Arno Schmidt

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Arno Schmidt's house in Bargfeld.

Arno Schmidt (January 18, 1914 - June 3, 1979) was a German author and translator.

[edit] Biography

Born in Hamburg, Schmidt was a strict individualist, almost a solipsist. Disaffected by his experience of the Third Reich, he had an extremely pessimistic world view. In Schwarze Spiegel, he describes his utopia as an empty world after an anthropogenic apocalypse. Although he was a strict atheist, he maintained that the world was created by a monster called Leviathan, whose predatory nature was passed on to humans. Still, he thought this monster could not be too powerful to be attacked, if it behooved humanity.

His writing style is characterized by a unique and witty style of adapting colloquial language, which won him a few fervent admirers. Moreover, he developed a willful orthography by which he thought to reveal the true meaning of words and their connections amongst each other. One of the most cited examples is the use of 'Roh=Mann=Tick' instead of 'Romantik' (revealing romanticism as the craze of unsubtle men). The atoms of words holding the nuclei of original meaning he called Etyme (etyms).

His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus Zettel's Traum, in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter. Schmidt also accomplished a willful translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works himself (1966-73, together with Hans Wollschläger).

As none of his works sold more than a few thousand copies, he lived in extreme poverty. During the last few years of his life, Arno Schmidt was financially supported by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the heir of a German cigarette manufacturer, who was one of his admirers.

In the 1960s he authored a series of plays for German radio stations presenting forgotten or little known and - in his opinion - vastly underrated authors, as e.g. Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Karl Philipp Moritz, Leopold Schefer, Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, et al. These "plays" are basically talks about literature with two or three participants plus voices for quotations (Schmidt lent his voice for his translations of Finnegans Wake quoted in Der Triton mit dem Sonnenschirm [1961]). 11 of these so called "Radio-Essays" were republished on 12 audio CDs in the year 2003.