The Hamburg writer and Büchner Prize winner Hans Erich Nossack divided his life into an "external" and an "actual". He was born in Hamburg on January 30, 1901. Who was the man that not many know today?
by Annette Volland, David Manikowski
Hans Erich Nossack liked to say that he had two biographies. "On one (...) registry, housing, tax offices and other authorities can provide much better information than I can. The registers are absolutely reliable because they are unimaginative." With the other, the true biography, he struggles day and night. He has kept a diary since he was 15. It was part of his "actual" life. He saw this in escaping bourgeois appearances and going in search of the truth about existence.
Artists become Nossack's "real" family
While Nossack distanced himself from his biological family - he described his relationship with his mother as "the misfortune of my life" - he found another that he saw as a "real" family. It had a far higher status for him and consisted of the artists, writers and poets with whom he felt spiritually related. Among others, Nossack counted the poet and dramatist Christian Friedrich Hebbel and the painter Vincent van Gogh among his role models, whom he also referred to as his fathers.
Goethe and man "without personality"
Goethe, on the other hand, was for Nossack the "capable German provincial in pure culture - under the pretentious costume the little big one always peeks out". He described Thomas Mann as "the epitome of dishonesty and cowardice". He justified the criticism of his "enemies" by saying that they were "fake" and had no personality.
The early years of Hans Erich Nossack in Hamburg
In the three-act play "Die Rotte Kain" Nossack deals with escaping his own fate - here during rehearsals at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus in 1952.Hans Erich Nossack was born on January 30, 1901 into a wealthy merchant family in Hamburg. He grew up in a Harvestehude villa. He spent his school days at the humanistic grammar school and then began studying art history and literature in Hamburg. In 1920 Nossack switched to the University of Jena to study law and philosophy there, but he also dropped out of this course. Back in his hometown, the 24-year-old began his writing career as a playwright. And he marries Gabriele Knierer, with whom he will remain together for the rest of his life. At night he writes works like this Lenin drama "Elnin" and the play "Die Rotte Kain". During the day Nossack works as a bank clerk until 1933 - but that is only his outward life.
Working against National Socialism in the KPD
The young writer and merchant's son is also politically active:in 1930 he joined the German Communist Party because he wanted to counteract the Nazi movement. Because of this membership, the SA and Gestapo later search his apartment. From 1933 Nossack worked in his father's coffee and cocoa import company, which he later took over. In his "actual" life in the 1930s and 1940s, in addition to poems, the dramas "Die Hauptprobe" and "Der Hessische Landbote" were written. They will not be published either.
"Downfall" - bomb attack destroys apartment and factory
Nossack worked in his father's company for more than 20 years, but his real passion was literature.Nossack experienced a major blow in July 1943:During the bombing raid on Hamburg, he not only lost his apartment - almost all of his manuscripts were burned too. This tragic loss of the diaries, letters and works he had written up to that point still troubled him decades later, because "these years were what really mattered," he wrote in his diary in 1977. But the loss of all his belongings, the complete destruction of his apartment and the destruction of his father's company are also an opportunity for Nossack to bring his external life closer to the real life. In October 1943 he wrote his first prose work "Der Untergang" (not to be confused with the film of the same name). As one of the first German authors, he describes the disaster of the air raids on Germany - here on Hamburg - and settles accounts with the Nazis.
Nossack's second life
He actually did not want to publish the work, but in 1948 the autobiographical story was published in an anthology. The text makes him known. Although it was written during the Second World War, it is considered the beginning of post-war literature. Nossack is elected to the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and one year later is one of the co-founders of the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg.
Honored with the Georg Büchner Prize 1961
From 1955 Nossack published with Suhrkamp-Verlag, to which he remained loyal until his last publication. He dissolves the company of his father, who died in 1948, and moves to Aysetten near Augsburg. From now on he works only as a writer and writes several novels, among others "Story of a Survivor" and "At the Latest in November". In 1961, Nossack was honored with the Georg Büchner Prize and received further awards in the years that followed, such as the Wilhelm Raabe Prize. He undertakes a number of reading tours, one of them to the USA. After living in Darmstadt for a short time and then in Frankfurt am Main, he returned to his hometown of Hamburg in 1969. He dies there eight years later, on November 2, 1977, and is buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery.