Wilhelm Genazino, winner of the Büchner prize, and master of the laconic humor, died last Wednesday after a short illness at the age of 75 years.
This spring, 21 appeared. Roman. It should be the last, the publication of which he witnessed. As the Hanser publishing on Thursday announced that it is Wilhelm Genazino died on Wednesday at the age of 75 years.
“No money, no watch, no hat” deals with a subject which employed the with dozens of awards Honored again and again in new variations: the Failure. Especially the Failure of men in advanced age, where the way of life by the fingers, often desperate and funny at the same time.
Failure as a life theme
“I’m used to it, in the Failure to continue. For a while I don’t know what is happening and how I’m going to get away with it, but I do. And so long, until I suddenly have the impression that I am in the midst of a new, second Beginning.” The Genazino wrote in September, in a long Essay for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. “As I was I” to this question, the Reflection, which was at the same time, self-assurance, and between the balance as a writer revolves.
Wilhelm Genazino: Never on the Computer, only on the typewriter
What is the meaning of defeats, in a “large-scale failing of the world”, even if you can have a beneficial impact on your life? What it means to write, where “the works of the writers to emerge unprompted, mostly selfless, no one addressed”. If the words “power beings” arising from a kind of desire?
Eccentric Nerds
Genazinos “expression engine”, his own word, has brought the world as a virtuoso told novels, rarely longer than 170 pages. Bizarre stories of people with strange activities is: “An umbrella for this day” (2001) is a man philosophizing as a “Finisher” for luxury shoes. In “The Love of timidity” (2005) is a Horsemen with the mess of the love life and his own inability to relate to others.
In the novel, “If we were animals” (2011) is about a man who loses control of himself, told with the “devilishly good laconicism”, as the “Frankfurter Rundschau” commented. Joke of the detail-rich reference to reality is also a characteristic of Genazinos other books, such as “When it rains in the hall” (2014) and “no-one but us is talking about us” (2016). It novels, the characters as quirky loner with a relaxed passivity, a right life in the wrong search. “Individualists reluctantly” called the author of the Anti-heroes of his books.
Writing against the abyss
Fear was a big issue for Wilhelm Genazino, born in 1943, grew up quite poor and as a child of the post-war bombed-out Mannheim intense had experienced. “Unforgettable, my post-war childhood; I stromerte as a Seven – or eight-year-old crater that remained of the bombs left,” he said in his I-Determination article in the “FAZ”.
Genazino first worked as a Journalist, among others, in the satirical magazine “Pardon”. Then he studied German language and literature. He wrote radio plays, before he was with his employees-novel trilogy “Abschaffel” (1977), “the destruction of The” (1978) and “the Wrong year” (1979). His works have been translated into many languages.
In 2004, Wilhelm Genazino was awarded the Georg Büchner prize
However, in spite of his enormous success, in spite of the award in the year 2004 with the most important honor for a literary life’s work, which is awarded in Germany, the Georg Büchner prize, in spite of the Heinrich-von-Kleist prize in 2007, and all of the other tributes, looked at the writer, his identity always-sceptic clothing. Until old age him before each book fear of failure plagued.
Observations and reflections
“I’m making an attempt to find the truth and to come close to her. I don’t like being bold. Actually, I don’t know what to say: that’s Why I’m talking about,” he explained himself to write the need. Write meant for him, and he watched to write. “I need the half-distance,” he once said. If he was traveling, had Genazino small white piece of paper and a pencil to write down observations of Everyday life. His perceptions, he transferred to the typewriter in his idiosyncratic mixture of sadness and Comedy.
In the laudatory speech for the Büchner prize-awarding literary critic Helmut Böttiger said, Genazinos books have become “always silent, always easier – and to always be serious”. Now, the master of grotesque humour is muted, the Between – life balance.
His novels, Essays, photos, correspondence, and a “work diary” to stay in the German literature archive in Marbach, for posterity. The skeptic Wilhelm Genazino had delivered Marbach his personal archive in 2012.