Wolfgang Hildesheimer

Hildesheimer, Wolfgang (Hamburg, 1916-91, Poschiavo, Switzerland), moved to England in 1933 to complete his grammar-school education before emigrating to Palestine, where he trained as a carpenter and took up drawing and interior design. From 1937 he studied at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1939 returned to Tel-Aviv, taught English at the British Council, and from 1943 worked in Jerusalem as an intelligence officer for the British government. In 1946 he became a simultaneous translator at the Nuremberg War Trials, at the end of which he edited the proceedings' official report. After its completion in 1949 he lived for some four years in Ambach, mainly as an artist, before moving to Munich to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1957 he settled in Switzerland.

Hildesheimer began in satirical vein, exposing pretentiousness and corruption in the collection Lieblose Legenden (1952, ext. 1962, repr. 1983) and in the short novel Paradies der falschen Vögel (1953), which focuses on a painter's exploits as a faker. At the same time he began to write plays, including the libretto for the opera for radio (Funkoper) Das Ende einer Welt (1953) by H. W. Henze, and radio plays (see Hörspiel), among them the political satires Der Drachenthron (1955, rev. and retitled as Die Eroberung der Prinzessin Turandot in 1961) and Das Opfer Helena (1955), the grotesque satire Der schiefe Turm von Pisa (1956), and Herrn Walsers Raben (1960), which marked a transition to a new dramatic style. In a speech of 1960, Über das absurde Theater (1963), he defined the theatre of the absurd as representing a parable on man's alienation in the world (eine Parabel über die Fremdheit des Menschen in der Welt), adding that it should be staged with dignity. This approach, which also underlies his brief analysis of Beckett's plays, Becketts ‘Spiel’ (1963), characterizes the three plays (Pastorale, Die Uhren, Landschaft mit Fi-guren) published as Spiele, in denen es dunkel wird (1958), Die Verspätung (1961), Monolog (1964), and the melancholy Nachtstück (1963), which introduces the situation from which his novel Tynset (1965) proceeds. A writer, unable to sleep at night, browses in a railway timetable and, fascinated by the sound of the name ‘Tynset’, a remote place in Norway, imagines himself to be there; the dream fulfils his urge to withdraw into the inner world of his thoughts and imagination, but it also releases deep-seated fears. Hildesheimer conceived the highly intricate structure of this vast monologue as a musical composition in rondo form. In its sequel, Masante (1973), the protagonist is again a writer, but the change of location from Masante to an inn on the fringe of the desert is real; moreover, the extraordinary range of its substance relates largely to cultural and historical subjects through the ages. Finally, the writer walks into the desert and out of sight, an ending suggesting the absurd.

Hildesheimer became best known as the author of Mozart (1977), a work which at the time generated considerable controversy, mainly because his findings were not reconcilable with accepted portraits of Mozart; he himself denied at length that he had set out to demythologize his favourite composer, but he was also convinced of the impossibility of knowing the truth about him as a person. His scepticism towards biographies was not new (his early prose sketch Ich schreibe kein Buch über Kafka exemplifies this preoccupation), and his own psychoanalytical approach relies on no evidence other than that of Mozart's procedure as a composer. This is amply demonstrated in the remarkably detailed examination of Mozart's compositions which was his real contribution to Mozart scholarship. Apart from two more radio plays conveying a bleak vision of the future, Biosphärenklänge (1977, on nuclear devastation) and Endfunk (1980), Hildesheimer wrote a novel purporting to be the biography of a connoisseur of art: Marbot. Eine Biographie (1981) is a brilliant parody of the genre which the reader of the introduction to Mozart cannot fail to recognize as such; for only the omniscient writer of fiction can resolve the mystery of genius. Set in the early 19th c., mainly in Germany, which the young British aristocrat Andrew Marbot visits in the course of his continental travels, the novel skilfully reproduces the style of the period. In the end, the romantic Marbot takes his own life, frustrated by unfulfilled love and thwarted artistic aspiration. With all its wit and masterly faking of allegedly authentic letters (including Goethe's), it is an ambivalent work by which Hildesheimer sought to demonstrate the fine distinction between the two German concepts of ‘Realität’ and ‘Wirklichkeit’; perhaps it is also an ironic reminder of the heritage of Western civilization which he had hoped a new humane world would cherish as a stimulus to new endeavours. Mitteilungen an Max über den Stand der Dinge und anderes. Eine Festschrift für Max Frisch zum 70. Geburtstag (1981) is his last creative discourse. He shows an affinity to Frisch by conceiving his work as ‘Fiktionen’. Das Ende der Fiktionen. Reden aus 25 Jahren is a collection of 1984. Other titles include translations and adaptations, among them his rendering of Nightwood (1936), a novel by Djuna Chappell Barnes said to have influenced his conception of Tynset (Nachtgewächs, 1959). In 1965 he was awarded the Büchner Prize. Büchner and James Joyce are the subject of Interpretationen (1969) containing his Frankfurt lectures. During the last decade of his life he applied himself again exclusively to painting and collage of which he published several collections.

Gesammelte Werke (7 vols.), ed. Ch. Lucas, H. Nibbrig, and V. Jehle, appeared in 1991.

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