural programs for the recently established Croatian television broadcasting company Prior to taking up her studies in Berlin, she and director Ante Viculin co-authored sixty twenty-minute films under the heading Portreti i susreti (Portraits and Encounters), for which Vrkljan also wrote the screenplays. Visually evocative texts and associative, experimental montage transformed these television features into explorations of places and lives.

When Irena Vrkljan came to Berlin in 1966, she belonged to the first generation of women who were able to study film in West Germany. Along with Helke Sander and Gerda Katharina Kramer, she was one of only three female students in the DFFB’s first intake (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin / German Film and Television Academy). The modest grant offered to Vrkljan by the DFFB would not have been enough to pay her living costs. What enabled her to study in Berlin was the larger grant she received as a fellow in the literature section of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP).

Not long after she started studying at the DFFB, Vrkljan met her later life partner, Benno Meyer-Wehlack (1928–2014), a novelist, dramaturge, and writer of radio and television plays. Their personal and professional partnership lasted until Meyer-Wehlack’s death in 2014 and had a profound influence on the work of both. The couple co-authored around 100 scripts for radio plays, books, films, and television projects; active in both the German- and the Croatian-speaking world, they translated between the two languages and created an oeuvre whose dual authorship also interwove the respective cultural and historical contexts.

Irena Vrkljan was in the same year as the students who mounted a strike at the DFFB and occupied the film school for several days in May 1968. Although she did not take part in her fellow students’ occupation of the school, she did not actively withhold her solidarity: she participated in lengthy debates, ate “solidarity buns,” and attended political demonstrations.
War and fascism, which the 1968 protesters associated with their parents’ generation, were experienced by Vrkljan at first hand in Belgrade and Zagreb. She was a witness to external and internal devastations that shaped her writing and also provided the backdrop for the four films she made at the DFFB.

Irena Vrkljan left behind an extensive body of aesthetically and politically significant work that met with a very different reception in Germany and (the former) Yugoslavia. Having lived in Zagreb and Berlin for half a century, she wrote in two languages and told about life between these worlds, which were inseparable but never united. Her complex biography led to her being active in historically interesting times and contexts, not least as part of the community of exiled artists and writers who lived and worked in Berlin during the 1970s and 80s. Vrkljan’s work contains numerous references, quotations, anecdotes, and pseudonyms with which she paid homage to others: longtime friends such as the Croatian painter Miljenko Stančić, the film director Ante Viculin, and those from her circle in Berlin (Claudio Lange, Filippo Esteban, and of course Benno Meyer-Wehlack), but also other artists and writers who influenced her work, such as Marina Zwetajewa, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Walter Benjamin.

After Benno Meyer-Wehlack’s death in 2014, Irena Vrkljan returned to Zagreb for good. She continued writing until her death on March 23, 2021

Text: Borjana Gaković, Tobias Hering