ABSTRACT
Born and brought up in Westphalia, Wollschläger studied music there from 1955 to 1957 and settled in Bamberg in the following year as a professional writer. He translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe with his mentor Arno Schmidt, then the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1970) and the whole of Ulysses (1975), an achievement for which he has received unstinted praise. He shares with Schmidt religious agnosticism, reflected in his non-fictional works Die bewaffneten Wallfahrten gen Jerusalem. Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (1973) and Die Gegenwart einer Illusion. Reden gegen ein Monstrum (1972, extended 1978), and an interest in the late nineteenth-century author of exotic adventure stories Karl May, whose biography he has written (Karl May. Grundriβ eines gebrochenen Lebens (1965, extended 1976)). Wollschläger’s chief work to date is the novel Herzgewächse oder Der Fall Adams. Fragmentarische Biographik in unzufälligen Makulaturblättern, written from 1959 to 1962 but not published until 1982. The central figure Adams, born of Jewish parents in Aden in 1900, resident in Bamberg from 1905 to 1935, emigrates to London and becomes a war correspondent who takes part in a bombing raid over Cologne in 1942, then returns to Germany in 1950 to compose ‘Herzgewächse’, which combines the history of the human race with autobiography. In a state of growing paranoia he conjures up the mephistophelean figure of a Nazi war criminal who has become a weapons dealer and international gangster, with whom he develops a symbiotic relationship. The style of this magnum opus is marked by a multiplicity of time levels, historical, literary, mythological and philosophical allusions and verbal play which form an intricate network of dazzling complexity comparable to works of similar modernist virtuosity by Joyce, Thomas Mann and Arno Schmidt.
