Weidermann is publishing the collected output of the prolific pacifist writer Armin T. Wegner; the first volume appeared in 2012. That was also the year in which Weidermann took on a guest professorship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.[3] He lives in Berlin.[4]
Publications
March 2006 saw the appearance of Weidermann's literary history, Lichtjahre (Light Years), subtitled, rather more helpfully, A Short History of German Literature from 1945 till Today.[5] This gave rise to a discussion about the division of literary criticism in Germany into two opposing camps, characterized by Hubert Winkels of the national radio station as the "Emphatic" and the "Gnostic."[6] The distinction drawn by Winkels, writing in Die Zeit, is between literary critics such as Weidermann, who pay close attention to the vitality, realism, and passion of an author's output, and those who concentrate on the textual form and style along with the language and the dramaturgy. One camp hankers after "true life," while the other looks out for "true literature." Predictably, having defined the polar opposites in this way, Winkels is critical of both.[7]
Weidermann marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Max Frisch with a critical new biography, published in 2010, entitled Max Frisch. Sein Leben, seine Bücher (Max Frisch: His Life and His Books).[8]
Volker Weidermann: Principal Publications
Lichtjahre: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von 1945 bis heute. Kieperheuer & Witsch, Köln 2006, ISBN3-462-03693-9.
Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2008, ISBN978-3-462-03962-7.
Max Frisch. Sein Leben, seine Bücher. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2010, ISBN978-3-462-04227-6.
Ostende: 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2014, ISBN978-3-462-04600-7.
Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918. Pushkin Press, 2018.
In 2008, Buch der verbrannten Bücher (Book of the Burned Books) appeared, comprising 131 miniature overviews of the lives and works of authors whose works were included in the 1933 Book Burnings. In 2009 this book won Weidermann the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis for literary journalism.[9]
The biographical novelOstende: 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft (Ostend 1936: Summer of Friendship)[10]) appeared in 2014. It concerns the friendship of two very different writers, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, and their meeting at the Belgian coastal resort Ostend in 1936. Weidermann addressed the same subject in a nonfiction book that has been translated into English.[11] Other exiled German writers and artists were at Ostend at the same time, including Roth's latest love, Irmgard Keun, along with Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Arthur Koestler, Willi Münzenberg, Ernst Toller, and Toller's young wife, Christiane Grautoff.
↑This is a translation of the title, but the book does not appear to have been translated into English.
↑Weidermann, Volker (Carol Brown Janeway, translator), Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016; Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936. London: Pushkin Press, 2017.
