Wolfgang Hildesheimer and His Critics

Professor Stanley’s book analyses the critical response to the works of Wolfgang Hildesheimer, one of the most important German writers - of plays, short stories, travelogues, biographies and longer fiction - to emerge from the postwar period. Hildesheimer’s early writing, strongly influenced by James Joyce and Beckett, is the literature of the absurd in Germany, but it was only with the publicaton of Tynset (1965) - translated into other European languages and Japanese - that his European reputation was firmly established. He became famous in English-speaking countries with his unconventional biography Mozart (1977), which portrays Mozart as a kind of absurdist; his next book, Marbot, a fictional biography, is about an English nobleman of the early nineteenth century who is purported to have met and spoken with Goethe, Byron, the German Romantic poet Platen, Leopardi, and other luminaries of the period: Marbot has recently attracted considerable critical attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and Stanley provides illuminating discussions of the critical controversy surrounding the problematic relationship of author and subject. She also shows that Hildesheimer has close links to some of the great European writers of the age, such as Ionesco, but that henevertheless, in the later works, owes much to Goethe and Thomas Mann.