Hans erich nossack biography

Hans Erich Nossack (30 January 1901 – 2 November 1977) was a German writer.
Hans Erich Nossack was born in Hamburg in 1901, and much of his writing was shaped by his relationship to his native city, where he died in 1977.
Hans Erich Nossack was virtually unknown in America for most of his writing career.

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Hans Erich Nossack.The End: Hamburg 1943. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxi + 87 pp. $20.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-59556-6.

Reviewed by Ryan Berry (Department of History, University of Toronto)
Published on H-German (September, 2005)

Writing From the Abyss: Hans Erich Nossack's The End: Hamburg 1943

In July 1943, Hans Erich Nossack, along with his wife Misi, watched as the Allied forces bombed the city of Hamburg. For several days, vacationing in a cabin on the outskirts of the city, they witnessed the repeated air raids and the resulting fire-storm that razed the city and left the majority of Hamburg's inhabitants, at least those fortunate enough to survive the bombing, as refugees in a fire-swept wasteland. Three months later, living in London, Nossack set to work on preserving his memories in Der Untergang, an eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath. This short book is at once a dispassionate, documentary report of annihilation and total destruction, and a narrative that describes the author's immediate and personal experience w

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w i t n e s s to w a rj o e l a g e e

In today’s world, personal truth is the only reality. To stand
by that truth—to declare it—is revolutionary.
–Hans Erich Nossack

Half a century ago, when I was fifteen years old, I read a collection of “reports”—that is what they were called on the flyleaf—titled Interview mit dem Tode, “An Interview with Death,” by an author named Hans Erich Nossack. I was living in Berlin then, surrounded by many ruins left over from World War II. It may be that the knowledge of so much violent death in my neighborhood not long ago was in part what attracted me to that title, even before I discovered how much of the book had to do with the enigma those ruins represented to me.

The reports were unlike anything I would have associated with that word. All but one of them were works of fiction, some of it quite fantastical, and the single piece of reportage proper, titled Der Untergang ⁱ—an account of the destruction of Hamburg by Allied bombers in July, 1943—gave way, intermittently, to passages writ

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To the Unknown Hero

»Hans Erich Nossack belongs to the extraordinary lineage of German writers that includes Hesse, Kafka, Rilke, and Novalis. Jean-Paul Sartre has called him ›the most interesting contemporary German writer.‹

To the Unknown Hero […] shows Nossack’s inimitable wry conscience in a comic mood that promises to delight the reader. The book is both an adventure story and a proof of the limitations of historiography. ›Professor Precise,‹ German pedant, had early in his in academic career written a 200-page treatise called ›To the Unknown Hero,‹ about a bit of German history, ten event-filled days in 1919 that paved the way to the Weimar Republic. The hero of this brief revolution, praised as a tactical and political genius, was a man known only as Comrade Hein, a mysterious figure who disappeared from the midst of the first assembly of victorious revolutionaries and was never heard from again. ›Professor Precise,‹ with filial pride, had presented his middle-class, grocer father with a copy of his published book – with surprising results, for the father clearly knew