Friedrich Christian Delius was born in Rome in 1943 and grew up in Wehrda, Hessen, not far from the former GDR border.  Since 1963 he has been living in Berlin.  He studied at the Free University and the Technical University, earning his Ph.D. in German literature in 1970 with a dissertation entitled Der Held und sein Wetter [The Hero and His Weather].  From 1970 until 1978 he was an editor in the Klaus Wagenbach and Rotbuch publishing houses, where he worked with the texts of Wolf Biermann, Thomas Brasch, Heiner Müller, Peter Schneider, and many other well-known writers.  Since 1978 he has been an independent author.

Delius was a participant in the last meetings of the “Gruppe 47”.  He is a member of PEN and of the German Academy for Language and Literature. Before coming to Dickinson as Max Kade Writer-in Residence for the spring semester 2000, he was Max Kade Writer-in-Residence at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1994.

Delius is both prolific and multifaceted, having written six volumes of poetry, twelve volumes of prose fiction (novels and stories), and seven plays and radio dramas.

As the stuttering son of a protestant pastor, Friedrich Delius learned early on the value and power of words.  In his autobiographical work Der Sonntag an dem ich Weltmeister wurde  [The Sunday I Became World Champion, 1994]  Delius has portrayed the power of words and the various, startlingly new shades of meaning they acquire as they shift context.  Words, he has said in one of his lectures, “are more than a tool […], they are not static, not simply transmittors of bits of information or communication -- they develop, according to their setting, their own dynamics.  They are redeemed only when they are tied together, in speech that tries to give form to experience and thereby becomes the language of literature.” [Die Verlockungen der Wörter, 15]

In Delius’ hands, language is indeed a dynamic form of speech that is shaped quite differently from work to work, according to the character and situation that he illuminates.  Because of this, it is impossible to pigeonhole his works by plot or style.  His words have helped us to understand the capitalistic indifference of the world of Siemens [Unsere Siemens-Welt (Our World of Siemens), 1972]; the ruminations of a Chilean-German political refugee [Adenauerplatz (Adenauer Square), 1984]; an East German’s elaborate plans for taking an illegal trip to Italy [Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus (The Walk from Rostock to Syracuse), 1995); and the motivations of a German musician who has signed a bar tab in Tel Aviv with the name of Adolf Hitler [Die Flatterzunge (The Flutter-Tongue), 1999].  He has written a trilogy of works about the terrorist acts that occurred in Germany in 1977: the first, Ein Held der inneren Sicherheit [A Hero of Internal Security, 1981), is inspired by the kidnap-murder of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer; the second, Mogadischu Fensterplatz [Mogadischu Windowseat, 1987), by the Palestinian hi-jacking of a commercial Lufthansa plane; and the third, Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes [An Enemy of the State’s Ascension into Heaven , 1992], by the suicides of the terrorists Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe und Andreas Baader in their Stammheim prison.  The first in this trilogy recreates the emphatically self-serving, tripartite language of a highly-placed speech-writer; the second records the written stream-of consciousness recreation of five days of terror by a woman hijack victim; while the last includes, among several voices, the illuminating commentary of a dead terrorist.  In Delius’ best-selling book Die Birnen von Ribbeck  [The Pears of Ribbeck, 1991] the pent-up frustrations of an East German farmer are recorded as a single- sentence outpouring about the abuse of his townspeople by local aristocracy, by Stalinist dictators, and by west German capitalists.

Despite their great variation in style and plot, Delius’ works share certain traits as well.  First and foremost, they are informed by actual people and by current events, as they reflect the conflicts that exist between individuals and society.  Often Delius turns public perception of events on their head, as when he portrays a nation’s debt of gratitude to its terrorists (for providing the pretext for restricting the freedom of its citizens) or when he shows that the actions of a German musician in Tel Aviv were motivated by his frustrations with an incompetent waiter rather than by anti-Semitist sentiments.  The most common thread in Delius’ works is, however, his presentation of differing viewpoints, some convivial, some pompously self-serving, but all designed to show the reader the subtle psychological forces that influence one’s actions.

To date three of Delius’ works have appeared in English translation:The Pears of Ribbeck   (Toronto, Exile Editions,1991); Washday  (London, 1989, performed by the Cracked Mirror Theater); and The Sunday I Became World Champion  (due to appear in the German Library this year).   Other translations of his works have appeared in Brazil, Denmark, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, and Turkey.
 

Beverley Driver Eddy