Biography
Edgar Hilsenrath was born on 2 April 1926 in Leipzig, the son of a Jewish merchant. In 1938 he fled Nazi persecution together with his mother and brother to his grandparents in Sereth in Romanian Bukovina; in 1941 the family was deported to the ghetto of Mohyliv-Podilskyi in Transnistria, from which Soviet troops liberated them in 1944. Via Palestine, where he lived for a time on forged papers, and France, where he learned his father's trade as a furrier, Hilsenrath reached New York in 1951, supporting himself with casual work while beginning to write. His novel „Der Nazi & der Friseur“, which German publishers initially refused and which first appeared in the United States in English translation in 1971, brought him international recognition; he returned to Germany in 1975. For his work he received numerous honours, including the Alfred Döblin Prize in 1989 and the Armenian National Prize for Literature in 2006. Edgar Hilsenrath died on 30 December 2018 in Wittlich.
On Stagelog
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