Arno Schmidt

Schmidt, Arno (Hamburg, 1914-79, Celle), lived from the age of 14 in Görlitz (Silesia), and in 1937 took up an office job in a textile factory in Greifenberg. But his true interests were mathematics, literature, and writing. He was called up in 1940, and while stationed in Norway continued to write and to work on devising a logarithm table. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British, and until 1947 made a living as an interpreter. He now became a full-time writer and pursued his interest in neglected authors of the 18th c. and 19th c. In 1955 these became the subject of radio essays, written for A. Andersch and published in the collections Dya Na Sore (1958; the title of a novel by W. F. von Meyern), Belphegor (1961; the title of a novel by J. K. Wezel), and Die Ritter vom Geist (1965; the title of Gutzkow's major novel). After his story Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas had appeared in Andersch's periodical Texte und Zeichen, both men were charged with blasphemy and pornography, causing Schmidt to move from the diocese of Trier to Darmstadt. The case was dropped, but Schmidt was obliged to modify his new novel Das steinerne Herz. Historischer Roman aus dem Jahre 1954 (1956; full text 1986). In 1958 Schmidt bought a house in Bargfeld nr. Celle in the Lüneburger Heide, now the centre of the Arno-Schmidt-Stiftung.

From relatively conventional beginnings, Schmidt's narrative technique became increasingly experimental and eccentric in all aspects of fictional presentation, most conspicuously so in the manipulation of language (including neologisms and phonetic spelling), in temporal concentration, and in the representation of consciousness. Linked with this was his return to the Romantics (see Romantik) and the exploration of the world of fantasy, before, in the final stage of his development, concentrating on the subconscious, notably in the context of problems of translation (Stanislaus Joyce, Fenimore Cooper, Wilkie Collins, Poe, Bulwer-Lytton). An obsessive collector of literary motifs and quotations, Schmidt was an intellectual writer sifting different levels of experience in a world of literature congenial to his inventive genius, until acquaintance with Freud and James Joyce freed his most complex (and cryptic) creativity.

Emphasizing the fragmented nature of our experience of reality, Schmidt adopted a snapshot technique consisting of alternating short clips recording actual happenings in support of his increasingly indistinct story-lines and often cursory political, cultural or existential reflections. His anti-authoritarian attitude and metaphysical pessimism are fundamental traits, demonstrated in Leviathan (1949), a terse story registering in the form of diary entries the attempt of a group of refugees to escape the inferno of war in a goods train; when it is brought to a halt by a detonated bridge, the diarist, in an act of defiant self-assertion against Leviathan's might, plunges into the abyss. His action is meant to be seen in the context of the Will as defined by Schopenhauer and of his bitter ridicule of affirmative forms of metaphysical consolation. The impact of war and critically viewed post-war developments form the background of his next stories (published together as a trilogy in 1963), though all three indicate through their titles the interplay of romantic motifs, alienating reality: Brand's Haide (1951, a reference to Fouqué's autobiography), Schwarze Spiegel (1951), and Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (1953). After thirty years of research on Fouqué he produced Fouqué und einige seiner Zeitgenossen: Biographischer Versuch (1958, ext. 1959). In Die Gelehrtenrepublik (1957) the imagined nuclear wasteland of Schmidt's own homeland introduces a utopian idea, which in his novel Kaff auch Mare Crisium (1960), a climax in his œuvre, includes the moon as the location of the narrator's fantasy world. The novel also introduces new formal aspects, of which the arrangement of two worlds, a village in the Lüneburger Heide and the lunar camp of the new space age, in separate columns (Mehr=Spalt=Buch) are the most distinct features. The columns represent two interacting levels of experience (Erlebnisebenen), with fantasy exemplifying Schmidt's notion of ‘längeres Gedankenspiel’; the often witty manipulation of orthography and typological playfulness probes the allusiveness of words and phrases while reproducing the spoken dialect and emphasis. The title of Berechnungen I und II (1959, in Rosen & Porree) highlights the ‘calculating’ nature of his theoretical concepts at this stage. The 1960s showed an advance with the publication of his psychoanalytical study of Karl May, Sitara und der Weg dorthin (1963), the stories of Kühe in Halbtrauer (1964), the collection Trommler beim Zaren (1966), containing an essay on Lewis Carroll, and his work on James Joyce, Triton mit dem Sonnenschirm. (Überlegungen zu einer Lesbarmachung von ‘Finnegans Wake’) and Das Buch Jedermann (1969). Like other essays on writers (the Brontë sisters, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Wilkie Collins), these are presented in the form of dialectical discussions within a small group of participants, in this way anticipating Schmidt's major novel, Zettels Traum (1970), in which the exploration of subconscious phenomena adds a significant dimension to earlier theories. Reproduced in typescript and running to more than 1, 300 pages, it is arranged in triple columns to convey simultaneity and pursues within the space of twenty-four hours three mental processes; in one of them, featuring subconscious involvement, Schmidt displays his so-called ‘Etym’ language, which is based on the etymological scrutiny of individual words and their derivatives, especially sexually revealing polyvalent words. Schmidt illustrated his theory of ‘Etym’ in his essays on Joyce, the ‘mosaic artist’ (Mosaikarbeiter), with whom he all but identified. The next works, Die Schule der Atheisten (1972) and Abend mit Goldrand (1975), the one characterized by its wit, the other by the resumption of romantic motifs, represent a final move to metaliterature. Posthumous publications include Julia, oder die Gemälde. Scenen aus dem Novecento (1983) and the collection of radio essays … denn ‘Wallflower’ heißt ‘Goldlack’ (1984). Schmidt was an élitist, but although he projects himself in his work as a contemporary writer, he does not assume committed leadership. Rather, he emerges as a pungent, at times indiscriminate satirist, as in his comments on both German states in Das steinerne Herz. In the end his pessimism became all-pervasive.

Briefe an Werner Steinberg. 16 Briefe aus den Jahren 1954-57 appeared in 1985, correspondence with Andersch in 1985, with Wilhelm Michels in 1987, and with Eberhard Schlotter in 1991, all edited by B. Rauschenbach. Editions of works include Dichtergespräche im Elysium (2 vols., 1984), Das erzählerische Werk (8 vols., 1985), Bargfelder Kassette (8 vols., 1988), Das essayistische Werk zur deutschen Literatur (4 vols., 1988), Werke. Bargfelder Ausgabe. Werkgruppe I (4 vols.), Werkgruppe II (3 vols.), 1986 ff., Ausgewählte Werke (3 vols., 1990), and Arno Schmidt 1904-1979 (CD-ROM, 1995).

Arno Schmidt's house in Bargfeld.

Schmidt's grave in the garden of his house in Bargfeld.

Arno Schmidt Foundation

Arno Schmidt (18 January 1914 - 3 June 1979) was a German author and translator.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Selected works 3 Further reading 4 See also

Biography

Born in Hamburg, son of a police constable, Schmidt moved with his widowed mother to Lauban (in Lusatia, then Lower Silesia, now Polish) and visited the secondary school in Görlitz. He then worked as a clerk in a textile company in Greiffenberg. At the outset of World War II in 1939, Schmidt was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He first served in Alsace and after 1941 in fairly quiet Norway. In 1945, Schmidt volunteered for active duty at the front in Northern Germany in order to be granted a brief home visit, as was the custom. He used that visit to organize a defection from Lusatia westwards for him and his wife, in order to evade capture by the Red Army, which was famed for its abuse of POWs and German civilians in the east, and gave himself up to British forces in the German province of Lower Saxony.

After an interlude as an English POW and later as an interpreter at a police school, Schmidt started his future life as a freelance writer during the time of wandering that followed the war. Since Schmidt's pre-war home in Lauban was in the part of Germany ethnically cleansed of Germans after the war and annexed to Poland, Schmidt became part of the throng of refugees moved by the authorities from village to village in West Germany. This included stints in Cordingen (in the Bomlitz county of Lower Saxony), Gau-Bickelheim, and Kastel (both in the newly formed province of Rhineland-Palatinate). In Kastel, he was accused in court of blasphemy and moral subversion, which was then still prosecuted in the Catholic parts of West Germany. As a result, Schmidt and his wife moved to the Protestant city of Darmstadt in Hesse, where the suit against him was dismissed. In 1958, the Schmidts moved to the small village of Bargfeld (near Celle) in Lower Saxony, where they were to stay (cf. Martynkewicz 1992).

Schmidt was a strict individualist, almost a solipsist. Disaffected by his experience of the Third Reich, he had an extremely pessimistic world view. In Schwarze Spiegel, he describes his utopia as an empty world after an anthropogenic apocalypse. Although he was a strict atheist, he maintained that the world was created by a monster called Leviathan, whose predatory nature was passed on to humans. Still, he thought this monster could not be too powerful to be attacked, if it behooved humanity.

His writing style is characterized by a unique and witty style of adapting colloquial language, which won him quite a few fervent admirers. Moreover, he developed a willful orthography by which he thought to reveal the true meaning of words and their connections amongst each other. One of the most cited examples is the use of “Roh=Mann=Tick” instead of “Romantik” (revealing romanticism as the craze of unsubtle men). The atoms of words holding the nuclei of original meaning he called Etyme (etyms).

His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus, Zettels Traum, in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter. Schmidt also accomplished a willful translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works himself (1966-73, together with Hans Wollschläger).

In the 1960s, he authored a series of plays for German radio stations presenting forgotten or little known and - in his opinion - vastly underrated authors, as e.g. Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Karl Philipp Moritz, Leopold Schefer, Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, et al. These "plays" are basically talks about literature with two or three participants plus voices for quotations (Schmidt lent his voice for his translations of Finnegans Wake quoted in Der Triton mit dem Sonnenschirm [1961]). 11 of these so called "Radio-Essays" were republished on 12 audio CDs in the year 2003.

As none of his works sold more than a few thousand copies, he lived in extreme poverty. During the last few years of his life, Arno Schmidt was financially supported by the philologist and writer Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the heir of the German cigarette manufacturer Philipp F. Reemtsma.

After a stroke, Arno Schmidt died in a hospital at Celle. The Arno Schmidt Foundation (Arno Schmidt Stiftung) in Bargfeld, dotated by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, is publishing his complete works.

The US entrepreneur and technology writer Dave Winer is a grandnephew of Arno Schmidt.

Selected works

• Leviathan (1949)
• Das steinerne Herz ("The Stony Heart", 1956)
• Die Gelehrtenrepulik ("The Egghead Republic")
• Kaff auch Mare Crisium ("Boondocks/Moondocks")
• Zettels Traum ("Bottom's Dream", 1970)
• Die Schule der Atheisten ("School for Atheists", 1972)
• Abend mit Goldrand ("Evening Edged in Gold", 1975)

For the full bibliography, see Müther 1992.

Further reading

• Karl-Heinz Müther: Bibliographie Arno Schmidt 1949–1991, Bielefeld 1992 (in German, continued)
• Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Arno Schmidt. Reinbek 1992. ISBN 3499504847 (in German)
• Marius Fränzel: Dies wundersame Gemisch: Eine Einführung in das erzählerische Werk Arno Schmidts. Kiel (Ludwig) 2002, ISBN 978-3933598547 (in German)
•  »Arno Schmidt? - Allerdings!« 2006 (Marbacher Kataloge) (Arno Schmidt Exhibition, Marbach 2006).

See also

• Eberhard Schlotter
• John E. Woods

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Persondata
NAME	Schmidt, Arno
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German author and translator
DATE OF BIRTH	18 January 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hamburg, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	3 June 1979
PLACE OF DEATH	Celle, Germany

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