Dietrich Schwanitz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dietrich Schwanitz (born April 23, 1940 in Werne an der Lippe, North Rhine-Westphalia , † probably December 17, 2004 in Hartheim near Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German English scholar , literary scholar and author .

Life

Dietrich Schwanitz grew up as the third son of a teacher couple in Bergkamen -Rünthe in the northern Ruhr area and after the Second World War partly with Mennonite mountain farmers in Switzerland , up to the age of eleven without attending school. After his return he was accepted into high school.

He studied English , history and philosophy at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster , in London , Philadelphia and Freiburg im Breisgau. At the city's Albert-Ludwigs-University , he was in 1971 with the dissertation George Bernard Shaw - Artistic design and messy world of Dr. phil. PhD . In 1973 he married; with his wife Gesine he had a son and a daughter. He first taught at the University of Mannheim , from 1978 to 1997 at the University of Hamburg as a professor of English literature and culture. Schwanitz suffered from Parkinson's disease and went into early retirement in 1997. It was only after his death that it became known that he had had Huntington's disease and not Parkinson's disease .

Schwanitz is the author of the novel Der Campus , published in 1995, which deals with political intrigue and the instrumentalization of allegations of sexual harassment using the example of a novel located in Hamburg University (with clearly recognizable similarities to real people). The book, in the story of which the sociologically significant distinction between “formal” and “informal” organizational areas and their different components of power appears, became a bestseller, especially after it was filmed by director Sönke Wortmann with Heiner Lauterbach and Sandra Speichert and in February 1998 in the German cinemas came.

Also located at the University of Hamburg and as a continuation of the novel The campus following, of course, with other protagonists, Schwanitz is' crime comedy The Circle (1998), a satire on the contemporary German academic life and his all-German higher education policy. The German university is portrayed as matted, filthy, sunk, grotesquely bureaucratic, mediocre in principle and therefore fundamentally unreformable; its “desolate state” can “only be veiled with difficulty” by the new German power elite. In the crime story of the book, as in the campus , peculiarities and alleged undesirable developments from the university systems of West Germany and the GDR (before and after reunification) are presented.

Dietrich Schwanitz 'non-fiction book Education. Everything You Need to Know (1999) also became a bestseller. As an Anglophone-oriented Homme de Lettres , he makes a foray into the modern knowledge of history , literature , philosophy , art and music , which in his opinion should be part of the educational canon in Germany . This compilation caused controversial discussions in critical circles. Schwanitz was also a critic of the 1996 spelling reform .

In 2001 Schwanitz acquired the Salmen inn in Hartheim and in 2002 had the trompe l'œil painter Andrea Berthel-Duffing paint a “ Shakespearised ” version of Paolo Veronese's The Banquet in the House of Levi . There he was found dead on December 21, 2004. Schwanitz presumably died as a result of a pulmonary embolism . The autopsy revealed the probable day of death on December 17, 2004. In 2005, the Hartheim community took over the Salmen inn . There has been a thought room there since 2017 with the exhibition “Schwanitz, Shakespeare and the Salmen”. This Schwanitz Museum is supported by the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

plant

After decades of teaching at university, Dietrich Schwanitz quickly became known in 1995 as the author of the German university novel The Campus . With him, Schwanitz transferred the ambitious US and British entertainment literature of the 20th century, especially the satirical novels by David Lodge , to German conditions. In addition, Schwanitz criticized the media and big capitalist influenced process of the commercialization of culture and civilization , education and the university as the " carnivalization " of European civilization and culture. In literary studies he appeared among other things since the beginning of the 1990s through pioneering contributions to systems theoretical literary studies .

Fonts

Web links

Wikiquote: Dietrich Schwanitz  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Best-selling author found dead . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 17, 2010 (date given on the website, probably correct date at the end of December 2004), accessed on February 10, 2017.
  2. ↑ a b Bettina Schulze: Gasthaus "Zum Salmen": How Shakespeare came to Hartheim . In: Badische Zeitung , September 10, 2011, accessed on February 10, 2017.
  3. ↑ https://www.salmen-hartheim.de/
personal data
SURNAME Schwanitz, Dietrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German English scholar and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Werne an der Lippe, North Rhine-Westphalia
DATE OF DEATH at December 17, 2004
Place of death Hartheim near Freiburg im Breisgau