HILDESHEIMER, WOLFGANG

HILDESHEIMER, WOLFGANG (1916–1991), German writer and artist. As a participant, chronicler, and critic of the business of literature in postwar Germany, Hildesheimer can be regarded as one of the most influential, controversial, and multi-talented writers of his time and place. His oeuvre includes not only brilliant prose, but also radio plays, librettos, graphic art, and theoretical essays and lectures on music, theater, and literature. Biographical projects on Mozart (1977) and on the English aristocrat Sir Andrew Marbot (1981) earned him an international reputation. Born in Hamburg and raised in Berlin, Nijmegen, and Mannheim, Hildesheimer immigrated with his parents to England in 1933, continuing to Palestine in the same year. He apprenticed as a carpenter in Jerusalem. After three years studying set and costume design in London, he took a job as an English teacher at the British Council in Tel Aviv. In 1943 he became an information officer for the British government in Jerusalem. Returning to London in 1946, he was hired by the American forces in Germany as a simultaneous translator for the nuremberg trials , ultimately editing some parts of the transcripts. In the ensuing years Hildesheimer remained in Germany, where his literary career took off. He became a member of the Gruppe 47, published short stories (Lieblose Legenden, 1952), a novel (Paradies der falschen Voegel, 1953) and plays (including Der Drachenthron, 1955), and collaborated on radio broadcasts including an opera by Hans Werner Henze (Das Ende einer Welt, 1953) and the drama Prinzessin Turandot (1954). By then the fate of humanity in the face of ecological devastation had become a lasting concern in Hildesheimer's writings; during the 1970s, not least in his radio plays (Hauskauf, 1974, and Biosphaerenklaenge, 1977), the fall of civilization becomes the dominant poetic perspective. Finally, the "end of the world" becomes "the end of fiction," the title of Hildesheimer's most provocative lecture (1975). It denies literature's ambition "to condense truth out of fiction," in favor of a world now lost to writers, the realm of science, which has taken over responsibility for converting thought into truth, facts, and reality. As a consequence of this conviction, Hildesheimer stopped his literary production, returning to graphic work for the rest of his life. Undoubtedly, the path to Hildesheimer's vision of doomed mankind leads past the core scenes of Jewish postwar identity to which he became a late witness during the Nuremberg trials. The Holocaust exemplifies the damage humanity has suffered; the survivors are damaged in their ability to take renewed hold of narration and transform it into coherent, meaningful, promising realities, as depicted in Hildesheimer's prose monologues (Tynset, 1965; Masante, 1973). But far from being a paradigm, Judaism for Hildesheimer represents first and foremost the experience of a gap that cannot be bridged, a difference that often may require distancing, and always demands vigilance in order to sense the coming threat. Still aware of German antisemitism, he decided in 1957 to transfer his domicile to Poschiavo, Switzerland. Wary of being used as a Jew in Germany's struggle with its past, he avoided letting himself be integrated into the German culture industry. Although he made major contributions to the reestablishment of a completely destroyed literary landscape, Hildesheimer never subscribed to any notion of assimilation, refusing explicitly to continue the tradition of German Jewry – as he quotes Moritz Goldstein – "to hold in trust the cultural heritage of a nation that did not ask us for it." -BIBLIOGRAPHY: D. Roedewald, Ueber Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1971); Text u. Kritik 89/90 (1986) V. Jehle, Wolfgang Hildesheimer: Werkgeschichte (1990); P.H. Stanley, Wolfgang Hildesheimer and His Critics (1993); H.A. Lea, Wolfgang Hildesheimers Weg als Jude und Deutscher (1997). (Philipp Theisohn (2nd ed.)