Martin Walser: Writer died at the age of 96

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Writer Walser in 2013

Photo: APress / IMAGO

The writer Martin Walser is dead. He died at the age of 96 in Überlingen, Baden-Württemberg, on Lake Constance. This is reported by several media outlets.

Walser is one of the best-known and most controversial authors of German post-war literature. For more than 60 years, he created an extraordinarily extensive oeuvre, the scope and breadth of which only a few German post-war authors can measure. In his books, he explored the everyday consciousness of society with empathetic irony and a satirical eye, so he became for some

Martin Walser was born in 1927 as the son of a Catholic innkeeper in Wasserburg, Bavaria. He is said to have written his first poems at the age of twelve, and after the Second World War he studied literature, among other things. He published his first collection of short stories, »An Airplane Over the House«, in 1955, and his first novel, »Marriages in Philippsburg«, in 1957.

In the years that followed, countless works followed. More than two dozen novels, plus novellas, essays, poems and speeches. Also a variety of plays, radio plays and translations. "A titanic work," literary critic Denis Scheck once said of Walser's work as an author. In 2021, his last book was published, the poetry collection »Sprachlaub« with watercolors by his daughter Alissa.

Walser's feud with the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, which became probably the most famous dispute in post-war literature with Walser's novel »Death of a Critic«, was also legendary. Walser saw himself "expelled from German literature" by the critic and also defended himself against Reich-Ranicki in literature.

In 2004, Walser moved all his works from Suhrkamp Verlag to Rowohlt Verlag – mainly because he had not felt supported in his dispute with Reich-Ranicki. Walser staged his farewell in an open letter as a reckoning.

At the age of 95, Walser had donated his collected narrative, dramatic and essayistic works, his photos and computer files, but also the private library to the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach as a so-called legacy. There were 75,000 handwritten pages, including 75 diaries, which Walser had kept since the fifties.

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