He was a post-fascist language innovator. The poet Franz Mon has died at the age of 95.
The Frankfurt writer Franz Mon is dead. This was confirmed by a spokesman for S. Fischer Verlag on Friday in Frankfurt am Main. Mon was 95 years old.
With his text montages, he was considered a pioneer of Concrete Poetry, as was Ernst Jandl, with whom Mon founded Typos-Verlag in 1962.
With sound poems and graphic experiments, Mon wanted to revive the language and also emphasize its ideological use. This was a reaction to fascism and the Nazi dictatorship that Mon witnessed. In his language collages and radio plays he borrowed from music, the fine arts and architecture. In addition to numerous radio plays, essays and collages, his most important works include the volumes “artikulationen” (1959), “herzzero” (1967), “Nach Omega undsofer” (1992) and “Freiflug für Fangfragen” (2004). He recently published “Language for Life. Collected Essays” (2016) by S. Fischer Verlag.
Mon worked as an editor in a textbook publisher until 1991 and from the early 1990s was a lecturer in the field of graphics/design in Frankfurt, Offenbach and Karlsruhe. Mon’s real name was Franz Loeffelholz. (dpa)
