Wilhelm Muster

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Wilhelm Muster ( pseudonym Ulrich Hassler , born October 12, 1916 in Graz , † January 26, 1994 ibid) was an Austrian writer and literary translator .

biography

Wilhelm Muster was the son of a customs officer. He spent his childhood and youth in Mureck ( Styria ). He attended the Federal Educational Institute in Wiener Neustadt, a boarding school for gifted pupils without access to higher schools, and passed the school leaving examination there in 1935. He then studied Romance studies, German studies, medicine and zoology at the University of Graz without a specific objective; he also assisted as an assistant director at the Graz Opera House . In 1941 he passed the examination for teaching and worked as a primary school teacher in Burgenland and in Maribor . Since he was unfit for the military, his time in the Wehrmacht was only a short episode in 1943. He continued his studies in Graz , now in the subjects of Ancient History, German Studies, Comparative Studies, Ethnology and Zoology, and after 1945 also in Folklore and Comparative Religious Studies. In 1947 he earned his doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on shamanism .

In 1952, Muster went to Spain, where he worked as a lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid . His preoccupation with Spanish-language literature led him to translate from Spanish into German from 1958 onwards. In 1960 he moved to Ibiza before returning to Graz in 1962. In the following years he undertook several longer trips a. a. to the Sahara. From 1965 to 1978 he was lecturer for Spanish language at the University of Graz .

To the work

Wilhelm Muster is regarded as a narrator who was strongly influenced by Spanish and Latin American authors and therefore an outsider in Austrian literature of his time. The plot of his fantastic, long-winded, complex prose works is rarely straightforward, but often broken, which, in addition to Pattern's predilection for forgery, contributes to the irritation of the reader.

His first works appeared in the post-war period, but Muster was not recognized as an author of contemporary Austrian literature until the 1980s. The complexity of his narrative structure was assigned to the tradition of Austrian modernism, but the influence of postmodernism, especially Latin American, was not taken into account.

Today, Muster is one of the most important German-speaking translators from Spanish.

Prices (selection)

Works

  • The benefits of the message in a bottle or the detour via the West Indies , Zurich 1953
  • Every Nights Day , Stuttgart 1960 (under the name Ulrich Hassler)
  • Die Reise nach Cerveteri , Vienna 1957. Filmed as a video in 1984 by the Graz artist Herbert Josef Grosschedl, actors: Erik Göller, Rolf Kanies , Karin Kienzer and others.
  • Spain , Olten [u. a.] 1972 (together with Hanns Buisman)
  • Death comes without a drum , Stuttgart 1980
  • The wedding of unicorns , Stuttgart 1981. (This is also the fate of Robert Musil's fictional character General Stumm von Bordwehr from The Man Without Qualities continues to count.)
  • Go, travel, flee , Graz 1983
  • Monsieur Muster's wax museum , Graz 1984
  • Pulverland , Stuttgart 1986
  • Winner and vanquished , Graz [u. a.] 1989
  • Mars in the twelfth house , Graz 1991
  • In the footsteps of the Kuskusesser , Graz [u. a.] 1993

Translations

literature

  • Walter Grünzweig:  Sample, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 641 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Jerzy Staus: "What is it that has been like that?" , Vienna 1996
  • Grünzweig, Walter: Muster, Wilhelm. In: Killy Literature Lexicon. Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. Volume 8, edited by Wilhelm Kühlmann. Berlin: De Gruyter 2010, pp. 470–471.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Muster, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hassler, Ullrich (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and literary translator
DATE OF BIRTH October 12, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Graz , Styria
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1994
Place of death Graz