Hans Erich Nossack

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Hans Erich Nossack (right) at the Frankfurt Book Fair 1969

Hans Erich Nossack (born January 30, 1901 in Hamburg ; † November 2, 1977 there ) was a German writer who initially appeared as a poet and dramatist, but later mainly as a prose author.

Life

Memorial plaque for Hans Erich Nossack in Hamburg on the corner of Isestraße / Grindelberg

Hans Erich Nossack came from a wealthy Hamburg family; his father Eugen Nossack ran a trading company (coffee and raw cocoa). In 1919 he made the Abitur at the humanistic high school Johanneum in Hamburg. In the winter semester of 1919/20 he enrolled at the Hamburg University, which was only founded in 1919, for the subjects of art history and literary studies. In 1920 he moved to the University of Jena , where he began to study law , political science and economics, which he broke off in 1922. In the same year Nossack announced his resignation from the Corps Thuringia Jena , which he had belonged from summer 1920 to winter 1922. At the same time, he renounced support from his family and tried to get by as a laborer. He temporarily became a member of the KPD .

Nossack returned to Hamburg in 1923 and married Gabriele Knierer (1896–1987) in 1925, with whom he remained married all his life despite great difficulties. He became a bank clerk and trained as a banker in the following years . In addition to his job, he wrote poetry and dramas.

In 1930 he became a member of the KPD again. In 1933 he retired to his father's company. House searches were carried out by the SA and the police , but he was not arrested. Soon afterwards he took over the management of the import company.

In 1943 his diaries were destroyed by the most violent bombing raid on Hamburg . Nossack was able to rescue some manuscripts from his safe and reconstruct them. The total loss was part of a legend. Apart from a few poems published in the Neue Rundschau in 1942 and 1944, his first publications began in 1947, initially at the Wolfgang Krüger Verlag, Hamburg. The following year the first books in translation appeared in France .

In his prose text Der Untergang (1948), he was one of the first writers in German post-war literature to address the horrors of the bombing war based on the destruction of his hometown Hamburg.

Nossack was elected to the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, in 1949 and in 1950, alongside Hans Henny Jahnn a . a. Founding member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg . In addition, he was a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry , Darmstadt, since 1961 .

Nossack pillow stones, Ohlsdorf cemetery

Nossack was unable to publish between 1949 and 1955 because his publisher Krüger asked him to sell prose in the form of a romance novel, which he could not and would not deliver due to his priority work on other narratives. As a result, Nossack almost completely disappeared from the literary stage for several years. During this time of crisis he made friends with Ernst Kreuder , with whom he had a lively and cordial correspondence. Finally, Nossack switched to Suhrkamp Verlag , where his first and to this day most successful novel was published in 1955, in November at the latest . Suhrkamp then became his in-house publisher and remained so until Nossack's last novel A Happy Person .

In 1956, with the help of the Swiss industrialist Kurt Bösch , he dissolved his father's company and moved to Aystetten near Augsburg . Since then he has worked as a freelance writer.

Together with Rudolf Hagelstange , Nossack was a representative of West German writers at the celebration of Rabindranath Tagore's 100th birthday in New Delhi in 1961 .

In 1962 he moved to Darmstadt . From 1964 to 1968 Nossack was Vice President of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature . In 1965 he moved to Frankfurt am Main , and for the sake of his wife, he returned to Hamburg in December 1969, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1977. His estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach .

At the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg , in the area of ​​the family grave site “Kröhnke / Nossack” at grid square U 22 (south of Nebenallee near Waldstrasse ) there is a pillow stone for Hans Erich Nossack next to his wife's.

Create

In an early study of Nossack's work, Cristof Schmidt identified loneliness in a borderline situation, the search for one's own self and death as the author's great themes. In doing so, he focuses on the moment of departure, on crossing boundaries, but not on what can be found beyond these boundaries. This is also due to the fact that Nossack himself was of the opinion that the essentials could not be conveyed linguistically. In the first post-war years in particular, the accusation that his works were “existentialist” or “nihilistic” was often opposed to adequate appreciation. However, it has been pointed out on several occasions that Nossack does not use the term “nothing” in the sense of a suspension of being, but rather as a designation for a space of new possibilities.

Nossack has been called " the greatest German storyteller of the fantastic after Kafka ".

Works (selection)

  • The gang of Cain. Play in three acts. (1926/1946)
  • The dress rehearsal. A tragedy burlesque with two pauses. (1933/1956)
  • The Hessian country messenger. A German tragedy. (1934) Gerald Funk, Tilman Fischer (eds.), Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-89528-989-7 .
  • Poems. (1947)
  • Nekyia. Report from a survivor. (1947)
  • The downfall. (1948)
  • Interview mit dem Tode (1948), second edition 1950 under the title Dorothea - contains Der Untergang
  • No later than November. Novel. (1955)
  • The Curious One (1955), short story
  • Spiral. Novel of a sleepless night (1956) - contains u. a. Impossible taking of evidence
  • Meeting in the anteroom (1958), two stories
  • The younger brother. Novel. (1958)
  • After the last uprising. A report. (1961)
  • A special case. Play. (1963)
  • You know that. Narrative. (1964)
  • Six studies. (1964), Stories - Insel-Bücherei 805
  • The will of Lucius Eurinus. (1965)
  • The weak position of literature. Speeches and essays. (1966)
  • The d'Arthez case. Novel. (1968)
  • The unknown winner. Novel. (1969)
  • Pseudo-autobiographical glosses. (1971)
  • The stolen melody. Novel. (1972)
  • On call. Report on the epidemic. (1973)
  • To make it short. Miniatures. (1975)
  • A happy person. Memories of Aporée. (1975)
  • The diaries 1943–1977. (Ed. Gabriele Söhling) (1997)
  • Give a sign of life again soon. Correspondence 1943–1956 (Ed. Gabriele Söhling) Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-41278-7 , (2001)

Awards

The Hans Erich Nossack Prize was awarded annually from 1989 to 2007 for the life's work of a writer. The Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz has been awarding the Nossack Academy Prize since 1993 "for pioneering literary work and its congenial and creative transfer".

literature

  • Christof Schmid: Monological Art. Investigations into the work of Hans Erich Nossack . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1968.
  • Christof Schmid (Ed.): About Hans Erich Nossack . Suhrkamp Verlag, edition suhrkamp 406, Frankfurt am Main 1970.
  • Joseph Kraus: Hans E. Nossack . Verlag Edition text and criticism: Authors' books 27, CH Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-406-08419-2 (introduction to the work).
  • Michael Bielefeld: Hans Erich Nossack . in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Critical lexicon for contemporary German literature - KLG. Edition text and criticism, Munich (introduction to the work).
  • Wolfgang Michael Buhr: Hans Erich Nossack. The borderline situation as the key to understanding his work. Studies on borderline situation and border crossing in prose, artist understanding and biography of Hans Erich Nossack. Frankfurt am Main 1994.
  • Gabriele Söhling: Making the silence ring . Thought structure, concept of literature and spellings with Hans Erich Nossack. The Mainzer series, vol. 81, v. Hase & Koehler Verlag Mainz, Mainz 1995, ISBN 3-7758-1332-2 .
  • Thomas Diecks:  Nossack, Hans Erich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 348 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Günter Dammann (Ed.): Hans Erich Nossack. Life - work - context. Königshausen and Neumann Verlag, Würzburg 2000. ISBN 3-8260-1807-9 (collection of articles).
  • Gabriele Söhling: Hans Erich Nossack . Ellert and Richter, Hamburg 2003 ISBN 3-8319-0127-9 (biography).
  • Andrew Williams: Hans Erich Nossack and the Mythical . Königshausen and Neumann Verlag, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 3-8260-2844-9 .
  • Benedikt Viertelhaus “We are not honest enough to despair.” Hans Erich Nossack and the problem of going under. In: Critical Edition. Journal for German Studies and Literature. No. 11 , Bonn 2004.
  • Gabriela Ociepa: After the downfall. Narrative city designs: Kasack - Nossack - Jünger . ATUT / Neisse, Wrocław / Dresden 2006, ISBN 3-934038-55-7 (comparative study).
  • Susanne Bienwald : Hans Erich Nossack. At night on the Lombard bridge. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-455-50025-7 .
  • Hans Erich Nossack: The control panel. With the version of the manuscript . Nimbus. Art and Books, 2015, ISBN 978-3-03850-014-8 .

Movie

  • Inner life of an outsider. Documentation, 2001, 60 min., A film by Susanne Bienwald and Frank Hertweck, production: SWR , summary

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 438.
  2. ↑ Cristof Schmid: Monological Art. Investigations into the work of Hans Erich Nossack . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1968, p. 67.
  3. ^ Gabriele Söhling: Hans Erich Nossack . Ellert and Richter, Hamburg, 2003.
  4. ^ Heinz W. Doll: HE Nossack and Nihilism. In: The German Quarterly 37, 1964, pp. 1-16
  5. ↑ Ingeborg M. Goessl: The action-less room with Hans Erich Nossack . In : months booklet 66, 1974, p. 35.
  6. ↑ Rein A. Zondergeld / Holger E. Wiedenstried: Lexicon of fantastic literature. Weibrecht Verlag, Stuttgart a. a., 1998 ISBN 3-522-72175-6 p. 252
personal data
SURNAME Nossack, Hans Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH November 2nd 1977
Place of death Hamburg