Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Dürrenmatt in 1989.
Born	(1921-01-05)5 January 1921 Konolfingen, Switzerland
Died	14 December 1990(1990-12-14) (aged 69) Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Occupation	Playwright, novelist
Language	German
Nationality	Swiss
Notable work(s)	The Physicists The Visit

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (German pronunciation: [ˈfriːdrɪç ˈdʏrənˌmat] (5 January 1921 – 14 December 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre^{[citation needed]} whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten.

Biography[link]

Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, in the Emmental (canton of Bern), the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather, Ulrich Dürrenmatt, was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began studies in philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943, he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career. In 1945–46, he wrote his first play It is Written. On 11 October 1946, he married the actress Lotti Geissler. She died on 16 January 1983, and Dürrenmatt married again in 1984 to another actress, Charlotte Kerr.

Dürrenmatt also enjoyed painting. Some of his own works and his drawings were exhibited in Neuchâtel in 1976 and 1985, as well as in Zurich in 1978.

Later life[link]

View above the Centre Dürrenmatt at the Lake Neuchâtel.

In 1990, he gave two famous speeches, one in honour of Václav Havel (Die Schweiz, ein Gefängnis? / Switzerland a prison?), and the other in honour of Mikhail Gorbachev (Kants Hoffnung / Kant's Hope). Dürrenmatt often compared the three Abrahamic religions and Marxism, which he also saw as a religion.

Even if there are several parallels between Dürrenmatt and Brecht, Dürrenmatt never took a political position, but represented a pragmatic philosophy of life. In 1969, he traveled in the USA, in 1974 to Israel, and in 1990 to Auschwitz in Poland.

Dürrenmatt died from heart failure^[1] on 14 December 1990 in Neuchâtel.

Selected bibliography[link]

• Es steht geschrieben (1947)
• Der Blinde (1947)
• Romulus the Great: An Ahistorical Historical Comedy in Four Acts (Romulus der Große, 1950, play)
• The Judge and His Hangman (Der Richter und sein Henker, 1950; novella)
• Suspicion (Der Verdacht, 1951, also known as The Quarry)
• "The Tunnel" ("Der Tunnel", 1952; short story)
• The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi (Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi, 1952, play)
• "Theatre Problems" ("Theaterprobleme", 1954, essay)
• Once a Greek (Grieche sucht Griechin, 1955, novel)
• The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956, play)
• A Dangerous Game (Die Panne, 1956, novel / novella, also known as Traps^[2])
• The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel (Das Versprechen: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman, 1958, novella)
• The Physicists: A Comedy in Two Acts (Die Physiker, 1962, play)
• Der Meteor (1966)
• Play Strindberg (1969, play)
• "Monster Lecture on Justice and Law, with a Helvetian Interlude" ("Monstervortrag", 1969, lecture)
• "The Coup" ("Der Sturz", 1971, short story)
• Achterloo (1982)
• The Execution of Justice (Justiz, 1985)
• The Assignment (Der Auftrag, 1986, novella)
• "Switzerland—A Prison: A Speech for Vaclav Havel" ("Die Schweiz—ein Gefängnis. Rede auf Vaclav Havel", 1990, speech)

Dürrenmatt's stories in film[link]

• It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958), with a TV version made in 1997
• The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi (1961)
• The Visit (1964, Der Besuch der alten Dame)
• Once a Greek (1966, Grieche sucht Griechin)
• Der Meteor (1968)^[3]
• Play Strindberg (1969), based on Strindberg's The Dance of Death
• Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session)(1971), based on 'Die Panne' (Traps)^[4]
• La più bella serata della mia vita (1972, by Ettore Scola, based on 'La Panne')
• Авария (The Breakdown, based on 'Die Panne') (1974, in Russian)
• End of the Game (1976), based on The Judge and His Hangman, and in which Dürrenmatt himself appears in two scenes
• Deadly Games (1982, Trapp)
• Cumartesi Cumartesi (1984, Salam, stories in film)
• Физики (The Physicists) (1988, in Russian)
• Визит дамы (The Visit of the Lady) (1989, in Russian)
• Szürkület (Twilight) (1990, by György Fehér) based on the Es geschah am hellichten Tag movie script
• Hyènes (1992), adaptation of The Visit by the Senegalese moviemaker Djibril Diop Mambéty
• Justiz (1993)
• The Pledge (2001), based on the novel Das Versprechen, which is in turn based on the Es geschah am hellichten Tag movie script

Adaptations[link]

His story, 'Die Panne' (Traps) was adapted into a Marathi play, Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session) by Indian playwright, Vijay Tendulkar in 1967, and since then been performed in various Indian languages, and made into a film by the same name by Satyadev Dubey.

His play 'The Visit' has been adapted and Indianised into a play called "Miss.Meena" by Chennai based theatre group called 'perch'.

References[link]

• Everett M. Ellestad, 'Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "Mausefalle" ("Mouse Trap"),' German Quarterly, 43, 4, 770–779, Nov. 1970.
• Gerhard P. Knapp, "Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Studien zu seinem Werk," Poesie und Wissenschaft, XXXIII, Lothar Stiehm Verlag, Heidelberg, 1976.
• Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel
• National Library Switzerland

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Friedrich Dürrenmatt

• Friedrich Dürrenmatt home page sponsored by the University of Chicago Press. Includes a 1969 interview with Dürrenmatt, his story "Smithy" and essay "Automobile and Railroad Nations," and essays on Dürrenmatt.
• Radio drama by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
• Friedrich Dürrenmatt at the Internet Movie Database

Hans Mayer (March 19, 1907 in Cologne – May 19, 2001 in Tübingen) was a German literary scholar. Mayer was also a jurist and social researcher and was internationally recognized as a critic, author and musicologist.

Life[link]

Hans Mayer was the son of a Jewish upper-class family. He was influenced in his youth by the writings of Georg Lukács and Karl Marx. He can be described as a socialist and a Marxist.

He studied jurisprudence and political science, history and philosophy in Cologne, Bonn and Berlin and received his doctorate in 1930 with a thesis about "Die Krise der deutschen Staatslehre" (The Crisis of German Political Science). At the same time, he joined the SPD and worked on the magazine, Der Rote Kämpfer (The Red Fighter). In 1931, he moved to the SAPD, which expelled him again one year later because of his sympathy for the KPD-O. Since he was a Jew and a Marxist and therefore banned from his profession in July 1933, he fled in August 1933 to France, where he worked for a short time as the chief editor of the Die Neue Welt ('The New World'), which was as the daily newspaper of the Alsatian KPO. In 1934, Hans Mayer had to flee to Geneva. Here, he received jobs from Hans Kelsen and Max Horkheimer as a social researcher. He left the KPD-O in 1935. Carl Jacob Burckhardt influenced his literary orientation during this time.

From 1937 to 1939, Mayer was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, founded by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois in 1937. There he held a lecture about the secret political societies in German Romanticism and demonstrated how these secret societies already anticipated Nazi symbolism. Other exiles at the Collège were Walter Benjamin and Paul L. Landsberg.

After the end of the war, he returned to Germany in 1945. The Americans made him the cultural editor of the German news agency, DENA, the predecessor of the dpa, and later the chief political editor of Radio Frankfurt.

In 1948, he and his friend Stephan Hermlin, went to the Soviet occupation zone. In Leipzig he accepted a professorship for literary studies and became an influential critic of the new German literature. It was possible for him to cross between the East German and the West German world. In the East, he worked through his lectures and discussion circles, and in West Germany he was a welcome guest at meetings of Group 47. He was also in contact with Bertolt Brecht during this time.

His relationship with those in power in the GDR was characterized by more friction as of 1956. He resigned in 1963 and did not return to the GDR after a visit to a publisher in Tübingen. In 1965, he was appointed to a newly-created chair for German literature at the University of Hannover. He held this chair until his retirement in 1973. After that, he lived in Tübingen as an honorary professor. As he grew older, he lost his eyesight, but he was still able to dictate his texts. For that reason, his publications extend well into his old age.

Work[link]

The work of Hans Mayer includes more than forty volumes. He studied Büchner, Thomas Mann, Montaigne, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass, Hans Henny Jahnn and others in his investigations on the history of literature.

While he was in exile in 1936, he began the advance work for his great work about Georg Büchner. This work about Büchner was later recognized by the University of Leipzig as his postdoctoral thesis which was required to qualify as a professor.

He released the collection of essays, Zur deutschen Literatur der Zeit, in 1962. In 1986, he followed this volume with the book, Das unglückliche Bewusstsein - Zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte von Lessing bis Heine. Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf is the title of his three-volume memoires of 1982.

The investigation, Außenseiter, which appeared in 1975, was considered by many to be his main work. In this volume, he deals with the literary portrayal of three groups, which have commonly been discriminated against in history: women, male homosexuals and Jews. He had his own experiences with belonging to two of these groups - as a Jew and as a homosexual.

Der Turm von Babel of 1991 is an obituary on the GDR. Its key sentence is frequently seen to be: "Das schlechte Ende widerlegt nicht einen möglicherweise guten Anfang" - "The bad end doesn't disprove a possibly good beginning." The GDR was the better of the two German states to him for a long time.

The last book published by Mayer is Erinnerungen an Willy Brandt from 2001.

Tributes and criticism[link]

When it comes to acknowledging the work on Hans Mayer, these points are especially emphasized:

• In the middle of Stalinism, he defended authors such as Kafka, Proust, James Joyce and Ernst Bloch.
• In his lectures, it was important to him to investigate literature time after time with a view to whether it was suitable to promote humanity.
• His special attention for the non-compliant and Außenseiter (outsider) especially stands out.
• Mayer was an important supporter for many young authors (for example, for Uwe Johnson).

Hans Mayer was an honorary citizen of the city of Leipzig, had honorary doctorates from universities in Brussels, Wisconsin and Leipzig, was an honorary professor in Peking, was winner of the National Prize of East Germany, as well as the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) of the class "Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband" (Great Cross of Merit with Star and shoulder ribbon). He was honored with the Ernst-Bloch Prize in 1988. He was a member of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts) in Berlin and an honorary member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste (Saxon Academy of the Arts).

Hans Mayer, along with Walter Benjamin, who was also with him at the Collège de Sociologie, and some others, belongs to the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Perhaps there is some correlation to a former competitive situation, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote about in an obituary,^{[citation needed][vague]} which shows Mayer's life in an unflattering light. Reich-Ranicki describes the story of Hans Mayer's life as a tragic story, as the story of a person who did not find a home anywhere.

Selected literary works[link]

• Karl Marx und das Elend des Geistes. Studien zur neuen deutschen Ideologie. Westkulturverlag Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1948.
• Richard Wagner, 1959
• Zur deutschen Literatur der Zeit, 1962
• Georg Büchner und seine Zeit, 1972
• Außenseiter, 1975
• Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf, 1982
• Wir Außenseiter, 1983
• Widersprüche einer europäischen Literatur, 1984
• Das unglückliche Bewusstsein - Zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte von Lessing bis Heine, 1986
• Der Turm von Babel, 1991
• Versuch über Hans Henny Jahnn, 1994
• Erinnerungen an Willy Brandt, 2001
• Briefe 1948-1963. Publ. and annotated by Mark Lehmstedt, Leipzig 2006

References[link]

All references are in German

• Volker Ladenthin: Hans Mayer und das "Unglückliche Bewußtsein". In: Volker Ladenthin: Moderne Literatur und Bildung. Hildesheim-New York 1991. pp. 136–162
• Clemens Berger: Der späte Hans Mayer. Aspekte im Lebens-Werk eines Außenseiters, 2003 (dissertation, Vienna)
• Stephan Moebius: DIE ZAUBERLEHRLINGE. Soziologiegeschichte des COLLÈGE DE SOCIOLOGIE 1937-1939 (Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, die Geheimgesellschaft 'Acéphale' und die Wirkungen auf Foucault, Lévinas, Nancy, Maffesoli, Baudrillard und Derrida). 552 pages, Constance: UVK, 2006, ISBN 3-89669-532-0

This article incorporates information from this version of the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.

External links[link]

• Hans Mayer in the German National Library catalogue (German)
• Obituary for Hans Mayer

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. It needs additional citations for verification. Tagged since March 2010. Its tone or style may not reflect the formal tone used on Wikipedia. Tagged since February 2010.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Marcel Reich-Ranicki 2007
Born	Marcel Reich (1920-06-02) June 2, 1920 (age 92) Włocławek, Poland
Occupation	Literary critic

Marcel Reich-Ranicki (German pronunciation: [maɐˈsɛl ˈʁaɪç ʁaˈnɪtski]; born 2 June 1920) is a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the literary group Gruppe 47. He is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and therefore has often been called the 'Pope of literature' (Literaturpapst) in Germany.^[1]

Life[link]

Marcel Reich-Ranicki was born Marceli Reich on June 2, 1920, at Włocławek, Poland, to David Reich, a Polish-Jewish merchant, and his wife Helene Auerbach Reich, who came from a German-Jewish family. Reich moved with his family to Berlin in 1929. As a Polish Jew he was deported to Poland in the so-called “Polenaktion” on October 28, 1938, together with more than 12,000 Polish-born Jews. In November 1940 Reich and his parents found themselves in the Warsaw Ghetto. During his stay there he worked for the Judenrat as a chief translator, and also contributed to the collaborative newspaper Gazeta Żydowska (The Jewish Newspaper) as a music critic. He married his wife, Teofila, on July 22, 1942, the first day of the mass transports to the Treblinka transit camp. In 1943 they managed to escape to the "Aryan side". Their parents did not survive.^{[citation needed]}

In 1944 he joined the Polish People's Army, and became an officer in the communist secret police Urząd Bezpieczeństwa^{[citation needed]} where he worked in the censorship department. He joined the Polish Workers' Party in 1945.

From 1948 to 1949 he was a Polish consul-general and intelligence worker (operating under the pseudonym ‘Ranicki') in London. He was recalled from London in 1949, sacked from the intelligence service and expelled from the Party on charges of "cosmopolitanism" and Trotskyism. He then took a position with the publishing house of the Polish Defence Ministry, where he established a section publishing literature by contemporary authors from the German Democratic Republic. Subsequently he developed a freelance career writing and broadcasting about German literature.

Frustrated by the curtailment of his liberty in the People's Republic of Poland he emigrated in 1958 with his wife and son to the Federal Republic of Germany. Here he began writing for leading German periodicals, including Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In Poland he had published under the pseudonym Ranicki, his intelligence codename. On the advice of the arts editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine he adopted the name Marcel Reich-Ranicki professionally.

From 1960 to 1973 he was literary critic for the German weekly Die Zeit, published in Hamburg. From 1973 to 1988 he was head of the literature staff at the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His successor was Frank Schirrmacher. Currently Reich-Ranicki edits the "Frankfurter Anthologie" in that newspaper. In 1968 and 1969 he taught at American universities. From 1971 to 1975 he held visiting professorships at Stockholm and Uppsala. Since 1974 he has been an honorary professor at the University of Tübingen. In 1990 he received the Heine visiting professorship at the University of Düsseldorf, and in 1991 he received the Heinrich-Hertz visiting professorship of the University of Karlsruhe.^{[citation needed]}

From 1988 to 2002 Reich-Ranicki hosted the literary talk show Literarisches Quartett on the German public television broadcaster ZDF. Through the show he became a household name in Germany. The show was followed by a similar show that consisted of him talking about old and new books in front of a studio audience.^{[citation needed]} Following the publication of Too Far Afield by his fellow Gruppe 47 member Günter Grass, Reich-Ranicki appeared on the cover of the magazine Der Spiegel, tearing the novel apart. The magazine included his unfavorable review of the book. However, Reich-Ranicki praised Grass' next book, Crabwalk. Having written about German literature for most of his life, Reich-Ranicki published books about American and Polish literature, after cutting down on his television appearances.^{[citation needed]}

In February 2006 he received the Honorary degree (Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa) of the Tel Aviv University. The university will establish an endowed chair for German literature named after Reich-Ranicki. In February 2007 the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin awarded an honorary degree to Reich-Ranicki. This is the same university that Reich-Ranicki applied to in 1938, his application having been turned down because of his Jewish ancestry.^{[citation needed]}

In October 2008, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award during a German television awards telecast for Literarisches Quartett. He made headlines with his acceptance speech, in which he spurned the prize and criticized the state of German television.^[2] His 1999 autobiography, Mein Leben (The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki), mainly dealing with life and survival during the war, was filmed for public television and broadcast in April 2009. His son, Andrew Ranicki, is a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University. His wife died in 2011.^[3]

Works[link]

See also[link]

• German literature
• List of Poles

References[link]

External links[link]

• (German) Reich-Ranicki.com
• (German) Marcel Reich-Ranicki on literaturkritik.de