Edgar Hilsenrath

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Edgar Hilsenrath (2010)
Edgar Hilsenrath signing a book during the celebration of his 80th birthday

Edgar Hilsenrath (born on 2. April 1926 in Leipzig , died on the 30th December 2018 in Wittlich ) was a German writer who primarily for its own survival from the Holocaust influenced works night and The Nazi & the hairdresser as well as The Tale of last thought is known and has received numerous awards.

Life

Edgar Hilsenrath was the son of a Jewish merchant. He grew up in Halle . Before the “ Reichspogromnacht ” in November 1938, he, his mother and his three years younger brother Manfred fled to their grandparents in Sereth in Bucovina ( Romania ). The father was originally supposed to follow, but this made the outbreak of war impossible; he got to France , where he survived the war . In 1941 Edgar Hilsenrath, his brother and mother, as well as all his friends and relatives from Sereth were deported to the Mohyliw-Podilskyj ghetto in the Romanian-occupied " Transnistria ". When the ghetto was liberated by the Red Army in March 1944 , he walked back to Sereth and from there to Chernivtsi . Through the Ben Gurion organization , Hilsenrath came to Palestine together with other Jewish survivors and with foreign passports . Both on his way there and in Palestine itself, he was captured several times, but each time he was released again after a short time.

He lived as a casual worker in Palestine, but did not feel at home there and decided in 1947 to go to his now reunited family in Lyon , where he learned the craft of furrier at his father's request . In the early 1950s he emigrated to New York . There Edgar Hilsenrath earned his living by doing odd jobs, at the same time he wrote his first novel Nacht . This novel initially had considerable difficulties when it was first published in Germany, as the publisher's management (more precisely: the publisher's internal opposition) withdrew the work shortly after it was published due to personal resentment (see the reference to the demolition by Raddatz under " # Essays "). The following novel Der Nazi & der Friseur , which was written during a long stay in Munich and New York, was first published by Hilsenrath in English translation in the USA. This novel gave him his worldwide breakthrough as a writer - and ultimately also in Germany . In 1975 Edgar Hilsenrath returned to Germany because of the German language and from then on lived in Berlin .

Edgar Hilsenrath was a member of the PEN Center Germany . According to Hilsenrath's publisher Ken Kubota, Hilsenrath had Jewish roots, but was an atheist: “He didn't believe in any God, his position was always unchanged.” After his first wife died in 2005, he remarried in 2009 and since then has lived with his second wife for up to his death in December 2018 in the Vulkaneifel . Edgar Hilsenrath succumbed to the consequences of pneumonia in a hospital in Wittlich at the age of 92 .

plant

Since his first work Nacht , in which he describes his experiences as a survivor of the ghetto in a cruelly realistic way, he has thematically circled the Holocaust , whereby he did not directly accuse the perpetrator and victim roles in black and white, rather he wrote in his Complete work against oblivion and thus sought to erect a monument to “the lowest level in the ghetto” - with the guilty conscience of the survivor. While Nacht was still written in the naturalistic style, Hilsenrath switched to expressive alienations in his later works, such as satire , grotesque or fairy tales. Der Spiegel wrote of his novel Der Nazi & der Friseur : “… a satire about Jews and the SS . A picaresque novel , grotesque, bizarre and sometimes cruel laconic, tells of dark times with black humor. ”The book, written in 1968/1969, first appeared in an English translation published in the USA in 1971 under the title The Nazi & the Barber, a Tale of Vengeance . Even after more than 2 million copies had already been sold in English, French and Italian translations, over 60 German publishers rejected the manuscript, including S. Fischer , Hanser , Hoffmann and Campe , Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Luchterhand , Rowohlt , Scherz and Wagenbach . So it finally appeared in August 1977 in a small Cologne publisher, the literary publisher Helmut Braun . The first edition of 10,000 copies was quickly sold out, and two more editions followed shortly afterwards. The book was, among others, Heinrich Boell in the time discussed on 9 December 1977 when very positive. In the meantime, over 250,000 copies have been sold in Germany. The book was published in 22 countries and 16 languages ​​worldwide. In the novel The Fairy Tale of the Last Thought from 1989, for which Hilsenrath received the Alfred Döblin Prize , the author dealt with memory and historiography. By describing the genocide of the Armenians and relating the Holocaust to it, he accused all kinds of genocide and warned against oblivion. The chosen form of the fairy tale sarcastically addresses denial, but also means that a story is being told that no longer has any eyewitnesses.

Hilsenrath's works have been translated into eighteen languages ​​and have been sold over five million times worldwide. Many of the front pages were designed by the artist Natascha Ungeheuer , a friend of Hilsenrath. In Germany, most of his works were published by Piper Verlag , but the latter returned the rights to the author in 2003. Between 2003 and 2008, Dittrich Verlag (initially based in Cologne, since 2006 in Berlin), with Helmut Braun as editor, presented Edgar Hilsenrath's collected works in ten volumes, which, in addition to the previous eight book titles, included the 9th volume You drummed with your fists in time with prose pieces and newspaper articles that had been published scattered up to then as well as the completely new novel Berlin ... Endstation as the 10th volume .

After a settlement reached on February 22, 2011 at the Berlin Regional Court, the cooperation between Hilsenrath and Dittrich Verlag ended on December 31, 2011. However, on July 25, 2012, a press release from Hilsenrath's authorized representative, Ken Kubota, followed. who accused Dittrich, among other things, of "having made multiple incorrect statements with considerable shortfalls to the disadvantage of Edgar Hilsenrath" and "having issued licenses for foreign-language editions contrary to the author's contract". In addition, "false reports" were published on Deutschlandfunk and an "incomplete account" was published in Spiegel about the dispute between those involved in this dispute . Dittrich Verlag responded to this on July 27, 2012 with a press release that essentially denied these allegations.

The remaining copies of the Dittrich Verlag designed and supervised by then Hardcover - complete works were used by Ken Kubota over its small publishing owl of Minerva sold. The hereof meantime (as of January 1, 2019) out of print volumes night , Fuck America and The Story of the Last Thought was the new publisher as softcover - revisions out and put them in the same appearance as an English translation before.

Awards (selection)

bibliography

Novels, short stories

Discography

Radio plays

literature

Monographs

  • Susanna Amirkhanyan: Yes, chotel naruschit 'molchanije. Yerevan 2006, ISBN 99941-1-194-9 . (Russian)
  • Jennifer Bjornstad: Functions of humor in German Holocaust literature: Edgar Hilsenrath, Günter Grass, and Jurek Becker. ISBN 0-493-23274-5 .
  • Stephan Braese : The other memory. Jewish authors in West German post-war literature. Philo, Berlin / Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-86572-227-X . (also Habil. script) (Hilsenrath is one of the three authors who are presented as a focus).
  • Helmut Braun : I'm not Ranek. Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-937717-09-9 .
  • Claudia Brecheisen: Literature of the Holocaust: Identity and Judaism with Jakov Lind, Edgar Hilsenrath and Jurek Becker. 1993.
  • Volker Dittrich : Two sides of the memory. The brothers Edgar and Manfred Hilsenrath. Dittrich, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-937717-75-3 .
  • Dietrich Dopheide: The grotesque and black humor in Edgar Hilsenrath's novels. Berlin 2000, ISBN 978-3-934479-36-4 . Zugl. Dissertation Freie Universität Berlin, beginning / reading sample (PDF)
  • Alexandra Heberger: Fascism criticism and image of Germany in the novels by Irmgard Keun "After midnight" and Edgar Hilsenrath "The Nazi and the hairdresser": a comparison. 2002.
  • Susann Möller: Where the victims become perpetrators, the perpetrators make themselves victims: the reception of Edgar Hilsenrath's first two novels in Germany and the USA. 1991.
  • Jennifer L. Taylor: Writing as revenge: Jewish German identity in post-Holocaust German literary works; reading survivor authors Jurek Becker, Edgar Hilsenrath and Ruth Klüger. 1998.

Anthologies

  • Helmut Braun (Hrsg.): In love with the German language. The Odyssey of Edgar Hilsenrath. Dittrich-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-937717-17-X .
  • Thomas Kraft (Ed.): Edgar Hilsenrath. Telling the untold. Munich 1996.

Essays

  • Susanna Amirkhanyan: Edgar Hilsenrath and Armenia . In: Armenian-German correspondence , No. 114, 2001, no. 4.
  • Martin A. Hainz : FUCK, z. E.g .: FUCK AMERICA. In: Helmut Braun (Hrsg.): In love with the German language. The Odyssey of Edgar Hilsenrath. Dittrich, Berlin, Akademie der Künste 2005, pp. 69–76.
  • Ingeborg Drewitz and Fritz J. Raddatz : Two reviews of night. In: Fischer-Almanach der Literaturkritik 1978/79. ISBN 3-596-26450-2 . (Ingeborg Drewitz in Der Tagesspiegel , (tendency: positive) and Fritz J. Raddatz in Die Zeit (tendency: extremely negative))
  • Marko Martin : My friend Edgar. In: Die Welt , August 30, 2007. (Report on Edgar Hilsenrath.)
  • Peter Stenberg: Edgar Hilsenrath and Jakov Lind meet at the employment office in Netanya, Palestine… In: Sander L. Gilman , Jack Zipes (eds.): Yale companion to Jewish writing and thought in German culture 1096–1996. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven 1997, pp. 642-647.

Testimonials

Web links

Commons : Edgar Hilsenrath  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Biographies:

  • Edgar Hilsenrath. In: Website of the exile PEN.
  • Hajo Jahn : Hilsenrath, Edgar. In: Exile Archives. Archived from the original on March 18, 2014 (biography with numerous links).;
  • Jordi Roca: Edgar Hilsenrath. In: Mertin literary agency. September 20, 2018 (English).;

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ken Kubota: On the life and work of Edgar Hilsenrath. Obituary on the occasion of his death on December 30, 2018. In: hilsenrath.de. December 31, 2018, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Ulrich Seidler: A conversation on the evening of a writer's life: I've written enough. In: Berliner Zeitung . February 27, 2010, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  3. ↑ a b Based on Volker Hage: Authors; The two sides . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 2012, p. 116-117 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Martin Doerry , Volker Hage : Guilty because I survived . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 2005, pp. 170 ( online interview. The Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath on his years in the ghetto, the profession of a writer and his new novel about the massacre of the Armenians).
  5. ↑ Helmut Braun: Afterword . In: Edgar Hilsenrath: The Nazi & the hairdresser. Dittrich, Cologne 2004 (= Collected Works, Vol. 2). ISBN 3-937717-01-3 . Pp. 467-478. here p. 472.
  6. ↑ Helmut Braun: Afterword . In: Edgar Hilsenrath: The Nazi & the hairdresser. Dittrich, Cologne 2004. pp. 467-478. here p. 474.
  7. ↑ a b Gerrit Schoff, Volker Dittrich: Press release: Background of the separation of publisher and author Edgar Hilsenrath. (pdf, 178 kB) Dittrich Verlag, July 27, 2012, archived from the original on September 23, 2015 ; accessed on December 31, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Press release Ken Kubota / Freundeskreis Edgar Hilsenrath e. V .: Wrong reports on Deutschlandfunk and incomplete presentation in the current issue of "Spiegel". (pdf, 182 kB) In: Owl of Minerva Press. July 25, 2012, accessed on December 31, 2018 ( doi: 10.4444 / 10.10000.de ).
  9. ↑ Homepage of the publishing house Eule der Minerva
personal data
SURNAME Hilsenrath, Edgar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2018
Place of death Wittlich