Johannes Mario Simmel

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Portrait of Johannes Mario Simmel during an interview in 1982
Johannes Mario Simmel, 1982

Johannes Mario Simmel (born April 7, 1924 in Vienna ; † January 1, 2009 in Lucerne ) was an Austrian writer .

Life

Simmel's parents came from Hamburg. His Jewish father Walter Simmel was a chemist, his mother Lisa, b. Schneider, editor at the film company Wien-Film . His father fled the Nazis to London, while almost all relatives on his father's side were murdered by the Nazis. Simmel grew up in Austria and England , and graduated from the Higher Federal and Research Institute for Chemical Industry in Vienna, the graduation as a chemical engineer . During the Second World War he was employed in the electrochemical research department of the Kapsch electrical company in Vienna. On April 5, 1945, he witnessed the murder of scientists who wanted to save an electron microscope from being destroyed. In 1980, he dealt with this in his novel We Are You Hope .

After the war, he worked as a journalist, translator and interpreter for the US military government , which was responsible for the American sector in the four-power city of Vienna and for the American occupation zone of Salzburg and Upper Austria south of the Danube. In 1947 he published his first collection of short stories under the title Encounter in the Fog . For the Vienna daily newspaper Welt am Abend , which was discontinued at the end of October 1948 , he wrote film reviews and feature articles as cultural editor in the last year of its publication. In 1950 he moved to Munich and worked there for the illustrated magazine Quick . On her behalf, he made reporter trips through Europe and overseas.

Simmel wrote factual reports and series novels under various pseudonyms . From 1950 to 1962 he wrote a total of 22 scripts, either alone or together with other authors. a. for films like Miracles still happening (1951) with Hildegard Knef , Tagebuch einer Verliebten (1953) with Maria Schell , Hotel Adlon (1955) or Robinson shall not die (1957) with Romy Schneider and Horst Buchholz .

After his first major success with the Quick series Es muss Not Always Caviar (1960), he devoted himself primarily to writing entertainment novels, each of which dealt with current socio-politically relevant topics such as violence against foreigners, drug trafficking and genetic manipulation . The basis was journalistic research at the locations and in the milieu in which his novels were set.

The leitmotifs in many of his works were the relativization of good and evil and passionate pacifism . For decades he has been one of the most widely read authors in German-speaking countries. He published 35 novels with a total circulation of about 73 million copies. His works have been translated into 30 languages ​​and filmed by directors such as Alfred Vohrer and Roland Klick .

For a long time, literary critics vilified Simmel as a trivial author , “bestselling mechanic” or assembly line writer. Only with the novel But with the clowns came the tears (1987) he found general recognition. Married three times, he last lived in the Swiss city of Zug ; he died on January 1st, 2009 in Lucerne, according to his information he was still working on a novel.

Awards and honors

Works

Novels

stories

  • Encounter in the fog . (7) Stories. Zsolnay, Vienna 1947.
  • Nobody is an island . (2) Stories with drawings by Eugen Ledebur, Vienna 1948.
  • Twenty-two centimeters of tenderness and other thirty-three-year stories . Knaur, Munich 1979.
  • The earth will remain young for a long time, and other stories from thirty-five years . Knaur, Munich 1981.

Dramas

Essays

  • The bees have gone mad. Speeches and essays about our insane world . Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-45959-5

Books for children and young readers

  • About dragons, royal children and good spirits . Compiled for the youth by Johannes Simmel. Leuen (legends of our homeland), Vienna 1950
  • Crying is strictly forbidden! A story for little and big girls . Leuen, Vienna 1950
    • Reissued as: Crying strictly prohibited . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1977
  • A bus as big as the world. A travel experience full of excitement for boys and girls . Fountain of Youth, Vienna 1951
  • My mother must never know. An exciting adventure around a bad report card . Fountain of Youth, Vienna 1952
  • If only it goes well, Paul. An exciting adventure . Weiß, Munich / Berlin 1953

Filmography

Scripts

Films based on works by Johannes Mario Simmel

literature

  • Richard Albrecht : A bestselling novel in the media. Case study of the sociology of literature on the dissemination of the bestselling novel “ Only the wind knows the answer ” (1973) . In: "Sociologia Internationalis", 23 (1985) 1, pp. 49-77, ISSN  0038-0164
  • Wlodzimierz Bialik: Johannes Mario Simmel or the inevitable success. Narrative and sales strategies of the entertainment novel in the Federal Republic of Germany. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. Poznań 1987, ISBN 83-232-0020-3
  • Friedbert Aspetsberger (Ed.): Johannes Mario Simmel smiles . Studien Verlag, Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-7065-1314-5 .
  • Gerhard Teuscher: Perry Rhodan , Jerry Cotton and Johannes Mario Simmel. A presentation on theory, history and representatives of trivial literature . Ibidem, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-932602-76-5 .
  • Jacek Rzeszotnik: Literary Communication Strategies . On the bestseller novel and its authors in the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries using the example of Karl May and Johannes Mario Simmel . Corian, Meitingen 2000, ISBN 3-89048-318-6 .
  • Christian Heger: The stuff dreams are made of. To the journalist picture at Johannes Mario Simmel . In: Ders .: In the shadow realm of fictions: Studies on the fantastic history of motifs and the inhospitable (media) modernity. AVM, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-86306-636-9 , pp. 204-226.
  • Andrea Hamburg: Between slap and bestseller. The reception by Johannes Mario Simmel . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-631-62503-3 .

Movie

  • 1973: Johannes Mario Simmel. A production by Südwestfunk / TV / Baden-Baden (12 minutes). Script and direction: Klaus Peter Dencker

Web links

Wikiquote: Johannes Mario Simmel  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Spiegel Online, January 2, 2009
  2. ↑ Johannes Mario Simmel on the madness of our world ( Memento from April 19, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Johannes Mario Simmel interviewed by Ernst Grabovszki. Wiener Zeitung . June 1, 2001
  3. ↑ See Horeischygasse in Vienna Hietzing
  4. ↑ Horeischy, Kurt. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)
  5. ↑ Johannes Mario Simmel is dead Faz.net from January 3, 2009.
  6. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
  7. ↑ Data from rororo paperback edition May 1964
personal data
SURNAME Simmel, Johannes Mario
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 2009
Place of death Lucerne