Hans Erich Nossack
Hans Erich Nossack was a German writer born into a middle-class family in Hamburg in 1901. He faced significant challenges in his early life, including a serious injury that affected his mobility and a difficult family dynamic marked by a domineering mother and a passive father. After studying law and philosophy, Nossack chose to work as a manual laborer and became politically active by joining the Communist Party. He married Gabriele Knierer in 1925 and began writing dramas while working in his father's coffee import business.
Nossack's literary career was profoundly impacted by the political landscape of Nazi Germany, where he struggled to publish his work due to censorship and resource shortages. The bombing of his Hamburg apartment during World War II resulted in the loss of many manuscripts, prompting a significant shift in his writing. Despite these challenges, he became a notable figure in the German literary scene, receiving several prestigious awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize. Nossack's work often explored themes of inner truth versus external reality, asserting that personal belief can be a revolutionary act. He remained engaged with the literary community throughout his life and traveled extensively for readings, leaving a lasting legacy in German literature.
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Hans Erich Nossack
Writer
- Born: January 30, 1901
- Birthplace: Hamburg, Germany
- Died: November 2, 1977
- Place of death: Hamburg, Germany
Biography
Hans Erich Nossack was one of five children born to Eugen Nossack (1861-1947) and Ella Marie Nossack, née Kröhnke (1878-1953). Eugen established a coffee export business in Santos, Brazil, and then the Eugen Nossack coffee import business in Hamburg, Germany, where he married into the upper middle class.
Hans suffered a serious injury while ice skating when he was seven and had difficulty walking for the rest of his life. His childhood was not particularly happy: he found his mother domineering and his father passive. From 1910 to 1919, he attended the humanistic high school Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums. From 1919 to 1922, he studied law and philosophy at the universities of Hamburg and Jena. On his twenty-first birthday, he declined further financial support from his family, took a job as a manual laborer, and joined the Communist Party.
On November 10, 1925, Nossack entered into his lifelong marriage with Gabriele (Misi) Knierer. While writing his first dramas, he worked for the private bank L. Behrens Söhne (L. Behrens’s sons), later for Rudolf Meyerkorf und Söhne in Hamburg. In 1929, Nossack went to Brazil briefly as the representative of his father’s company, but missed the European intellectual climate. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Nossack took a secure position in his father’s company.
During the Third Reich (1933-1945), Nossack attempted to have some poetry published, but was told there was a shortage of paper. In July of 1943, the Nossacks were away on holiday when their Hamburg apartment was bombed. Nossack captured the shock of the survivors in his prose piece Der Untergang: Hamburg, 1943 (1961).
Many of his manuscripts were destroyed in the bombing, so Nossack had to begin again after the war. He always drew a distinction between the outer world and the inner world, which he explained as follows in his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize in 1961: “In the renunciation of truths that can be used for practical purposes, I see an attempt to get at one’s own truth. . . One’s own truth is, in the current state of the world, the only reality. To declare one’s belief in it is a revolutionary act.”
In 1956, Nossack dissolved the family firm. After living in Aystetten near Augsburg, in Darmstadt and in Frankfurt, Nossack returned to Hamburg in 1969. Reading tours took him to Italy, Spain, Portugal and Holland in 1963, to Scandinavia in 1964, Great Britain in 1966, and the United States in 1968.
Nossack was active in the German literary world. In 1949, he became a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz; in 1950 he was a founding member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg. He was a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt, and of the PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists) Center of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Nossack received four prizes for literature: the Prize of the Cultural Circle of German Industry in 1957; the Georg Büchner Prize in 1961; the Wilhelm Raabe Prize of the City of Braunschweig in 1963; and Hamburg’s Alexander Zinn Prize in 1974, the same year he was elected a member of the order “Pour le mérite” for the Arts and Sciences.