Content area
Full Text
Schnurre, Wolfdietrich (1920-)
German poet, editor, critic, and commentator, was born in Frankfurt am Main and attended school in Berlin from 1928 to 1939. As a soldier in Adolf Hitler's army (1939-45) he was repeatedly arrested for “defeatism”; in 1945 he deserted and returned to the eastern sector of Berlin, where he began writing his first short stories, later published as Man sollte dagegen sein (1960; People Ought to Be Opposed). From 1946 to 1949 Schnurre worked as a book, theater, and film critic for the Deutsche Rundschau. In 1947 he cofounded the “Gruppe 47” and opened the group's first session with a reading of his short narrative Das Begräbnis (1946; The Burial). This story, which depicts the burial of God and rejects spiritual consolation as senseless, is thematically similar to early works by Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll. The earliest stories in the collection Eine Rechnung die nicht aufgeht (1958; A Calculation That Doesn't Work Out) were also written at this time.
In 1948, ordered by the Soviet cultural officer in East Berlin to cease writing for publications licensed by the Americans and the British, Schnurre moved to West Berlin, where he contributed...