Georg M. Oswald

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Georg M. Oswald, 2017

Georg M. Oswald (born August 5, 1963 in Munich ) is a German writer and lawyer .

Life

Georg M. Oswald grew up in Weßling near Munich . He studied law at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . After completing his legal clerkship at the Regional Court of Munich I, he passed the second state examination in 1993. He has been practicing as a lawyer in Munich since 1994.

Oswald made his literary debut in 1995 with the short story volume Das Loch . Since then he has published numerous essays and articles in magazines and newspapers such as Akzente , Süddeutsche Zeitung , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Die Zeit, as well as for the night studio and the culture journal of Bayerischer Rundfunk .

In 1995 and 2000 he took part in the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt .

In 2000 his highly acclaimed novel Everything that counts was published , with which he became known to a larger audience. From 2001 to 2007 he moderated the stories from the big city , a literary stage in the Giesingen pub "Kilombo".

From 2007 to 2013 he wrote the column How was your day, honey? for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Together with Juli Zeh, Georg M. Oswald took over the Tübingen poetics lectureship in 2010 .

From 2013 to 2016 Georg M. Oswald was the head of Berlin Verlag .

Since 2017 he has lived again as a writer and lawyer in Munich.

He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the PEN Center Germany .

plant

Oswald made his literary debut in 1995 with the short story volume Das Loch. Nine novels from the neighborhood . In it, he sketches bourgeois life in his Bavarian homeland at the end of the Second World War in a bizarre way. Walter Hinck ( FAZ ) recognizes in Oswald's language “a parodic distance to his own technical language” and states: “His real domain is the family party, at which he brings together small and medium-sized citizens in a humorous arrangement”.

Oswald's legal background finds its way into his letter again and again. He uses and implements the “cultural capital” gained in the legal profession in literary terms, e.g. B. by telling of legal dilemmas and “events that cannot be captured by law” in “aesthetically highly artificial texts”.

This also applies to his first novel from 1997. In Lichtenberg's case , written in the style of a legal protocol, the author deals with the state of the German judicial system. At its center is Carl Lichtenberg, who is on remand because he is said to have murdered his wealthy mother-in-law. Lichtenberg doesn't want it to have been, but he is by no means an innocent angel - he speculated bankrupt shortly before. Oswald has "the society tableau in the professional grip, [...] the satire slides over abysses", judges Der Spiegel . This debut is "an intelligent, sarcastic pleasure".

Even Party Boy 1998 touched a legal issue. For the novel, Oswald had researched America's most wanted serial killer Andrew Cunanan on the Internet . Some of this research goes directly into the novel about the murder of a fashion designer in Miami. Der Spiegel praises this approach as a “new form of the internet novel” without Oswald creating another fearful vision of the web as a playground for murderers and computer intelligences. Volker Weidermann (for the daily newspaper ) sees the author in his moral claim in the tradition of Heinrich Böll .

In the year he took part in the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize , Georg M. Oswald achieved his literary breakthrough with the novel Everything that counts , which was awarded the International Prize in 2000 and translated into more than ten languages. The novel is about the failure of a careerist in the strictly profit-oriented economy at the beginning of the 21st century, about the slipping of a failed banker into the gangster milieu. The protagonist's crash is told relentlessly and precisely, according to Volker Weidermann in the daily newspaper . According to Der Spiegel , Oswald presents an abysmal novel full of lacony and cynicism.

In Heaven from 2003 is an adolescence novel set by Lake Starnberg . In it, Oswald shows - with ironic distance, but without any disgust - the world of the beautiful and the newly rich in all its inner emptiness, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . The novel is about Marcel, the twenty-year-old son of a lawyer, who tells of his traumatic last summer vacation. For Christoph Schröder ( Frankfurter Rundschau , Die ZEIT ), Im Himmel is a bitterly angry novel with unsettling effects, a satirical panopticon of the wealthy anti-social and at the same time an elegant broadside against a cynical money nobility.

"The entanglement of money, justice and politics are one of his body-and-stomach topics", writes Rainer Moritz about Georg M. Oswald in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and finds this again in Vom Geist deretze from 2007. There, a group of different characters from different backgrounds meet in court after a car accident; begin a series of power games. Hubert Winkels ( Die ZEIT ) finds the novel a little harmless, but it has a lot of charm and verve and a clever ending. Meike Feßmann ( Tagesspiegel ) reads a “precise portrait of a society that has long since ceased to function solely according to the laws of politics and economy” and certifies Oswald to describe “informal control loops with flying colors”.

With Unter Feinden , the author presents a 2012 thriller about failed integration and drugs in a problematic district of Munich. The novel was filmed by Lars Becker for ZDF under the same title and broadcast on Arte on November 15, 2013 . For Hannes Hintermeier ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) it is a “Munich milieu study at its finest, which does not neglect the tension”. From petty drug crime to international terrorism, everything is included, according to Gustav Seibt from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Oswald tells a carefully constructed story, full to the brim with social reality. Also for the TIME is Scorsese a brilliant thriller, "cool and clear" on the surface - but "including simmering social inequalities".

After 55 reasons to become a lawyer , in which Oswald portrays his profession, his latest novel will appear in 2017. Everyone You Love describes the crash of a successful lawyer as well as a father-son drama, told from the "asshole perspective" which Oswald masters according to Christian Buß ( Der Spiegel ). A divorced lawyer travels to Africa with his new girlfriend to fix the relationship with his son who lives there. But that does not succeed, and the reader quickly finds himself in the “shallows of broken family ties”. For Christoph Schröder ( Süddeutsche Zeitung ), All You Love is a fast-paced novel, enriched with a lot of shady characters. For Wolfgang Schneider ( FAZ ), "his attraction (...) lies in the many imponderables, as firm and dryly realistic as the tone of the novel appears". Oswald follows his “literary passion”, “to make wealthy and successful men stumble”, “stage the father-son drama as a clash of cultures” and “go all out”.

In 2018 the non-fiction book Our Basic Rights. Which ones we have, what they mean and how we protect them published. In it he explains and analyzes basic rights in understandable language and shows their relevance for current political and social discourses. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Andreas Zielke calls the genre that Oswald creates for this book “Interventionist Citizenship Training” and says: “Especially those citizens who currently want to defend the West against the unreasonable demands of freedom can tap into this in a manner that is as unobtrusive as it is self-examining that it is the West itself with its genuine Enlightenment tradition that is reflected in these unreasonable demands. "

The novel Vorleben was published in February 2020 . He explores the seductive power of doubt and asks how much one can suspect someone one loves. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung , it is a "thriller that you urgently want to read to the end", for Stefan Maelck from NDR Oswald tells "dense and poetic, exciting and mysterious at the same time".

Oswald repeatedly speaks up in cultural-political debates, for example in connection with the Esra judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court and in the debate about the appearance of right-wing publishers at book fairs .

Awards (selection)

Publications

Filmography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Archive of the Bachmann Prize
  2. ^ Family hell in the tropical paradise In: Der Spiegel . 20th March 2017.
  3. ↑ geschichtenausdergrossenstadt.de
  4. ↑ germ.uni-tuebingen.de
  5. ↑ issuu.com
  6. ↑ leipziger-buchmesse.de
  7. ^ Still life with petty bourgeois Walter Hinck, Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 21, 1995
  8. ↑ Georg M. Oswald: “The end comes when it is there!” Günter Keil, Münchner Feuilleton, April 16, 2017
  9. ↑ Legal German can be so beautiful. Anne Haeming, KarriereSPIEGEL, July 27, 2013
  10. ↑ a b c Georg M. Oswald: Contingency + Law (1) Jan Drees, readmitlinks.de, September 13, 2014
  11. ↑ a b Munich screened by Der SPIEGEL, February 17, 1997
  12. ^ 3 Enigmatic murderer Bettina Koch, Der SPIEGEL, March 1, 1998
  13. ↑ perlentaucher.de - review note on Die Tageszeitung, August 26, 2000
  14. ↑ Portrait Georg M. Oswald leipziger-buchmesse.de
  15. ↑ perlentaucher.de - review note on Die Tageszeitung, August 26, 2000
  16. ↑ Always be a shark, Der SPIEGEL, August 7, 2000
  17. ^ The city in the novel FAS, updated March 9, 2008
  18. ↑ perlentaucher.de - review note on Frankfurter Rundschau, October 8, 2003
  19. ↑ a b Here the police are investigating themselves Christoph Schröder, Die ZEIT, February 3, 2012
  20. ^ Power games Rainer Moritz, NZZ, January 22, 2008
  21. ^ About the spirit of television, Hubert Winkels, Die ZEIT, February 7, 2008
  22. ↑ On the Spirit of Laws Meike Feßmann, Der Tagesspiegel, October 10, 2007
  23. ↑ Knut Cordsen, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, March 19, 2012, renounces anything human
  24. ^ Munich burns Hannes Hintermeier, FAZ, January 27, 2012
  25. ^ Munich and its Banlieue Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 1, 2012
  26. ↑ 55 good reasons Corinna Budras, FAZ, updated on June 27, 2013
  27. ^ Family hell in the tropical paradise of Christian Buß, SPIEGEL online, March 20, 2017
  28. ↑ A puke goes through hell Christian Böhm, Die WeLT, May 11, 2017
  29. ↑ Mister Joe knows Christoph Schröder, Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 29, 2017
  30. ↑ Very little for so much money Wolfgang Schneider, FAZ, June 1, 2017
  31. ↑ What is German and why? Andreas Zielcke, Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 21, 2018
  32. ↑ piper.de past life
  33. ↑ Pasta food as a show Christian Mayer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 March 2020
  34. ↑ Crime about a terrible suspicion Stefan Maelck, NDR, April 2nd, 2020
  35. ^ Esra, ten years later - turning the fictionalization valve Georg M. Oswald, Verfassungsblog, July 25, 2017
  36. ^ "Excited differences of opinion are part of it" Georg M. Oswald in conversation with Joachim Scholl, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, January 10, 2018
  37. ↑ wuerth
personal data
SURNAME Oswald, Georg M.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH 5th August 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich