Volker Hage | |
|---|---|
 Volker Hage (2015) | |
| Born | Volker Hage 9 September 1949 |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist Literary critic Author |
Volker Hage (born 9 September 1949 in Hamburg) is a retired German journalist, author and literary critic, who has reinvented himself as a novelist.
Hage began his career as a journalist in 1975 as an editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, working initially for the Literature section and later for the newspaper's weekly “FAZ Magazin” colour supplement. From 1986 through to 1992 he was chief literary editor of another leading (West) German newspaper, Die Zeit, for which he subsequently has continued to write. [1] Since 1992 he has worked on Der Spiegel where he has served as culture editor (“Redakteur im Kulturressort”). [2] He was the founder of the periodical “Deutsche Literatur” (“German Literature”), published by Reclam and he has produced various anthologies and collections.
From 1988 through to 1994 Hage was a member of the jury for the annual Ingeborg Bachmann Prize contest, which is an event broadcast on television of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. More recently, in 2005 and 2006, he sat on the jury for the German Book Prize.
Volker Hage has written biographies of Max Frisch, Walter Kempowski, John Updike, Philip Roth and (combined with Mathias Schreiber) of Marcel Reich-Ranicki. He has also been involved in rediscovering the ”realist” genre work of the writer Gert Ledig. This came during the course of Hage’s contributions to the debates, initiated by Max Sebald, about the literary treatment of the bombing of German cities during the Second World War. Hage was particularly effective as an advocate for Ledig’s second novel, Vergeltung, a powerfully apocalyptical and autobiographical anti-war narrative.
In an engagingly two-edged assessment, fellow critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote that Hage’s style of literary criticism had the great advantage that you always knew in advance precisely what he wanted to say. [3] [4]
As a retired journalist Hage has begun to reinvent himself as a novelist. He has published in 2015 the novel Die freie Liebe concerning a love triangle amidst the cultural changes of the 1970s in Germany. The biographic novel Des Lebens fünfter Akt (Luchterhand 2018) narrates the last years of the life of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the informal literary association Gruppe 47. He was regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called Literaturpapst in Germany.
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff was a German poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Eichendorff was one of the major writers and critics of Romanticism. Ever since their publication and up to the present day, some of his works have been very popular in German-speaking Europe.
Volker Helmut Manfred Zotz is an eminent Austrian philosopher, religious studies scholar, Buddhologist and a prolific author.
Alfred Polgar was an Austrian-born columnist, theater critic, writer and occasionally translator.
Terézia Mora is a German Hungarian writer, screenwriter and translator.
Gert Ledig, full name Robert Gerhard Ledig, was a German writer.
Der Kanon or more precisely Marcel-Reich-Ranickis Kanon is a large anthology of exemplary works of German literature. Edited by the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), he called the anthology, announced on 18 June 2001 in the German news magazine Der Spiegel under the title "The Canon of worthwhile German Works", his magnum opus. The five parts appeared from 2002 to 2006 published by Insel Verlag: 1. Novels (2002), 2. Tales/Stories (2003), 3. Dramatic Works (2004), 4. Poetry (2005), and 5. Essays (2006). As expected, the anthology met with opposition and criticism, and even the idea of an anthology was questioned, but Reich-Ranicki called this questioning "incomprehensible, because the lack of a canon would mean relapse into barbarism. Reich-Ranicki sought to differentiate his anthology from previous compilations in his hope to imagine a "reader judge" such as teachers, students, librarians, who would need to draw from this canon because they were in the "first line of those who deal with literature professionally."
Vergeltung is the second novel of the writer Gert Ledig (1921-1999). It is an apocalyptic autobiographical anti-war novel. It mines the author's own experiences and is considered an important example of the literary realism genre of postwar novel.
Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt is the first novel of the Swiss writer Max Frisch (1911-1991). It was started during the winter of 1933 and published in Germany by Deutschen Verlags-Anstalt in 1934. Frisch would later distance himself from this juvenile autobiographical work which was not reprinted as an individual novel, although much later it was included in a compilation of Frisch's collected works. His second novel, J’adore ce qui me brûle, referred back to this first novel, being again centred on the same eponymous protagonist.
Volker Weidermann is a German writer and literary critic. He currently works for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as the literary director and editor of the newspaper's Sunday edition. In 2015, he changed to Der Spiegel.
Heinz Ludwig Arnold was a German literary journalist and publisher. He was also a leading advocate for contemporary literature.
Gerhard Rühm is an Austrian author, composer and visual artist.
Otto F. Walter was a Swiss publisher, author and novelist, which is well known in the German language countries. Otto Friedrich Walter was the younger brother of Silja Walter, a Benedictine nun in the Fahr Abbey and also a popular writer.
lichtung is a poem of Austrian author Ernst Jandl, which combines deliberations about the directions left and right with a change of the letters l and r, so resulting in "lechts und rinks" instead of "rechts und links". It was published in Jandl's first volume of poems, Laut and Luise, in 1966 and, while it consists of just one stanza, it is among the most cited of Jandl's poetry.
Fritz Joachim Raddatz was a German feuilletonist, essayist, biographer, journalist and romancier.
Iris Radisch is a German literature-journalist. Since 1990 she has written for the mass-circulation weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. More recently she has come to wider prominence through her television work.
Günter Herburger was a German writer. He was initially counted among the "New Realists" funded by Dieter Wellershoff, became the author of socialist, imaginative utopian worlds since the 1970s and took an outsider position in German-language contemporary literature. He was a writer of poems, short stories, children's books, radio plays and a member of the PEN Center Germany.
Kurt Honolka was a German musicologist, journalist, and music and theatre critic. He is known as a translator of the librettos of Czech operas into German, such as Smetana's Dalibor and Janáček's Osud.
Milena Moser is a Swiss writer. Her first language is Swiss German. She has emigrated to the United States twice, in 1998 and again in 2015, but German remains the language in which she writes, and in which by 2018 more than twenty of her novels had been published.
Joachim Kaiser (1928–2017) was a German musicologist, critic, and journalist. He worked as a senior editor and cultural critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 1959, contributing reviews and articles on music, literature, and theatre. From 1977 to 1996, he was a professor of music history at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart.
