Maxim Biller

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Maxim Biller (born August 25, 1960 in Prague , Czechoslovakia ) is a German writer and columnist .

Life

Maxim Biller was born to Russian-Jewish parents in Prague and in 1970, at the age of ten, emigrated to West Germany with his mother Rada Biller , father Semjon-Jevsej Biller (1931-2017) and half-sister, who later became a journalist and writer Elena Lappin . He studied literature in Hamburg and Munich and completed his studies with Wolfgang Frühwald in 1983 with a master's thesis on the image of the Jews in Thomas Mann's early work .

After further studies at the German School of Journalism in Munich, Biller wrote for Tempo , Spiegel and Die Zeit and Faces . His column at Tempo was titled: 100 Lines of Hate and made him known as a provocateur in the zeitgeist scene. His first volume of short stories when I am rich and dead (1990) received mixed reviews, as did the second, Land of Fathers and Traitors (1994). The reaction to all of Biller's other literary works was similarly controversial.

Biller has repeatedly sparked literary controversy. In 1991, in the essay As much sensuality as the city map of Kiel , he urged German-speaking writers to write more realistically and to break with the "old avant-garde and literary nomenclaturists", which earned him a lot of criticism. In April 2000 he organized the conference Freedom for German Literature at the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing , which he himself opened with a polemical and much-discussed speech. In it he accused his colleagues of the young and middle generation of authors, who were present in large numbers, for writing “slack-tailed literature” and ignoring the “manual principle of 'morality'”, because, as Biller says: “Without morality there is no art, no literature ". Biller himself explains his statements and interventions, which he often makes from the position of a Czech-Russian Jew living and writing in Germany, as follows: “Because I want my literature to be part of German literature - it is probably the old Heinrich Heine drama - and hopefully also belong ”.

Biller's novels and short stories have been translated into several languages, including the novel The Daughter , which was published in France in 2003 in the renowned folio series by the Gallimard publishing house . In 2007 two of his short stories were printed in the New Yorker , "which is as common among Germans as becoming pope". In July 2010 he began to write a socio-political column in the German edition of Rolling Stone under the title Maxim Billers Feuilletonshow . Biller stopped working together after two columns because the magazine did not want to print a text about Ferdinand von Schirach unchanged.

Biller lives in Berlin . Until 2019, he wrote the satirical column Moral Stories for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . One of the main characters, Dudek Kohn, is an unsuccessful Jewish writer whose seven-year-old daughter Rosa always has better ideas than him. Biller's second column is called Über den Linden and is about himself and his encounters with friends and artists in Berlin. It appears at irregular intervals in time .

Biller's mother, Rada Biller, also published several short stories and a novel by Berlin Verlag up to 2011 . In an interview with René Scheu for the NZZ , Biller says that he inherited his “human sense” from his mother, while his “directness and unconditionality” came from his father.

From October 2015 to December 2016 he was a participant in the new edition of the Literary Quartet on ZDF . The Tagesspiegel wrote about Biller's appearances : “Without Maxim Biller, the event would only be worth half of it […] Even if you aren't interested in any of the new releases presented, the way these Billers interpretive grids run through is good, intelligent entertainment later evening. "

Esra controversy

In 2003 Biller caused a sensation with his novel Esra , the distribution of which the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch was banned in spring 2003 after about 4,000 copies had been delivered. The autobiographical text describes intimate details about the narrator and his partner Esra . Strong similarities between the figure of Esra and Biller's former partner Ayşe Romey can be seen . In the figure of Lale , a domineering, mentally ill alcoholic , her mother Birsel Lemke , in turn, felt defamed .

Romey and Lemke obtained an injunction; In the following proceedings, the Munich Regional Court prohibited further distribution of the book because it saw the plaintiffs' personal rights violated. On June 21, 2005, the Federal Court of Justice rejected the appeal by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, who then turned to the Federal Constitutional Court . However, on June 13, 2007, the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court rejected the constitutional complaint mainly because of a massive violation of Romey's personality. As a result, the final result of the work may not be distributed or published.

Furthermore, Romey and Lemke sued the author and publisher at the Munich Regional Court for € 50,000 in compensation for pain and suffering, Romey was awarded this on February 13, 2008. More than a hundred personalities had raised their voices against such a condemnation for pain and suffering , including Herbert Achternbusch , Günter Grass , Elfriede Jelinek , Peter Zadek and Feridun Zaimoğlu .

This ruling of the regional court was finally overturned by the BGH on November 24, 2009: Even the prohibition of a work of art because of a violation of personality is a considerable encroachment on artistic freedom, so that monetary compensation can only be considered in extreme exceptional cases.

In the meantime, on June 10, 2008, the BGH had rejected Lemke's injunction (VI ZR 252/07): In contrast to that of her daughter, her personal right was not seriously violated, in this case artistic freedom took precedence over personal right . This judgment has no effect on Romey's ban on the book; it is still not allowed to be distributed. Lemke's lawsuit for pain and suffering was thereby settled.

Works

  • Once I'm rich and dead (narratives) Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-423-11624-2 . (including the story of the Harlem Holocaust )
  • The Tempo Years (essays and reports). Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-423-11427-4 .
  • Land of Fathers and Traitors (stories). Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-423-12356-7 .
  • Harlem Holocaust (short novel). Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-462-02761-1 .
  • The daughter . Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-423-12933-6 (novel about the failure of a love between an Israeli who wants to forget his experiences as a soldier in the Lebanon war and a German.)
  • Kühltransport: Ein Drama , Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 9783423129206 .
  • German book (essays and reports), Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-423-12886-0 .
  • Esra . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003, ISBN 3-462-03213-5 (the publisher has been legally prohibited from distribution).
  • The perfect novel (a reading book), Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-423-13087-3 .
  • Bernsteintage (short stories), Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-462-03361-1 .
  • Maxim Biller Tapes (CD with songs and poems), 2004
  • I Love My Suffering (video), 2004
  • Moral stories (satirical short stories), Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-462-03477-4
  • Ada's greatest wish , Bloomsbury Children's Book, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-8270-5027-8 .
  • Peter Brook: The theater as a journey to people , Alexander Verlag Berlin, Berlin 2005, ISBN 9783895811357 .
  • People in the wrong context: Komödie , Libelle Verlag, Lengwil 2006, ISBN 978-3905707090 .
  • Love today: Short stories , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2007, ISBN 9783462037029 .
  • A crazy morning (children's book), Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 9783827053039 .
  • The used Jew. (Self-portrait), Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-462-03703-6 .
  • Sewer rats (play). Fischer 2013 ISBN 978-3-596-19007-2 .
  • In the head of Bruno Schulz (novella). Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-462-04605-2 .
  • Jack Happy (children's book), with drawings by Kera Till. Atlantik, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 3-455-37008-X .
  • Biography. Novel . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-462-04898-8 .
  • A hundred lines of hate . Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-455-00110-5 .
  • Six suitcases. Novel . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3-462-05086-8 .
  • Literature and Politics, Heidelberg Poetics Lectures . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6920-0 .
  • Seven attempts to love. Family stories . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2020, ISBN 978-3-462-05437-8 .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Maxim Biller: Kaddish for my father. Die Zeit , August 16, 2017, accessed on September 24, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Anja Höfer : Maxim Biller: Six suitcases. SWR2 , accessed September 24, 2019 .
  3. ↑ While for Peter von Becker , Biller, who had declared “ Tucholsky's intellectual grandson ”, was “true and this time funny on the nerves”, comparable to “ Böll's early prose” and the “post-war novels by Wolfgang Koeppen ”, Ulrich Greiner called him a “ absolutely zeitgeist ”artist without“ psychology and narrative breath ”. Michael Wise , on the other hand, declared Biller to be the "German Philip Roth " in the Jerusalem Post .
  4. ^ Hajo Steinert : Maxim Biller's new stories: Hardcore realism. In: The time . November 4, 1994, accessed September 13, 2019 . Werner Fuld wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : “Maxim Biller cultivates a style as it was written before Thomas Mann by the great Russians like Chekhov , who did not seek ironic agreement with the reader, but first tried to treat their characters with respect were. ”Other critics accused Biller of his classic narrative style and“ his journalistic hardcore thirsts ”.
  5. ↑ For example, Eberhard Falcke wrote about Biller's novel The Daughter (2000) in the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “The narrator's commitment to radical one-dimensionality limits his field of vision.” And Thomas Wirtz explained in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “Maxim Biller - and that is surely the most surprising finding after his first novel - is a traditionalist dyed to the point, a Freud - Joyce - Musil reader. "The reactions to Biller's Opus Magnum, the 900-page novel Biographie , published in the Was published in spring 2016. "And so the novel Biography creates something in the negative image, which is the highest goal of every novel: It is the mirror of its time", wrote Georg Diez on Spiegel Online , while Lothar Müller uses it for his "not unfeministic gentlemanly joke", for "high adjective - Dense, even higher density of names and words that signal Jewish ”and criticized“ high speed ”.
  6. ↑ Maxim Biller: As much sensuality as the city map of Kiel . In: Die Weltwoche , July 25, 1991.
  7. ↑ Maxim Biller: Feige das Land, slack literature: About the difficulties in telling the truth. In: The time. April 13, 2000, accessed September 13, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Adam Soboczynski : Maxim Biller: "The Germans get it off". March 3, 2016, accessed on September 13, 2019 (Interview werk = Die Zeit).
  9. ↑ Malte Welding : Wolf among sheep. In: The literary world , April 27, 2013, p. 2.
  10. ↑ A pot full of borscht in the trunk. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 28, 2011, page 32.
  11. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/interview-mit-maxim-biller-ld.1571933
  12. ^ ZDF debate broadcast: Maxim Biller stops at the “Literary Quartet”. In: Spiegel Online . January 16, 2017, accessed September 13, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Markus Ehrenberg: One year “Literary Quartet”: “Very briefly, I can justify it!” In: Der Tagesspiegel . October 13, 2016, accessed September 13, 2019 .
  14. ^ Resolution of the First Senate of June 13, 2007 - 1 BvR 1783/05 -
  15. ↑ Violation of personal rights: The novel "Esra" remains forbidden
  16. ^ "Esra" novel: Ex-girlfriend receives € 50,000 compensation for pain and suffering
  17. ↑ An appeal from writers for Biller's "Esra": "Freedom We Mean"
  18. ↑ Summary of the judgment of November 24, 2009
  19. ↑ Federal Court of Justice: BGH, judgment of June 10, 2008 - VI ZR 252/07. In: openJur. Retrieved September 13, 2019 .
  20. ↑ "Ezra" -Klage rejected. In: Weser-Kurier , June 11, 2008.
  21. ^ Fritz Gimpl: Maxim Biller: Harlem Holocaust. In: Lit-eX - magazine for verrisse all kinds, issue December 2 , 1998, accessed on September 13, 2019 (review).
  22. ↑ Shrewd, satirical, borderline: Grimm professor Maxim Biller reads on three dates in December. (No longer available online.) Press release 135/08 of the University of Kassel, December 11, 2008, archived from the original on December 17, 2008 ; accessed on January 9, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Biller, Maxim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague , Czechoslovakia