Gert Hofmann
Gert Hofmann ( born January 29, 1931 in Limbach, Saxony, † July 1, 1993 in Erding ) was a German writer.
Life
Gert Hofmann grew up in Limbach. 1948 the family moved to Leipzig, where Hofmann attended a foreign language school and passed his interpreters and translation exam for English and Russian. After he had made in 1950 graduated from high school, he began a study of Romance Studies, German Studies, Slavic Studies and English at the University of Leipzig. In 1951, Hofmann left the GDR and went to Freiburg, where he graduated - now in the subjects of English, German, Romance Languages, Sociology and Political Science - continued. In 1957 he received his doctorate with a thesis on Henry James to the doctor of philosophy.
After working as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau few years, Hofmann took from 1961 Germanistic lectureships at universities in Toulouse, Paris, Bristol, Edinburgh, New Haven, Berkeley and Austin true. From 1971 to 1980 he lived in Klagenfurt and taught simultaneously at the University of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Since 1980 he and his family lived in Erding near Munich. There he died in 1993 of a stroke.
Gert Hofmann's literary work consisting of a combination of a variety of plays and some plays that emerged since the early 1960s. From 1979, the author then published a series of stories and novels that made him known to a wider reading public. While Hofmann's radio plays in language and social criticism were at the forefront, he describes in his prose works, which have been compared by some critics with whom Thomas Bernhard, with preference mentally and physically damaged protagonists in a sinister, cruel world. Important, recurring themes in Hofmann's works are the problem of the displaced German past and the grotesque consequences of this displacement.
Gert Hofmann, who was a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt since 1987, among other things, received the following awards: 1979 the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, 1982 Alfred Döblin Prize, 1983 Hörspielpreis the war blind and the 1993 Literature Award the city of Munich.
He is the father of the poet and translator Michael Hofmann, who has also translated a number of his father's works into English.