Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cover bearing a trademark red bulldog. A few of its barbs about Emperor Wilhelm II were
so biting that the magazine was censored and some of its writers (Wedekind among them)
were sent to jail. During his 40 years in Munich, Thomas Mann wrote a bookcase of ac-
claimed works and picked up a Nobel prize in the process. His Bavarian gems include the
short story
Gladius Dei
(1902), a clever parody of Munich's pretensions to being the
Florence of Bavaria.
Today's leading literary lights are an eclect-
ic, label-defying bunch. Herbert Rosendorfer
(b 1934), a former Munich judge, has a long
list of credits, including a legal satire, a history
of the Thirty Years' War and travel guides.
Anna Rosmus (b 1960) has turned her investig-
ation of the Third Reich period in Passau, her
birthplace, into several best-selling novels, including
Against the Stream: Growing Up
Where Hitler Used to Live
(2002). Munich-based Patrick Süskind (b 1949) achieved inter-
national acclaim with
Das Parfum
(
Perfume;
1985), his extraordinary tale of a psychotic
18th-century perfume-maker, which was made into a film by Tom Tykwer in 2006.
Although he lived mostly in Switzerland, Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse
(1877-1962) is originally a Black Forest boy whose most famous novels,
Siddhartha
and
Steppenwolf,
became hippie-era favourites. The philosopher Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976), author of
Being and Time,
one of the seminal works of German existential-
ism, also hailed from the Black Forest, as did Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grim-
melshausen (1622-76), a 17th-century literary genius and author of the earliest German
adventure novel,
Simplicissimus
(
Adventures of a Simpleton
; 1668), which later inspired
the name of the aforementioned satirical magazine.
Bavaria's greatest playwright of international stature was the ever-abrasive Bertolt
Brecht (1898-1956) from Augsburg. After WWII, writers throughout Germany either
dropped out of sight ('inner exile' was the favoured term) or, as Hans Carossa and Ernst
Wiechert did, attempted some kind of political and intellectual renewal.
Germany's most successful golfer, Bernhard
Langer, is the son of a Russian prisoner of war who
jumped off a Siberia-bound train and settled in
Bavaria.
Cinema & Television
OK, so Germany's last true international suc-
cess, the Oscar-winning
Das Leben der Ander-
en
(
Lives of Others
; 2006), was filmed in Ber-
lin, but Munich's Bavaria Film studio is no
slouch in the movie scene. Successes cranked
out this side of the millennium include Marc
Florian von Donnersmarck, director of the Oscar-
winning
The Lives of Others
(2006), learned his
craft at the Munich film school.
