Schmidt, Arno

German author Arno Schmidt (b. 1914) was the author of nine novels, six volumes of stories, and various other reviews, articles, and radio essays. Schmidt also translated 22 volumes from English into German, including works by William Faulkner, Wilkie Collins, James Fenimore Cooper, James Joyce, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is considered to be one of Germany’s most difficult authors. Today, there exist four literary journals dedicated to Schmidt, one of which also publishes book volumes with scholarly research, a yearbook, an Arno Schmidt internet forum as well as French and Anglo-American internet websites. The Arno Schmidt bibliography compiled by Karl-Heinz Müther contains more than 13,000 entries. His work has been translated into 25 languages.

Schmidt was born on 18 January 1914 in Hamburg. In 1928, after the death of his father, a police officer, his mother moved the family to Silesia where Schmidt passed his high school graduation examination and worked in a textile factory in Greiffenberg. In 1937 Schmidt married Alice Murawski, who died in 1983. After his serving in the German army during World War II and time spent as a PoW in Belgium, the Schmidts lived in Cordingen, then later in small towns in the Rhineland-Palatinate and Darmstadt. They remained impoverished for many years after the war and depended on food and supply parcels from his sister Lucie in the United States and some loyal friends and admirers in West Germany. Their financial situation slowly improved after they settled in the hamlet of Bargfeld. Prior to his belated literary debut in 1949 at the age of 35 with the prose collection Leviathan, Schmidt had written juvenilia not intended for publication. This early work has as a common theme: strategies of escape from his petty-bourgeois upbringing, his life as an accountant in a textile factory, and his years in the German Wehrmacht.

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