The writer Wilhelm Genazino is on 12. December 2018, after a short illness died. The publisher, Carl Hanser reported, this Friday in Munich.
Wilhelm Genazino was born on 22. January 1943 in Mannheim, Germany born. He grew up with three siblings in the impoverished post-war conditions. The high school he had to leave “because of the dreams and because I was just too busy also with the Letter” even before graduating high school. With almost forty years, he took the Abitur and studied in Frankfurt, German Philology, sociology and philosophy.
First, worked Genazino as a Journalist, initially as a freelancer, then as a volunteer and editor at the “Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung” in Heidelberg and Mannheim, and later as a freelance Journalist for Radio, for Newspapers and magazines, most recently in 1971, the satirical monthly magazine “Pardon”. Since then, he has worked as a freelance writer. He was first author of radio plays and sketches known, which he wrote in part, together with Peter Knorr.
in The end, you will be a lot of the world
Genazinos first – then it dropped the novel “Laslinstraße”, of the outbreak of the dreams of high school students towards the end of the Adenauer Era to the topic, took place at his Appearing (1965), only little attention. To the operation of a recognized size in the literature Genazino was with his novel trilogy “Abschaffel” (1977), “the destruction of The” (1978) and “the Wrong year” (1979) about the life of the office workers Abschaffel, misses by alienation in the profession, yourself as a Person.
Had approached Genazino the question of self-realization, adaptation and escape, until then, from a socio-psychological perspective and the narrative Convention of continuity largely adhered to, he set his novel “The stain, the jacket, the room, the pain” (1989) of loosely-linked, self-contained, “prose miniatures”. With his novel “An umbrella for this day” (2001) presented Genazino a further variant of his city-goers-reflections. His Protagonist, the subtle inner-toothed look, with the detailed depiction of a big-city backdrop, the story of a nameless Intellectual who thinks of herself as a trial runner for English luxury shoes more water. In the serene narrative style with an ironic refraction Genazino deals with the fragility of today’s existence.
In Frankfurt, wrote our literary critic Lena Bopp in January 2013, the sixtieth birthday of the writer, have Genazino detected “an inexhaustible mine”, “because this city makes so many promises she can’t keep. For Frankfurt, the city that is always looking for reasons, the return to speak frankly to you, proved to be the chronicler of Genazino as a stroke of luck.“
