Gert Hofmann


Gert Hofmann was a German writer and professor of German literature.

Life

Hofmann was born and grew up in Limbach, Saxony which, after World War II, became part of East Germany. In 1948, he moved with his family to Leipzig. There, he attended a school for translators and interpreters, studying English and Russian. In 1950, he enrolled to Leipzig University, where he studied Romance languages and Slavic languages. In 1951, he fled from the German Democratic Republic and settled in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he continued his studies. In 1957, he graduated with a thesis on Henry James.
Hofmann began his writing career as a writer of radio plays. After one year as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg, he left Germany in 1961 for Bristol to teach German literature. Over the next ten years he taught at universities in Europe in Toulouse, Paris, Edinburgh, and in the United States at New Haven, Berkeley, California and Austin.
From 1971 to 1980 he lived in the southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt, while teaching at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, former Yugoslavia.
In 1980, aged 49, he returned to Germany, moving to Erding near Munich, becoming a novelist. He died of a stroke in 1993.

Honors

Hofmann received several literary awards during his lifetime including the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis, the Alfred-Döblin-Preis, the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden.
In 1987, he became a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt.
He received the Literaturpreis der Stadt München in 1993.

Works

A number of Hofmann's works have been translated by his son, poet Michael Hofmann.
Die Denunziation and Veilchenfeld are concerned with The Holocaust.