Alfred Andersch

Alfred Hellmuth Andersch was a German writer, publisher, and radio editor. The son of a conservative East Prussian army officer, he was born in Munich, Germany and died in Berzona, Ticino, Switzerland. Martin Andersch, his brother, was also a writer.

His parents were Alfred Andersch (1875–1929) and his wife Hedwig, née Watzek (1884–1976). His school master was Joseph Gebhard Himmler, the father of Heinrich Himmler. He wrote about this in The Father of a Murderer.

In 1930, after an apprenticeship as a bookseller, Andersch became a youth leader in the Communist Party. As a consequence, he was held for 6 months in the Dachau concentration camp in 1933. He then left the party and entered a depressive phase of "total introversion". It was during this period that he first became engaged in the arts, adopting the stance that became known as innere Emigration ("internal emigration") – despite remaining in Germany, he was spiritually opposed to Hitler's regime.

In 1940, Andersch was conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but deserted at the Arno Line in Italy on 6 June 1944. He was taken to the United States as a prisoner of war and interned at Camp Ruston, Louisiana and other POW camps. He became the editor of a prisoners' newspaper, Der Ruf (The Call).

A critical review of Andersch's "internal émigré" status, his marriage to a German Jew and subsequent divorce in 1943, as well as of his writing, may be read in W.G. Sebald's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" attached to his essay On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald accused Andersch of having presented through literature a version of his life (and of the "internal emigration" more generally) that made it sound more acceptable to a post-Nazi public.

Having returned to Germany, he worked from 1945 as an editing assistant for Erich Kästner's Neue Zeitung in Munich. From 1946 to 1947, he worked alongside Hans Werner Richter to publish the monthly literary journal Der Ruf, which was sold in the American occupation zone of Germany. The publication was discontinued following the non-renewal of its license by the U.S military government. Presumably, the discontinuation of "Der Ruf" followed "promptings by the Soviet authorities, provoked by Hans Werner Richter's open letter to the French Stalinist, Marcel Cachin." In the following years, Andersch worked with the literary circle Group 47, members of which included the authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Arno Schmidt, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Helmut Heissenbüttel, among others. 1948 saw the publication of Andersch's essay "Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung" (German Literature at the Turning Point), in which he concluded, in the spirit of the American post-war "re-education" programme, that literature would play a decisive role in the moral and intellectual changes in Germany.

Beginning in 1948, Andersch was a leading figure at radio stations in Frankfurt and Hamburg. In 1950, he married the painter Gisela Dichgans. His autobiographical work Die Kirschen der Freiheit (The Cherries of Freedom) was published in 1952, in which Andersch dealt with the experience of his wartime desertion and interpreted it as the "turning point" (Entscheidung) at which he could first feel free. On a similar theme, he published in 1957 perhaps the most significant work of his career, Sansibar oder der letzte Grund (published in English as Flight to Afar). A few of Andersch's books were turned into films.

From 1958, Andersch lived in Berzona in Switzerland, where he became mayor in 1972. After Sansibar followed the novels Die Rote in 1960, Efraim in 1967, and, in 1974, Winterspelt, which is, thematically, very similar to Sansibar, but is more complex in its composition. In 1977, he published the poetry anthology empört euch der himmel ist blau.  

Alfred Andersch died on 21 February 1980 in Berzona, Ticino. The incomplete story Der Vater eines Mörders (The Father of a Murderer) was published posthumously in the same year.