Alfred Andersch

Andersch, Alfred (Munich, 1914-80, Berzona), came from a modest middle-class background, which he rejected at an early age. He abandoned his education after only two years at grammar school, trained for the book trade, and, during a period of unemployment (1931-2), became active in the Bavarian communist youth organization. Arrested in February 1933, he spent three months at Dachau concentration camp. Having briefly been rearrested, he moved for his own safety to Hamburg, and, a politically disillusioned individualist, devoted himself henceforth to the arts and to literature. Called up in 1940, he served intermittently during the war and in 1944 deserted on the Italian front. He spent his period as prisoner of war in camps in the USA, where he started a periodical for fellow prisoners, among them H. W. Richter, with whom, after their release, he edited Der Ruf. He subsequently helped Richter to found Gruppe 47 and continued to write, contributing to the Frankfurter Hefte (ed. E. Kogen and W. Dirks) and the Neue Zeitung (under Erich Kästner). In 1948 he published Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung. Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der literarischen Situation, followed by a representative selection of essays by international authors entitled Europäische Avantgarde (1949); it was the beginning of his influence on West German cultural developments during the 1950s, not least through his radio work. From 1955 to 1957 he edited the periodical Texte und Zeichen, in which a great variety of intellectuals, writers, and poets (e.g. Adorno, Celan, Enzensberger, Heißenbüttel, Grass, Golo Mann, Arno Schmidt, W. Jens, M. Walser) are represented, as well as foreign writers, among them Hemingway, Faulkner, Sartre, and Camus, all of whom influenced his own thought and writing. In 1958 he relinquished his positions and settled in Berzona (Val Onsernone), acquiring Swiss nationality in 1972.

In 1952 Andersch published his autobiography, Die Kirschen der Freiheit. Ein Bericht, analysing critical phases of his development up to his desertion and surrender, including his relationship with his father, a reserve officer and supporter of Ludendorff, who died, an impoverished businessman, of war wounds when Andersch was in his teens. He resumed the subject of revolt and the father/son conflict in Der Vater eines Mörders (posth., 1980); the murderer of the title refers to Himmler, whose father was Andersch's classics teacher. Many themes of the autobiography recur in Andersch's fiction, notably those of flight (Flucht) and freedom, so successfully exemplified in his first novel, Sansibar oder Der letzte Grund (1957). Aesthetically, his emphasis on freedom is inherent in his stylistic experimentation, which makes use of montage, simultaneity, and flashback techniques, as well as linguistic innovation (see Kahlschlag), politically it lies in the rejection of ideological commitment following active involvement, and morally in an individual's social and humanitarian response to the demands of conscience at moments of free choice. In his second novel, Die Rote (1960, rev. 1972, film by H. Käutner, 1962, but a failure), at the time a best-seller, a (red-haired) woman interpreter escapes from personal conflict and the social pressures produced by the economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) to Venice, where in the end she decides to share her future with an older man, a gifted musician and disillusioned ex-communist, whose humanity and simple home promise fulfilment. The omission of this ending in the revised version heightens the impact of her involvement with men lingering in Venice because of their political past, a theme reminiscent of Koeppen's Der Tod in Rom. Of greater literary quality is Efraim (1967), a novel in the form of an autobiography purporting to have been written by a Jewish emigrant, a venture that at the time gave rise to considerable controversy. An interesting feature is Andersch's linguistic skill in the creation of characters that typify the 1960s east and west of the Berlin Wall. His last, partly documentary novel, Winterspelt (1974), is his most intricate and expansive compositional experiment which he himself likened to pointillism. An anti-war novel directly allusive to Im Westen nichts Neues by E. M. Remarque, it is set around the village of Winterspelt at the time of the decisive offensive in the Ardennes late in 1944. Its wide-ranging reflections focus on a (fictitious) German officer's plan to surrender with his battalion to the US forces in order to avoid senseless loss of life (see Weltkriege, II). In Die Flucht in Etrurien (1981) Andersch returns again to his own desertion. In 1975 he was awarded the Prix Charles Veillon.

Other publications include three travel books on journeys in the 1960s to the North and to Italy, Sämtliche Erzählungen (1971), containing the stories written between 1951 and 1963, Hörspiele (1973) and Neue Hörspiele (1979, see Hörspiel), collected poetry, empört euch der himmel ist blau. Gedichte und Nachdichtungen 1946-1977 (1977), essays, Die Blindheit des Kunstwerks (1965), Öffentlicher Brief an einen sowjetischen Schriftsteller, das Überholte betreffend (1977); correspondence with Arno Schmidt, ed. B. Rauschenbach, appeared in 1985, and letters to his mother, Ein Tagebuch in Briefen an Hedwig Andersch 1943-1975, ed. W. Stephan, in 1986, Werke (Studienausgabe, 15 vols.) in 1979, Die Romane (4 vols.) in 1988, and Gesammelte Erzählungen in 1990.

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