Edgar Hilsenrath

Corey Twitchell (Washington University St. Louis)

Ed. by Jennifer Marston William, Purdue University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.1: German-language Writing and Culture: Germany, 500-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Dates

Born 2 Apr 1926
Activity 1964-ongoing

Places

Born in Germany
Active in Germany

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Critics and scholars often highlight details from German-Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath’s biography as a point of departure for interpreting his texts—and not without good reason. Hilsenrath was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1926. The eldest son of a bourgeois Jewish family with strong ties to Eastern Europe, Hilsenrath experienced the rise of Nazism and the implementation of its racial policies firsthand as a schoolboy increasingly taunted and shunned by his fellow classmates. In an effort to remove his family from imminent danger as the legal status of Jews deteriorated in Nazi Germany, his father sent his wife and sons to live with relatives in the German speaking shtetl Sereth, in the Romanian Bukovina, in 1938. There, the y…

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2974 words

Citation: Twitchell, Corey. "Edgar Hilsenrath". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 September 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13114, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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