Gerd Gaiser
Gerd Gaiser, born Gerhard Gaiser on September 15, 1908, in Oberroexingen, Germany, was an influential figure in postwar German literature and art history. The only child of a Protestant minister, Gaiser experienced a childhood marked by the social upheavals of World War I and its aftermath, which shaped his worldview. He initially pursued a career in art, earning his doctorate in 1934 with a dissertation on Spanish Baroque and Renaissance sculpture. However, his path shifted dramatically during World War II when he served as a fighter pilot and was eventually captured by British forces.
After the war, Gaiser faced challenges in his painting career and turned to writing, producing poetry and narratives that explored the struggles of soldiers reintegrating into civilian life. His novels, such as "Die sterbende Jagd" and "Das Schiff im Berg," reflect a deep engagement with themes of heroism, despair, and the insignificance of humanity against the forces of history and nature. Throughout his career, Gaiser received numerous literary awards, but his later works revealed a growing pessimism about contemporary German culture. He ultimately shifted his focus to art history, and upon his death in 1976, he was largely forgotten, even as his contributions to conservative postwar literature remain significant.
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Gerd Gaiser
- Born: September 15, 1908
- Birthplace: Oberriexingen, Germany
- Died: June 9, 1976
- Place of death: Reutlingen, Germany
Biography
Gerd Gaiser was born Gerhard Gaiser, the only child of a Protestant minister, on September 15, 1908, in Oberroexingen, near Württemberg, Germany. Growing up amid the crises surrounding World War I and the subsequent economic slump that plagued Germany, Gaiser nevertheless enjoyed an idyllic childhood, devouring the parsonage library and falling in love with the mountains of the Swabian countryside. Although he initially thought to follow his father’s career, he opted ultimately to study and teach art. He completed his doctorate in 1934 at the University of Tübingen; his doctoral dissertation was a groundbreaking examination of Spanish Baroque and Renaissance sculpture, which he would publish in 1938. With the advent of World War II, Gaiser was drafted into the German air force and trained as a fighter pilot, ultimately serving as a squadron leader before being taken prisoner by the British in April, 1945.
After the war, Gaiser attempted to pursue painting. Unsuccessful in that endeavor (although he would eventually accept a university appointment in art history at Reutlingen, Germany), he turned almost reluctantly to writing. He later would claim that unlike painting, which was a joy, writing was an agony. He initially wrote poetry, publishing a slender volume of poems that he would later dismiss as amateurish, before writing short stories and novels.
After completing Zwischenland (1949), a collection of related stories that traced the difficult adjustment of soldiers to the routine of civilian life, Gaiser began publishing novels. His second novel, Die sterbende Jagd (1953; The Last Squadron, 1956), was an experimental ensemble narrative that recounted the exploits of a German squadron of elite fighter pilots who come to realize the doomed enterprise for which they were fighting. Gaiser’s depiction of the heroic engagements was tempered by the compelling feeling of helplessness in the face of the sheer force of history itself. That same sense of compelling grandness set against the diminutive dominates Gaiser’s next novel, Das Schiff im Berg (1955), in which a vast mountain serves as the narrative’s main character, a symbol for Gaiser of the strength and durability of nature against the evident inconsequentiality of humanity.
Now recognized among the leading voices of the conservative temperament of postwar German literature, Gaiser won many prestigious national literary awards between 1951 and 1963. By the late 1950’s, his work began to reflect his own growing pessimism over the direction of German culture, finding the contemporary era materialistic, morally shallow, conformist, and disconnected from its own troubling history. Like Heraclitus, whose dark vision of history deeply affected him, Gaiser argued that events ultimately unfolded according to the authority of a blind and unknowable force of fate.
For most of the last twenty years of his writing career, Gaiser forsook fiction and turned to writing art history. When he died in Reutlingen on June 6, 1976, he was largely forgotten; the German novel had moved into radical experiments with technique and far more liberal ideas. However, he remains an important voice of the postwar conservative generation that initially embraced the doctrine of Nazism, and then, disillusioned, was compelled to confront the tangled moral and political implications of that commitment.