Gabrielle Wittkop
Gabrielle Wittkop (born May 27, 1920 in Nantes , France , † December 22, 2002 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a French writer , artist , essayist and journalist .
Life
Born as Gabrielle Ménardeau, she learned to read at the age of four and wrote her first story at the age of eight. She went to Paris to study. There, during the Second World War , she met her future husband, the translator and essayist Justus Franz Wittkop , who was twenty years her senior , who was on the run from the National Socialists and whom she hid with herself. A year after the war in 1946, she moved with him to Germany. There she made a name for herself as a translator and book author - in addition to numerous novels, she wrote a monograph on ETA Hoffmann , which was published in many editions, and translated works by Theodor Adorno , Uwe Johnson , Wolfgang Hildesheimer and Peter Handke into French. In the field of fine arts, her oeuvre mainly comprises collages and graphics, which are stylistically assigned to fantastic realism .
The avowed atheist Wittkop made people sit up and take notice in post-war Germany, not least because of her open attitude towards her bisexuality and her literary role model, the Marquis de Sade .
Faced with an incurable cancer, Gabrielle Wittkop committed suicide on December 22, 2002 in Frankfurt am Main.
Fonts
Gabrielle Wittkop has written numerous books, some of which have been translated into German. Since 1972 the novels Le nécrophile , La Mort de C. and Sérénissime assassinat , the latter appeared in German as The Widower of Venice , as well as the book Le Sommeil de la raison, inspired by Francisco Goya 's picture of the same name, have been published .
The monograph ETA Hoffmann appeared as a non-fiction book in 1966 in Rowohlt-Verlag in self-testimonies and pictorial documents , in Atlantis Verlag she published the cultural-historical treatise Paris, which was written together with her husband . Prism of a city (published in French as Paris. Histoire illustrée ). Von Puppen und Marionetten , a cultural-historical work also written with her husband, was published by Classen-Verlag in 1962.
As a journalist, she wrote numerous articles, including for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
literature
- Josyane Savigneau: Obituary in Le Monde of December 25, 2002.
Web links
- Wittkop, Gabrielle (Gabrielle Wittkop-Ménardeau) - Vita , at lyrikwelt.de, accessed on February 6, 2017.
- Obituary in The Independent .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wittkop, Gabrielle |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wittkop-Ménardeau, Gabrielle |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French writer, artist, essayist and journalist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 27, 1920 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nantes |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 22, 2002 |
| Place of death | Frankfurt am Main |