Matthias Wittekindt

Matthias Wittekindt 2018

Matthias Wittekindt (born May 28, 1958 in Bonn ) is a German writer and playwright .

Life

Matthias Wittekindt grew up in Hamburg . After graduating from high school, he studied architecture and religious philosophy in Berlin and London from 1982 . In 1987 he passed his diploma examination and then spent a year in a monastery near Brussels . Here he worked on the transfer of architectural compositional laws into choral language compositions.

Back in Berlin in 1988 Matthias Wittekindt founded the “Brussels Project”. With this he realizes his choir pieces on stage. From the mid-1990s onwards, stage works were increasingly created without recourse to choirs. After initial successes at German, Austrian and Swiss theaters, Wittekindt decided to give up his work as an architect in favor of literary work.

Matthias Wittekindt has been writing radio plays since 2002 ; next impact on the radio scene of ARD continues to order pieces created for different theaters.

In 2004, Eichborn Verlag published Wittekindt's first novel Sog . As in an episode film, the book introduces various people whose fates cross, tangle or dissolve on a train ride from Berlin to Paris. The debut novel is received positively by the critics. Harald Martenstein wrote in the Berlin Tagesspiegel : “The book is more than just a film translated into prose, it is a sovereign work of language and style, a novel that tells everyday life like a breathless crime story and the life crises of its characters with suspense and mystery charges as if it were a story by Hitchcock. "

Matthias Wittekindt has been concentrating on crime novels since 2011. In this area, too, distinctive works were created from the start. So wrote Tobias Gohlis in Time for the last volume of the series The gas station of Courcelles : "What is remarkable is that is not told here in action sequences, in action, but in images in stills, as they say in the film." "The quiet, almost silent, completely unpretentious and sovereign prose, which does not need to celebrate its own brilliance, makes up the high quality of the novel, ”diagnosed Thomas Wörtche in an article for Deutschlandfunk Kultur .

Awards

• 1991 Berlin architecture prize for work in the area between architecture and theater
• 1992 Culture Prize of the City of Munich and the Gasteig Culture Center for the play Buried
• 2006 Kurd-Laßwitz-Prize for the Lewskow manuscript
• 2014 German Crime Prize 3rd place for marble men
• 2019 German Crime Prize 2nd place for The Courcelles gas station

Works

Novels

Fleurville series

• Snow Sisters , detective novel. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg, 2011. ISBN 978-3-8940-1743-9 .
• Marble men , detective novel. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2013. ISBN 978-3-8940-1772-9 .
• A light in the room , detective novel. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2014. ISBN 978-3-89401-795-8 .
• The accident on rue Bisson , detective novel. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2016. ISBN 978-3-96054-018-2 .
• Courcelles petrol station , detective novel. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2018. ISBN 978-3-96054-070-0 .

Fin-de-Siècle series

• Murder on the Balkan Express. (together with Rainer Wittkamp ) Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck 2018, ISBN 978-3-7099-3442-5 .

Others

• Sog , Roman, Eichborn Verlag, Berlin 2004. ISBN 978-3821809588 .
• The Fournier Brothers , detective novel. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2020. ISBN 978-3-96054-226-1 .

Drama Collections

• Seven pieces , Böhlau-Verlag, Vienna 2001, ISBN 978-3-205-99248-6 .
• Freilang , éditions phi, Esch-sur-Alzette 2005, ISBN 978-2879621975 .

Short stories

• The girl from the Witten Cross . In: Herbert Knorr , HP Karr , Sigrun Krauß (eds.): Glaube.Liebe.Leichenschau . Grafit Verlag, Dortmund 2016, ISBN 978-3-89425-474-2 .
• Everyone who didn't know him . In: Horst Bosetzky (Ed.): News from the Tegel crime scene . Jaron Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-89773-823-2 .
• The invisible one . In: Thomas Wörtche (Ed.): Berlin Noir . Culturbooks, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3959881012 .

Plays (selection)

• The Lewskow manuscript , 2004
• Release , 2005
• The Hero of Women , 2005
• Memotrip , 2006
• Guilt , 2006
• The Unreachable , 2006
• Man without a hatchet , 2007
• One less , 2007
• Make your way , 2008
• Fog , 2008
• The man in the stove , 2009

Radio plays (selection)

• The Unreachable , NDR 2007
• The Congress of Supervisionaries , RBB 2007
• The settlement , NDR 2007
• The cable car , SWR 2008
• Death of a diver , Radio-Tatort, NDR 2008
• The yellow truck , NDR 2009
• The strange wish of a fine gentleman , NDR 2009
• The woman in the net , Deutschlandradio 2009
• Störtebeker's revenge , Radio-Tatort, NDR 2010
• Total loss , Radio-Tatort, NDR 2011
• The blue yacht , Radio-Tatort, NDR 2012
• The goat , NDR 2012
• Arizona Phoenix Israel , RBB 2014

Film scripts

• The operation , directed by Christoph Kalkowski, Germany 2008

Web links

• Matthias Wittekindt's website
• Literature by and about Matthias Wittekindt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Matthias Wittekindt in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Tobias Gohlis: “The Courcelles gas station”: A fuzzy act. Matthias Wittekindt on guilt in the provinces. In: Zeit Online . May 17, 2018, accessed February 18, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Thomas Wörtche: Matthias Wittekindt: "The Courcelles gas station." Double murder in the border area. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . May 18, 2018, accessed February 18, 2019 .