Heimo Schwilk

Heimo Schwilk at a reading in Potsdam in 2008

Heimo Schwilk (born October 23, 1952 in Stuttgart ) is a German journalist and author .

Life

Heimo Schwilk comes from an educated middle class family from Esslingen am Neckar, where he attended the humanistic Georgii-Gymnasium from 1964 to 1968 . From 1968 to 1972 he was a student at the Protestant theological monastery schools in Maulbronn and Blaubeuren and passed his Abitur in 1972. After military service as a paratrooper officer, he studied German, history and philosophy in Tübingen from 1976 to 1981 and graduated with the state examination. He then worked as a freelance journalist ( Esslinger Zeitung , Stuttgarter Zeitung , Rheinischer Merkur , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Die Presse, etc.) and in the spring of 1986 he joined the feature section of the Bonn weekly newspaper "Rheinischer Merkur / Christ und Welt ". Since 1991 he has been working as a senior editor for “ Welt am Sonntag ” in Berlin. In 1991 he was awarded the Theodor Wolff Prize “for outstanding journalism” for his reports on the Gulf War. As a journalist, Schwilk reported from Saudi Arabia in February 1991 not only for “Rheinischer Merkur”, but also for ZDF's “Today Journal” . In the same year he published the experience report “What was kept from us. The Gulf War under Censorship ”(Ullstein), which deals with American information policy.

Schwilk became known as the author and editor of a number of books about the writer Ernst Jünger , with whom he was friends. Most recently, the new edition of the acclaimed biography “Ernst Jünger. A Life of the Century ”(2014). In the nineties Schwilk also appeared as a political publicist; the anthology " The Self-Confident Nation " (edited together with Ulrich Schacht ), which also contains the controversial essay "Swelling Bocksgesang" by Botho Strauss , sparked a public controversy in autumn 1994; In 1997, the equally hotly discussed volume of essays “For a Berlin Republic” followed .

In 1994 and 1995 Schwilk, along with Ulrich Schacht, Rainer Zitelmann and Klaus Rainer Röhl, was one of the initiators of the anti-anti-fascist Berlin appeal and the appeal “8. May 1945 - Against Forgetting " , which was intended to commemorate the oppression in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe after the" liberation "by the Allies.

In addition to Botho Strauss, the authors of the anthologies that Schwilk edited included Manfred Brunner , Peter Gauweiler , Klaus Modick , Alfred Mechtersheimer , Martin Mosebach , Heiner Müller , Ernst Nolte , Hanns-Josef Ortheil , Lutz Rathenow , Klaus Rainer Röhl , and Rüdiger Safranski , Hans-Peter Schwarz , Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt , Peter Sloterdijk , Robert Spaemann , Eberhard Straub , Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Michael Wolffsohn . Schwilk also works closely with the cultural scientist Uwe Wolff .

In 2006 Schwilk received his doctorate from Professor Hans Dieter Zimmermann in German studies at the Institute for German Philology, General and Comparative Literature at the TU Berlin. Heimo Schwilk was the managing editor of Welt am Sonntag until 2015 . Today he lives near Berlin . In 2014 he was awarded the Premio Comisso for the best biography in Treviso / Italy.

In 2019 he signed the "Appeal against hatred and violence, for a culture of debate!", Which instead of hateful slogans against the AfD, calls for a legal dispute with the party.

Works

Ernst Jünger. Life and work in pictures and texts , Klett-Cotta 1988
The echo of the images. In honor of Ernst Jünger , Klett-Cotta 1990
Turning point - turning point. Contributions to the literature of the eighties , Bouvier 1991
What was kept from us. The Gulf War under censorship , Ullstein 1991
The confident nation . "Swelling Bocksgesang" and other contributions to a German debate , Ullstein 1994
Magic of serenity. Ernst Jünger for the 100th , Klett-Cotta 1995 (together with Günter Figal)
The editors of the series Dichter See their City, among others, Walter Kempowski, Jürgen Hultenreich, Ulrich Schacht, Ullstein 1994
For a Berlin republic. Polemics, speeches, essays , Munich 1997 (together with Ulrich Schacht)
Hans-Georg Gadamer. La Filosofia nella crisi del moderno , mansion 2000 (together with Günter Figal)
Il mio cuore avventuroso. Passaggi nel fuoco e nel ghiaccio , manor 2001
The City of Children , Book on Demand 2003
The doors to happiness , Langen Müller 2007
Ernst Jünger. A century of life. The biography , Piper 2007
Hermann Hesse: Das Leben des Glasperlenspielers , Piper, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-492-05302-0 .
Ernst Jünger: Feldpostbriefe to the family 1915-1918 , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-608-93950-7 .
Rilke and the women. Biography of a Lover , Piper 2015, ISBN 978-3-492-05637-3 .
Luther. Der Zorn Gottes , Blessing, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-89667-522-4 .