ABSTRACT
Born in Hamburg, Nossack studied law and literature in Jena, worked in various jobs, including journalism, then, having been forbidden to publish by the Nazis, entered his father’s import firm, where he remained until 1956. He then moved to South Germany, eventually settling in Darmstadt in 1962. In 1943 his early manuscripts and diaries fell victim to the flames during the bombing of Hamburg, a traumatic experience which left a permanent mark on his work. His type of magic realism, which is similar to that of Kasack and the early Jens and is as symptomatic of its time as ‘Kahlschlagliteratur’ and Borchert’s expressionism, has not worn as well as these, partly because Nossack chose to remain detached from the literary debates and groupings of his time and out of step with the general development towards social realism, preferring to the end of his career a bleak existentialism, which led to his promotion in France by Sartre, and the exploration of a metaphysical dimension by means of myth, allegory and futuristic fantasy. Nekyia (1947), based on the episode in the Odyssey in which Ulysses descends to Hades and makes a sacrifice to the dead, was inspired, like ‘Der Untergang’, by the destruction of Hamburg, the latter a realistic account and one of ten pieces, some based on myth, Märchen and science fiction motifs, assembled in Interview mit dem Tode (1948), which later appeared under the title Dorothea (1950, extended 1963). Nossack linked five more stories as the waking dreams of the central figure in Spirale. Roman einer schlaflosen Nacht (1956). With one exception these were republished with ten more stories in the collection Begegnung im Vorraum (1958, 1963). His first novel Spätestens im November (1955), on a love-affair between a businessman’s wife and a poet narrated by her after her death, can be related to the story Das kennt man (1964), on the fantasies of a dying prostitute as she becomes aware of a post-mortem existence. Der jüngere Bruder (1958) describes a man’s search after his wife’s death for the title-figure, who emerges as an alter ego. The mysterious dystopia Nach dem letzten Aufstand (1961) invites comparison with Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie’ in its portrayal of attitudes before and after the uprising of the title. In Der Fall d’Arthez (1968) two friends, artist-intellectuals, succeed in defeating the machinations of a secret service. In Dem unbekannten Sieger (1969) a historian discovers by accident his father’s identity as the leader of a revolution in Hamburg after the First World War, while in Die gestohlene Melodie (1972) the melody of the title is traced to its source in a dimension beyond death. Bereitschaftsdienst. Bericht über eine Epidemic (1973) concerns the reaction of officialdom to a suicide epidemic, and Ein glücklicher Mensch. Erinnerungen an Aporée (1979) is a post-nuclear dystopia. In Das Testament des Lucius Eurinus (1964), a story in which Nossack’s aristocratic nihilism is succinctly conveyed, the title-figure commits suicide in the name of a stoic individualism when he recognizes his wife’s conversion to Christianity as a sign of the times.
