Reinhard Federmann

Reinhard Federmann (born February 12, 1923 in Vienna ; † January 29, 1976 there ) was an Austrian writer and translator . Often he is only known as the partner of his friend Milo Dor . The Viennese Picus Verlag has tried new editions of its independently written works since the 1990s.

Life

Federmann was the son of a Viennese higher regional judge who was released as a "half-Jew" after the annexation of Austria and who committed suicide. The son was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1942 and sent to the Eastern Front, where he probably only got away with his life because he was captured by the Soviets. “He was discharged fairly early because of inability to work, namely in autumn 1945, and came back to his parents' house, thin, malnourished and with an unhealthy, yellowish complexion that suggested a liver disease, where he only found his younger brother, who was completely neglected “, Writes Milo Dor. Federmann studied law, but saved himself a degree because a successful civil service career did not attract him. He was interested in literature. He initially went to the Erwin Müller publishing house as a trainee. Initially supported by Otto Basil and Friedrich Torberg , Federmann tried to make a living as a freelance writer, journalist, editor and translator (mainly from Serbo-Croatian and English) from around 1947.

Grave at the central cemetery

As an avowed supporter of liberal socialism, he wrote time-critical novels that sold only moderately. In order to earn money, he therefore switched to producing detective novels together with Milo Dor, sometimes also non-fiction books (about comedy). This collaboration ended around 1960, but not the friendship. Federmann now settled in Munich for a few years. He was now married and had one child. Around 1953 he entered into a love affair with the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer . It ended after a few years because Haushofer no longer had any hope that Federmann would give up his marriage because of her. However, she was also married herself. As president of the Society for Freedom of Culture, he successfully applied for a travel grant to Paris and London for Ingeborg Bachmann in the fall of 1950.

Returning from Munich around 1970, despite the adventurous funding, Federmann founded the literary magazine Die Pestsäule , of which 15 issues appeared between 1972 and 1975. Since 1961 he was a member of the Austrian PEN club . Now he became its General Secretary and in 1975 organized the Vienna Congress of the international PEN. Soon afterwards, Federmann's liver disease turned out to be incurable. Strigl writes that he has been overexploiting his already weak health by drinking excessively. Dor also admits that his partner and occasional drinking companion “somehow brought about his own end”. Federmann's plan to write a large-scale novel about his Jewish ancestors was thwarted by death (1976).

Works

• It can't be entirely a lie , Vienna 1951
• Napoleon was a little man , Munich 1957
• The kingdom of liars , Roman, Munich 1959 (new edition Vienna 1993)
• The cross-eyed angel , Graz 1963
• The royal art: A history of alchemy , Vienna 1964
• Priests and Boyars: Herberstains Mission in the Kremlin , Graz 1964
• Message from the beyond: Evidence of the occult , Tübingen 1968
• Viennese stories, history of Vienna: histories, episodes, anecdotes , Tübingen 1968
• And drive joking with horror: The world of black humor (Ed.), Tübingen 1969
• Country in the heart of Europe: a story of Austria for the youth , Vienna 1969
• Mr. Felix Austria and his benefactors , Roman, Munich 1970
• Russia at first hand: History and the present in reports from eyewitnesses and contemporaries (Ed.), Würzburg 1971
• Count Bobby Witze , Stuttgart 1972
• The Chinese are coming. From the memoirs of our grandchildren - after the fall of the West , Tübingen 1972
• Barricades. A novel from the storm year 1848 , Vienna 1973 (new edition Vienna 1998)
• Balkans , from a moral history of the peoples, Stuttgart 1978
• Chronicle of a Night , Roman, Vienna 1988
• The Voice , Stories, Vienna 2001

Together with Milo Dor

• International Zone , Roman, Frankfurt / Main 1953 (new edition Vienna 1994)
• the underground stream. dreams in the middle of the century, an attempt . Frankfurt a. M .: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 1953
• And one follows the other , crime novel, Nuremberg 1953 (new edition Vienna 1995)
• Romeo and Juliet in Vienna , Munich 1954
• Othello von Salerno , Roman, Munich, 1956
• The woman on the medallion , Roman, Vienna 1959
• The face of our century. Sixty years of current affairs in more than six hundred pictures , Düsseldorf 1960
• Murdered Literature: Poets of the Russian Revolution , Salzburg 1963
• The gallant joke , Munich 1966
• The grotesque joke , Munich 1968
• And if they haven't died , political thriller, Vienna 1996

In addition, many translations, some of them together with Dor

Web links

• Literature by and about Reinhard Federmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Reinhard Federmann in the literature archive of the Austrian National Library

Footnotes

Remarks

1. ↑ Federmann's daughter Dorothea Löcker founded the Viennese Picus Verlag in 1984, see univie , accessed on June 23, 2011
2. ↑ Brief discussion Spiegel 12/1960 , accessed on June 23, 2011
3. ↑ Brief discussion Spiegel 7/1971 and Zeit 1971 , both retrieved on June 23, 2011
4. ↑ Presentation by egotrip.de ( Memento from January 7, 2005 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on February 24, 2018
5. ↑ The story of the returning home, set in Vienna in 1948. It originally appeared in sequels in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1950 .
6. ↑ Review by Barbara Denscher , accessed on June 23, 2011
7. ↑ Brief discussion of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , accessed on June 23, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Critical Edition , accessed June 23, 2011
2. ↑ Daniela Strigl: “Probably I'm crazy ...” (Haushofer biography), quoted from the Berlin 2007 edition, p. 209
3. ↑ Daniela Strigl: "I am probably crazy ..." , p. 207