Louis Begley

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Louis Begley, 2003

Louis Begley (born October 6, 1933 in Stryj , then Poland , now Ukraine , as Ludwik Begleiter ) is an American writer of Polish-Jewish origin. After World War II , his family emigrated to the United States , where Begley worked as a lawyer. It was not until 1991 that he appeared in literary terms with the autobiographical novel Lügen in times of war . Of the works he has published since then, the novels about the retired lawyer Schmidt became particularly popular.

Life

Youth in Poland and emigration

German soldiers after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising

Louis Begley is the only child of the doctor Dawid Begleiter (1899–1964) and his wife Franciszka, née Hauser (1910–2004). The Jewish family lived in Stryj in Galicia , which was occupied by Soviet troops in 1939 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . In the run-up to the German war of aggression , his father was deported to the Soviet Union as a hospital doctor in 1941 and spent most of the war in Samarkand . The paternal grandparents were abducted and murdered in September 1941, while the maternal grandparents managed to go into hiding with the help of false papers. The mother was left alone with the boy and from June saw the persecution of the Jews by the German occupiers. Ludwik was not allowed to attend school after the first year of school. Before the planned establishment of a ghetto , Franciszka Begleiter fled with her child to Lemberg in the winter of 1941/42 , where they identified themselves as Polish Catholics with forged papers. In March 1943, mother and son continued to flee to Warsaw . During the Warsaw Uprising , they lived in cellars in August and September 1944. After the uprising was suppressed, Franciszka Begleiter was able to use a ruse to save herself and her son from the threatened deportation to Auschwitz . They hid in a village in Mazovia and later in the southern Polish city of Kielce until the invasion of Soviet troops in January 1945 ended the war for them.

In Krakow , mother and son met again with the father who had returned from the Soviet Union. After he had been taught exclusively by his mother during the war, Ludwik attended the Jan Sobieski grammar school in the 1945/46 school year. Under the influence of ongoing anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland, the family decided to emigrate. After Dawid Begleiter tried in vain to obtain an exit permit, the family left the country illegally in autumn 1946. With a limited residence permit, they stayed in Paris until the end of February of the following year . On March 3, 1947, they reached New York . In order to facilitate integration in the USA, the family changed their names: Begley became Begley, Dawid became Edward, Franciszka became Frances and Ludwik Louis. The family first lived in the Empire Hotel in Manhattan . In 1948 she settled in Flatbush , where Edward Begley opened a medical practice. Louis attended Erasmus Hall High School, which he graduated in 1950. The English language skills he had acquired within a few years were proven by winning first prize in a short story competition that New York University had advertised for all of the city's high schools.

Studies and career as a lawyer

Austin Hall of Harvard Law School

Begley received a scholarship from Harvard College and majored in English literature from 1950 to 1954 . One of his fellow students was John Updike . Begley has appeared in the student theater and the Harvard Advocate college magazine . However , he broke off a course in creative writing in the middle of the semester and abandoned all literary ambitions. He later stated that he could only have used childhood and adolescent experiences from Poland as material for his stories, which he absolutely wanted to suppress. However, he did not feel sufficiently rooted in America to describe his present. On November 5, 1953, he received American citizenship . In 1954 he passed his exam with summa cum laude . He served in the US Army for the following two years , the last 18 months of which in Göppingen in the 9th Division. He then took on a law degree at Harvard Law School , which he graduated magna cum laude in 1959 . While still a student, he received an offer from the renowned law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, where he began his career in autumn 1959. Two years later he was admitted to the New York bar.

As early as 1956, Begley had married Sally Higginson, a student at Radcliffe College and, as Begley judged in retrospect, a "very American" wife. The couple moved to a condominium on Fifth Avenue in Central Park in 1959 . The marriage had three children: Peter (* 1958, lives as an artist in Paris), Adam (* 1959, works as a literary critic and biographer) and Amey (* 1963, works as a writer like her father). However, tensions soon arose in the marriage, which Begley also attributed to the social changes in America in the 1960s. In 1965 Begley moved alone to Paris and worked in the French branch of Debevoise & Plimpton. When he was appointed partner of the firm in 1968 , he returned to New York. The marriage ended in divorce in May 1970. The following year Begley met the French historian Anka Muhlstein (* 1935) during one of his numerous stays in Paris . After a three-year pen friendship, the two married in March 1974. Muhlstein brought two sons into the marriage. The couple now lives in Park Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan . In 1983 they both bought a summer home in Sagaponack on Long Island .

In the years that followed, Begley became a senior partner of Debevoise & Plimpton. He was involved in numerous international transactions that took him to North and Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He was also a legal advisor to public companies as well as an asset manager and trustee of large private assets. As a visiting professor, he taught at Waltham Business School, the University of Pennsylvania Business School and international contract law in Beijing for several years . The legal profession brought him aesthetic satisfaction in addition to the intellectual challenge. The art of precise and elegant contracts into which his senior partner Francis Plimpton had introduced him, shaped his later literary style.

Late literary successes

Louis Begley, 2003

In August 1989, Begley took a three-month training leave. During this time he wrote his literary debut Wartime Lies , which is based on autobiographical experiences in Poland under Nazi rule. Begley commented that he had played the story over and over in his head and just had to write it down. The novel was published in 1991 and was immediately considered a literary sensation. Both the book and the author received a lot of attention in the American feature pages. In 1993 and 1994 Begley added two more novels with The Man Who Was Late and As Max Saw It . From 1993 to 1995 he was the presidency of the PEN American Center. With the publication of the German translation of his debut Lügen im Zeiten der Krieg in 1994, Begley had great success in Germany too, surpassing that in his home country. A friendship developed with the publisher Siegfried Unseld . The Polish translation of his debut brought Begley back to his country of origin for the first time in 1995.

Despite his writing successes, Begley remained a lawyer until late 2003. He wrote his novels on weekends and on vacation. Begley repeatedly expressed reservations about a purely literary career because a career outside of the literary business is important for contact with the real world. His own professional experience was reflected in many of his later books, not least in the trilogy about the retired lawyer Schmidt. After his own retirement in 2004, Begley increasingly wrote essays on literary and political topics. In 2006 he accepted the poetics professorship at Heidelberg University on the subject of between facts and fictions . In his lectures, as in his 2008 essay The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head on Franz Kafka, he turned against attempts at interpretation to equate the life and work of a writer.

plant

Although his debut Wartime Lies (Lies in Times of War) is based on the experiences of Louis Begley during the German occupation of Poland , it is, as he has always emphasized, a novel and not an autobiography . His own memories are so incomplete and falsified by the time gap of 50 years that they are no longer suitable for memoirs. The focus of the novel is on the experience that lies and camouflages have an effect beyond the time of hiding and become permanent normality for the first-person narrator. In reviews, the child-like gaze of the first-person narrator was often emphasized, which enables a fresh look at the horrors of the Holocaust. Begley's terse and unsentimental style was also emphasized. Begley explained this by saying that he did not write in his mother tongue. He lacks "the unshakable self-assurance that an author needs for outbursts of storming heaven or atrocities".

With his subsequent novels, Begley broke expectations of writing more Holocaust literature. According to Christa Krüger, they are “evidence of the assimilation of an immigrant” and, as social novels, show the life of the wealthy upper class on the American east coast . However, the surface of luxury living is often cracked, behind which lies and humiliations emerge. The protagonists try to overcome their self-deception and to regain the lost self-respect, in which they recall the first-person narrator from Begley's debut novel. Begley stated, “ My attempt to be basic honesty in lies in times of war applies not only to this one but to all of my novels, always aiming for aesthetic if not moral reasons. I believe that trying to create a work of art cannot succeed in any other way. "

Begley's protagonists share many details of his biography with their author. You studied like this at Harvard, then made a career, gained fortune, power and influence. They are not positive heroes, but people with contradictions, often outsiders, who are lonely and cold inside. Sex serves as a substitute for love and as a bridge to your inability to love. In the late novels they age like their author, draw a conclusion about their life and, as representatives of a declining world, have to deal with the changes of the present. The trilogy about the retired lawyer Schmidt ( Schmidt , Schmidt's Probation and Schmidts Insight ), which is considered unusually cheerful and relaxed in Begley's work, became particularly popular . Alexander Payne's film About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson in the lead role is loosely based on the first title in the series.

In contrast to his novels, in which the author does not preach a message and abstains from judgment, Begley expresses a clear political and moral opinion in his essays and statements on the state of the United States. Begley represents decidedly liberal positions and reveals himself as a supporter of the Democrats , who sharply criticized George W. Bush and saw in Barack Obama a bearer of hope. In the German-speaking press in particular, Begley is a frequent conversationalist and acts as an intermediary for his home country. Begley, however, restricted himself to the fact that a writer who turns to the politics of the day becomes "an unreliable and capricious reporter" who expresses preliminary thoughts which do not meet the truthful claim that he makes of realistic literature.

Honors

Begley's first work, Wartime Lies , was awarded the Irish Times / Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize and the Harold V. Ribalow Prize in 1991, and the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award and the Prix ​​Médicis étranger in 1992 . In 1995 Begley received the Jeanette Schocken Prize and the American Academy of Letters Award in Literature , in 2000 the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and in 2008 an honorary doctorate from the New Philology Faculty of Heidelberg University .

In 2000 he was appointed a member of the American Philosophical Society and Chevalier des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres . He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2011 .

Publications

Novels

Essay collections

  • 2001: The Promised Land: Observations from a Distance , ISBN 3-518-12217-7 .
  • 2005: Venice For Lovers (with Anka Muhlstein)
  • 2007: Transatlantic Misunderstandings: A European-American Tradition , Zabert Sandmann, ISBN 978-3-89883-190-1
  • 2008: The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
    • German 2008: The monstrous world that I have in my head. About Franz Kafka . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, ISBN 978-3-421-04362-7 .
  • 2008: Between Facts and Fictions. Heidelberg Poetics Lectures , ISBN 978-3-518-12526-7
  • 2009: Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
    • German 2009: The Dreyfus case. Devil's Island, Guantánamo, The Nightmare of History , ISBN 978-3-518-42062-1 .

The German translations by Christa Krüger were published by Suhrkamp Verlag, unless otherwise stated .

documentary

  • Marion Kollbach: Louis Begley - A talent for self-invention. (Germany, 2010, 45 min.)

literature

  • Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 .
  • Abby HP Werlock: Begley, Louis , In: Abby HP Werlock, James P. Werlock: Encyclopedia of the American Novel , Infobase Learning, 2015

Web links

Commons : Louis Begley  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Begley, Louis. In: Munzinger Online / People - International Biographical Archive.
  2. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 11–17, 133–134.
  3. ^ Marion Kollbach: Louis Begley - A talent for self-invention.
  4. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 18-25, 134.
  5. ↑ See Debevoise & Plimpton in the English language Wikipedia .
  6. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 25–32, 134–135.
  7. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 32–43, 134–135.
  8. ↑ A happy marriage . In: The time . No. 41/2013
  9. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 38–46, 135.
  10. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 46–51, 122–125, 135–136.
  11. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 56–64, 136.
  12. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect , p. 8.
  13. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 74–75.
  14. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 9, 54.
  15. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 43, 58–60, 95, 98.
  16. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life Work Effect , pp. 61–62, 127.
  17. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 10, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Ulrich Greiner : In places black ice. Louis Begley surprisingly fails. In: The time. November 27, 2003, No. 49 (review).
  19. ↑ Andreas Isenschmid : Ghosts that beset him. In: The time. March 8, 2007, No. 11, p. 56.
  20. ↑ Elmar Krekeler: The discreet Mr. Begley . In: Literary World (Saturday supplement of the world ). February 24, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Begley, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Companion, Ludwig (original name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Stryj