Günter Steffens

Günter Steffens (born August 8, 1922 in Cologne , † December 6, 1985 in Heidelberg ) was a German writer . Mainly through his second novel, The Approach to Happiness (1976), Steffens became an important author of "New Realism", a loose group of authors around the writer and editor Dieter Wellershoff during the 1970s.

life and work

Günter Steffens grew up in his native city of Cologne. He attended secondary school up to secondary school . Then he began to study painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Cologne and at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf . From 1942 to 1945 he took part in the Second World War as a soldier . He then worked for a time as a portrait painter and from 1949 to 1971 as a copywriter for advertising agencies in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin . He then lived in different places in Europe and from 1974 to 1979 as a freelance writer in Cologne , then later in Heidelberg .

Many of Steffens' literary texts remained fragments. He published his first novel, Der Platz , in 1965. The novel is considered to be one of the few attempts in the German language to write a novel in the style of the French nouveau roman . In his second novel, The Approach to Happiness (1976), he dealt with the cancer death of his wife Anna Elisabeth, a daughter of Ernst Rowohlt , and the subsequent collapse of his own personality and social existence. In the form of an autobiographical record , the novel only records the events in the random form of their perception and memory. This novel caused a stir. Steffens was perceived as an important representative of the “Cologne School of New Realism ”, a group of authors that the writer Dieter Wellershoff gathered around him during his time as a lecturer at the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch in the 1970s. In his third novel, Der Rest , (1981), Steffens connected in content and form to The Approach to Happiness .

Works

• The seat. Cologne 1965.
• The approach to happiness. Cologne 1976.
  • (Changed new edition :) Berlin 2018. ISBN 978-3-945980-25-5 pdf
• The rest. Cologne 1981.

literature

• Steffens, Günter . In: Rudolf Vierhaus (Ed.): German Biographical Encyclopedia (DBE) . 2., revised. and extended edition. tape 9 : Schlumberger – Thiersch . De Gruyter / KG Saur, Berlin / Boston / Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-096502-5 , p. 625–626 ( books.google.de - limited preview).
• Walther Kummerow: Steffens, Günter. In: Killy Literature Lexicon. Volume 11. 2nd ed., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2011, p. 193.
• Christa Merkes: Structures of Perception in Works of New Realism: Theory and Practice of New Realism and the Nouveau Roman. A comparison. P. Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1982.

Web links

• Literature by and about Günter Steffens in the catalog of the German National Library