Volker Weidermann | |
|---|---|
 Volker Weidermann (2014) | |
| Born | 6 November 1969 |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation(s) | Writer Literary critic Literary editor |
Volker Weidermann (born 1969) 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. [1]
Weidermann studied political science along with German language and linguistics at Heidelberg and Berlin. For many years he wrote as a Literary critic for the Berlin-based Tageszeitung, where he was employed as editor between 1998 and 2001. [2] He then switched to the "Literary directorship" of the then newly established Sunday edition of the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Since 2003 he has headed up the publication jointly with Claudius Seidl. [2]
Wiedermann is publishing the collected output of the prolific pacifist writer Armin T. Wegner: the first volume appeared in 2012. That was also the year in which he took on a guest professorship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. [3] He lives in Berlin. [4]
March 2006 saw the appearance of Weidermann's literary history, "Lichtjahre" (literally "light years"), subtitled, rather more helpfully. "A short history of German Literature from 1945 till today". [5] This gave rise to a discussion about the division of literary criticism in Germany into two mutually unhearing camps, characterized by Hubert Winkels of the national radio station as the "Emphatic and the Gnostic". [6] The distinction drawn by Winkels, writing in Die Zeit, is between literary critics such as Weidermann, who paid close attention to the vitality, realism and passion of an author's output and those who actually concentrated on the textual form and style along with the language and the dramaturgy. One camp hankers after "true life" while the other looks out for "true literature". Predictably, having defined the polar opposites in this way, Winkels is critical of both. [7]
Weidermann marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Max Frisch with a critical new biography, published in 2010, entitled Max Frisch. Sein Leben, seine Bücher ("Max Frisch: His life and his books"). [8]
In 2008 the "Book of the Burned Books" ("Buch der verbrannten Bücher") appeared, comprising 131 miniature overviews of the lives and works of authors whose works were included in the 1933 Book Burnings. In 2009 this book won Weidermann the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis for "literary journalism". [9] The biographical novel Ostende: 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft ( Ostend 1936: Summer of Friendship [10] ) appeared in 2014. It concerns the friendship of two very different writers, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, and their meeting up at the Belgian coastal resort in 1936. Weidermann addressed the same subject in a nonfiction book that has been translated into English. [11] Other exiled German writers and artists were at Ostend at the same time, including Roth's latest love, Irmgard Keun, along with Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Arthur Koestler, Willi Münzenberg, Ernst Toller and Toller's young wife, Christiane Grautoff.
Manuel Andrack is a German journalist, television presenter, and author. He is best known as the sidekick of the Harald Schmidt Show.
Irmgard Keun was a German novelist. Noted for her portrayals of the life of women, she is described as "often reduced to the bold sexuality of her writing, [yet] a significant author of the late Weimar period and die Neue Sachlichkeit." She was born into an affluent family and was given the autonomy to explore her passions. After her attempts at acting ended at the age of 16, Keun began working as a writer after years of working in Hamburg and Greifswald. Her books were banned by Nazi authorities but gained recognition during the final years of her life.
Moses Joseph Roth was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft", a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.
Katja Lange-Müller is a German writer living in Berlin. Her works include several short stories and novellas, radio dramas, and dramatic works.
Alice Sophie Schwarzer is a German journalist and prominent feminist. She is founder and publisher of the German feminist journal EMMA. Beginning in France, she became a forerunner of feminist positions against anti-abortion laws, for economic self-sufficiency for women, against pornography, prostitution, female genital mutilation, and for a fair position of women in Islam. She authored many books, including biographies of Romy Schneider, Marion Dönhoff and herself.
Bastian Sick is a German journalist and author.
Franz Carl Weiskopf was a German-speaking writer. Born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, he was often referred to as F. C. Weiskopf, he also used the pseudonyms Petr Buk, Pierre Buk and F. W. L. Kovacs. He died in Berlin in 1955.
Rahel Sanzara was a German dancer, actress and novelist.
Michael Kumpfmüller is a German writer and former journalist.
Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod is a series of books by Bastian Sick which deal in an entertaining manner with unappealing or clumsy use of the German language, as well as areas of contention in grammar, orthography, and punctuation.
Thomas Hettche is a German author.
Bernhard Kellermann was a German author and poet.
Ernst Ottwalt was the pen name of German writer and playwright Ernst Gottwalt Nicolas. A communist, he fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and went into exile in the Soviet Union, where he fell victim to the Great Purge and died in a Soviet gulag. Later, when the Allies of World War II prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, the chief prosecutor from the Soviet Union quoted from an anti-Nazi book by Ottwalt.
Wolfgang Herrmann was a German librarian and member of the Nazi Party, whose blacklist provided the template for the Nazi book burnings in May 1933.
Adriana Altaras is a German actress, theater director and writer, born in Zagreb.
Volker Hage is a retired German journalist, author and literary critic, who has reinvented himself as a novelist.
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.
Gerd Koenen is a German historian and former communist politician.
Robert Neumann was a German and English-speaking writer. He published numerous novels, autobiographical texts, plays and radio plays as well a few scripts. Through his parody collections, Mit fremden Federn (1927) and Unter falscher Flagge (1932), he is considered as the founder of "parody as a critical genre in the literature of the 1920s."
Klaus Modick is a German author and literary translator.
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