Gert Hofmann (29 January 1931 - 1 July 1993) was a German writer and professor of German literature. Hofmann was born in Limbach, Saxony (Germany) and died in Erding (near Munich).
He grew up in his native Limbach. In 1948, he moved with his family to Leipzig. There, he attended a school for translators, studying English and Russian. In 1950, he enrolled to the University of Leipzig, 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.
After one year as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg, he left Germany in 1961 to teach German literature in Europe and the United States: he taught at universities in Toulouse, Paris, Bristol, Edinburgh, New Haven, Berkeley and Austin. From 1971 to 1980 he lived in the southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt, while teaching at the University of Ljubljana (in former Yugoslavia, now in Slovenia). In 1980 he moved to Erding (near Munich), where he died in 1993.
Hofmann began his career as a writer of radio plays, becoming a novelist later in life after his return to Germany. He subsequently received several literary awards during his lifetime including the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (1979), the Alfred-Döblin-Preis (1982), and the Müncher Literaturpreis (1993).
A number of his works have been translated by his son, poet Michael Hofmann.
Read more about Gert Hofmann: Works
Famous quotes containing the words gert and/or hofmann:
“There’s a wonderful family called Stein:
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Ep’s statues are junk,
And no-one can understand Ein.”
—Anonymous.
“That children link us with the future is hardly news. . . . When we participate in the growth of children, a sense of wonder must take hold of us, providing for us a sense of future. Without the intimation of concrete individual futures, it is hardly worth bothering with social change and improvement.”
—Greta Hofmann Nemiroff (20th century)