Arno Schmidt

German novelist, nonfiction writer, short fiction writer, and translator.

• Born: January 18, 1914
• Birthplace: Hamburg, Germany
• Died: June 3, 1979
• Place of death: Celle, Germany

Biography

Arno Schmidt was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1914, the son of police officer Friedrich Otto Schmidt and his wife, Clara Ehrentraut Schmidt. His older sister Luzie taught him to read when he was three years old. During World War I, he and his family lived mainly in a poorly lit kitchen, where relations were sorely strained. Schmidt’s father died when he was fourteen, and his mother took her two children to live with her parents in Lauban, Silesia.

Schmidt was an excellent student. After graduating from high school in Görlitz in 1933, he attended commercial college and trained with the textile firm Greiff Works. He later reconstructed this part of his biography, saying he had studied astronomy at the university in Breslau but discontinued his studies in 1933 because his sister had married a Jewish businessman. Much of his writing has been termed a rewriting of his life, particularly his last novel,Abend mit Goldrand (1975; Evening Edged in Gold, 1980).

In 1937, Schmidt married Alice Murawski and asked that she stay home to assist with his writing. Alice was a devoted wife who helped Schmidt with his research and dealt with his publishers. Schmidt worked on a logarithm table and wrote short stories. He was drafted into military service in 1940, trained as an interpreter in Halle, stationed in Norway, and saw active duty only in 1945. After World War II, the Schmidts worked as translators for the Auxiliary Police Academy in Benefeld. When they were offered a transfer to police headquarters in Lüneburg in 1946, Schmidt made the crucial decision to live instead as an independent author. In the next thirty years, he became what one critic described as “postwar Germany’s most prolific and esoteric writer.”

The Schmidts traveled by tandem bicycle, pedaling thousands of miles to archives and libraries. When the publisher Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt took them out to a lavish dinner in 1950, Schmidt told him it was outrageous that writers were living in penury. Fortunately, the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz awarded Schmidt their 2,000 mark Grand Prize for Literature in 1951. In 1955, Schmidt was charged with blasphemy and pornography for his story “Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas,” and he and his wife fled to the more liberal state of Hesse. In 1958, they settled in Bargfeld, Lower Saxony. Schmidt was experiencing heart problems and lived as a recluse. He took issue with only two things: the Church and the rearmament of Germany.

His writing is unique for his accurate rendering of dialect; his neologisms, such as his title Nobodaddy’s Kinder (Nobodaddy’s Children); his large format, three-column pages with experimental typography; and his reliance on sources. The critic Robert Weninger notes that it took scholars thirty years to perceive that Schmidt used Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtshaften (1809; Elective Affinities, 1854) as the basis for his novel Das steinerne Herz. Schmidt's magnum opus was the 1334-page Zettels Traum (1970; Bottom's Dream, 2016), which is stylistically inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and is heavily dedicated to analysis of the works of Edgar Allan Poe; it presents text in the form of typewritten pages, notes, and collages. The book was first published in English in 2016; the translator had begun working on it twelve years before.

In 1964, Schmidt was awarded the 10,000 mark Fontane Prize; in 1965, the 8,000 mark Prize for Literature of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry; and in 1973, the 50,000 mark City of Frankfurt Goethe Prize. His wife read his acceptance speech, in which he said he always worked a hundred hours a week. That pace took its toll, and Schmidt died of a stroke in 1979 at age sixty-five.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Leviathan, 1949

Schwarze Spiegel, 1951

Brand's Haide, 1951

Die Umsiedler, 1953

Aus dem Leben eines Fauns, 1953 (Scenes from the Life of a Faun, 1983)

Kosmas: Oder, Vom Berge des Nordens, 1955

Das steinerne Herz, 1956

Die Gelehrtenrepublik: Kurzroman aus den Rossbreiten, 1957 (The Egghead Republic: A Short Novel from the Horse Latitudes, 1980)

Kaff auch mare Crisium, 1960

Nobodaddy's Kinder: Trilogie, 1963 (Nobodaddy's Children, 1995)

Zettels Traum, 1970 (Bottom's Dream, 2016)

Die Schule der Atheisten, 1972 (The School for Atheists, 2001)

Abend mit Goldrand, 1975 (Evening Edged in Gold, 1980)

Nonfiction:

Berechnungen, 1955

Fouqué und einige seiner Zeitgenossen, 1958

Trommler beim Zaren, 1966

Short Fiction:

Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas: Erzählungen, 1966

Orpheus: Fünf Erzählungen, 1970

Krakatau: Erzählungen, 1975

Collected Novellas, 1994

Collected Stories, 1996

Bibliography

Crilly, Alan. "Arno Schmidt's Modernist Masterpiece." The Times Literary Supplement, 7 Nov. 2016, www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/arno-schmidts-modernist-masterpiece. Accessed 22 June 2017. An article discussing Zettels Traum, its place in the modernist canon, and its English translation.

Langbehn, Volker Max. Arno Schmidt's Zettel's Traum: An Analysis. Camden House, 2003. An in-depth, book-length analysis of Zettels Traum intended to introduce the work and the author to English-speaking audiences.

Yi, Esther. "A Great Translator Takes On One Final and Nearly Impossible Project." The New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-great-translator-takes-on-one-final-and-nearly-impossible-project. Accessed 22 June 2017. Discusses in some depth the choices made by the translator in translating Zettels Traum into English, as well as offering some information on Schmidt's writing process.