Edgar Hilsenrath is a German-Jewish writer living in Berlin.
Background
Hilsenrath was born in Leipzig. In 1938 his mother escaped with her two children to Siret (Sereth), in Romanian Bukovina, where they enjoyed a respite from persecution. At the time that he should have received an entrance card to higher education, he and his mother were interned in the ghetto of Cernăuţi (Czernowitz).
Career
His main works are Night, The Nazi and the Barber, and The Story of the Last Thought. He began to write about the Holocaust after his liberation when he moved to Paris. Hilsenrath also lived in Palestine, Israel, and New New York
According to Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Hilsenrath calls things by their proper names and portrays life first and foremost as physical existence, of whose details the reader is constantly made aware: birth, nursing, feeding, sex, and excretion accompanied by feelings of pleasure and pain.
The rhetoric of politicians and political theory are shown to be the schemes of beings ultimately dependent on these bodily processes and subject to physical desires. Hilsenrath"s very approach is a protest against disrespect toward the mortal body, against the tyranny of the mind over matter.
Edgar Hilsenrath"s homepage (English) Edgar Hilsenrath"s homepage (German) Edgar Hilsenrath on Facebook and on Twitter (English) Biographies of the Literary Agency Doctor Ray-Güde Mertin with book presentations and comments. at exil-archiv.de.
Membership
German Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Center.