Wolfgang Hildesheimer

Wolfgang Hildesheimer (Hamburg, 1916 – Poschiavo, Switzerland, 1991) was a German writer of Jewish descent, best known for his fiction, plays and biographies, though he first trained as an artist. Born to a Jewish family, he emigrated with his parents to Mandatory Palestine, where he learned carpentry, and later studied painting and stage design in London. His work as a painter thus belongs to an early phase of his life, before he devoted himself fully to writing.

In 1946 he worked as a translator and clerk at the Nuremberg trials, an experience that shaped his attention to language and power. He then joined Group 47, the German postwar literary circle in which he met writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He wrote short stories, radio plays and stage works, including Herrn Walsers Raben and Pastorale oder Die Zeit für Kakao, and novels such as Tynset and Masante. In 1966 he received the Büchner Prize.

His best-known work outside Germany is the biography Mozart (1977), which he regarded as the book of his life, and the fictional biography Marbot (1981). Alongside his literary work, from the 1980s he made collages, gathered in several volumes, including Endlich allein (1984), a practice he shared with other writers of his generation.

His legacy lies mainly in postwar German literature, where his ironic prose and his reflection on the figure of the artist and on biography carried considerable weight. His work as a painter, though less documented, forms part of his early creative path.