Judith Hermann

This article is about a German writer; for the American psychiatrist and author, see Judith Lewis Herman .

Judith Hermann (2007)

Judith Hermann (2020)

Judith Hermann (born May 15, 1970 in Berlin ) is a German writer .

Live and act

Judith Hermann was born in Berlin-Tempelhof in 1970 . She began studying German and philosophy with the intention of working as a journalist. She broke off this and decided to do an internship in New York. Before that, she attended the Berlin School of Journalism. In 1997 she took part in the Prosa authors' workshop at the Berlin Literary Colloquium ; in the same year she received the Alfred Döblin grant from the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In America she wrote her first literary texts and soon discovered the short story as her favorite genre. In 1998 she finally published her first prose volume, Sommerhaus, later .

After her initial success, several years passed during which she - according to her own admission - had to learn to deal with the pressure exerted on her by publishers, the media and the public. In 2003 came the second volume of stories, Nothing but Ghosts . In 2014 Hermann's first novel was published with all love at the beginning .

Judith Hermann's works have been translated into Chinese, Danish, English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Dutch, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Spanish, Czech, Turkish and Ukrainian translated.

She is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

Hermann has one son and lives in Berlin- Prenzlauer Berg .

"Summer house, later"

Hermann achieved her literary breakthrough with her first book, the summer house, later . The critics praised her in short sentences, nonetheless undecided descriptions of everyday and seemingly everyday occurrences. In her melancholy short stories, Hermann sketches the moods of the people and the subtle nuances in a few words. Hermann is influenced by Raymond Carver , to whom she has repeatedly referred in interviews and award speeches.

Summer house, later received mostly positive reviews. Above all, she was enthusiastic about the fact that Hermann succeeded in depicting the attitude towards life of her generation, the artist-student-unemployed-bohemian living in Berlin at the end of the 1990s, in her stories. For Hellmuth Karasek , Hermann's stories embodied the "sound of a new generation". In addition to this generational effect, it was also stated that Hermann is a writer who lets women tell stories from their own world, without this being understood as intentionally emancipatory or gender-combative literature. Hermann was made the figurehead of a “ Fräuleinwunder ” literature, which also included storytellers such as Jenny Erpenbeck , Felicitas Hoppe , Zoë Jenny , Juli Zeh or Julia Franck .

Hermann's laconic short stories with little action led to a renaissance of short stories in Germany. Up until around 2002 or 2003, numerous volumes of stories reminiscent of Hermann were published by authors, such as Ariane Grundies , Mariana Leky or Ricarda Junge , often graduates of the German Literature Institute in Leipzig or of the “ Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism ” course at the University of Hildesheim.

With over 250,000 copies sold and translations in 17 languages, Sommerhaus is later one of the greatest German book successes in recent years. The story Hunter Tompson Musik aus Sommerhaus, later filmed by the student director Jakob Ziemnicki in 2003 as a diploma thesis. Hurricane from the narrative volume was processed in the episode film Nothing but Ghosts , which was released in 2007, directed by Martin Gypkens , as well as four of the stories from Nothing but Ghosts (the cover story Nothing but Ghosts and Friends , Kaltblau and Acqua Alta ).

"Nothing but ghosts"

Judith Hermann's second volume of stories , Nothing as Ghosts from 2003, was created under pressure to meet the expectations of the feature pages and the readers and at the same time not to become the epigon of her first work herself . She wrote much longer stories for this volume that are set all over the world - among other things to avoid the cliché of being a “Berlin writer”. Judith Hermann was inspired by trips she had made for the Goethe Institute to Tromsø , Venice and Iceland . Nothing but Ghosts was not as enthusiastically received by the critics and the public as the debut.

Honourings and prices

• 1999: Bremen Literature Prize
• 1999: Hugo-Ball-Förderpreis , for summer house, later
• 2001: Kleist Prize , for summer house, later
• 2009: Friedrich-Hölderlin-Prize of the city of Bad Homburg
• 2014: Erich Fried Prize

Works

Collections of short stories

• Summer house, later. Stories. S. Fischer, 1998, ISBN 3-596-14770-0 .
• Nothing but ghosts. Stories. S. Fischer, 2003, ISBN 3-596-15798-6 . ( No. 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list in 2003 )
• Alice. Stories. S. Fischer, 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-033182-3 .
• Lettipark. Stories. S. Fischer, 2016, ISBN 978-3-10-403716-5 .

novel

• All love beginning. Roman, 2014, S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-10-033183-0 .

Individual stories and other things

• Gaffa. Narrative. In: Bella triste , No. 22, Hildesheim 2008.
• Summer house, Canitz, later. In: Language in the Technical Age , No. 145, Berlin 1998. (In-progress version of the story of the summer house later , on which Hermann worked in the prose author's workshop at the Berlin Literary Colloquium )

literature

Portraits by Judith Hermann

• Günter Kaindlstorfer : Tom Waits at Prenzlauer Berg . In: Format , Vienna. December 21, 1998.
• Iris Radisch : Berlin Art Nouveau . In: Die Zeit , No. 6/2003.

Comparative work, classification in genre and individual aspects of your work

• Magnus Schlette: Aesthetic Differentiation and Fleeting Happiness. Berlin city life with T. Dückers and J. Hermann . In: Erhard Schütz , Jörg Döring (Ed.): Text of the city - Reden von Berlin. Literature and metropolis since 1989. Weidler, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89693-139-3 , pp. 71–94. (Comparison with Tanja Dückers )
• Christine Kanz: Not a bit excited? "Sonja" by Judith Hermann. In: Christina Kalkuhl, Wilhelm Solms (Ed.): Lustfallen. Erotic writing by women. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 3-89528-424-6 , pp. 127-130.
• Jörg Döring: Secret Annex, now - youth, for the moment - hurricane, later. To the paratext of the books by Judith Hermann. In: Fräuleinwunder literary. Literature by Women at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Edited by Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, Helga Meise. Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2005, ISBN 3-631-51120-5 , pp. 14-35.
• Contemporary literature: Germanistic Yearbook , No. 5. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2006, ISSN  1617-8491 . In this:
  • Günter Blamberger: Poetics of Indecision: For example Judith Hermann's prose. Pp. 186-206.
  • Thomas Borgstedt: Desired worlds: Judith Hermann and the neo-romanticism of the present. Pp. 207-232.
• Eve Pormeister: “Cedars and crickets wherever you look.” On the literary design of transience in Judith Hermann's Alice. In: Friederike Felicitas Günther, Torsten Hoffmann (ed.): Anthropologies of finiteness. Wallstein, Göttingen 2011, pp. 279–296.

Web links

Commons : Judith Hermann  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Judith Hermann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Judith Hermann in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Annotated link collection of the university library of the FU Berlin ( Memento from April 26, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) ( Ulrich Goerdten )
• Interpretations and list of works in the author's lexicon of the University of Duisburg-Essen / Faculty of Humanities - German Studies
• Short biography and reviews of works by Judith Hermann at perlentaucher.de
• Author's page by Judith Hermann at the publisher S. Fischer
• Readings with Judith Hermann to listen to and download on Lesungen.net

Individual evidence

1. ^ Judith Hermann receives the Erich Fried Prize. In: derStandard.at. September 10, 2014, accessed December 7, 2015 . 
2. ↑ conversation between Matthias Prangel and Judith Hermann on Summerhouse, Later .