Lebenserschreiber

There are authors who see themselves as biographers and describe their lives. This is the norm. Here we are dealing with the exception: authors who write their lives, biographers in the literal sense, life-writers indeed. Affected by the relentless passage of time up to death, like all of us, they attempt, like few others, to harness writing - the medium that preserves the fleeting word for eternity. They write, driven by this life-defining task of postponement and in the face of the ultimately unattainable goal of avoiding silence at the end. Starting from Jean Paul, the focus is on authors of European modernity who are very different and seemingly incomparable - and yet exhibit astonishing similarities in this, the crucial point: in their narrative styles and contents, motifs and images, down to individual formulations. The overview moves from the literature of the late 18th century to that of the present - and back, forth and back, tracing the promise of non-linear time. With texts on Jean Paul and Proust, K. Ph. Moritz, Novalis, Stifter, Flaubert, G. Keller, Robert Walser, Italo Svevo, Canetti through Kafka, Arno Schmidt, Handke, and Virginia Woolf.