The great author Peter Härtling would have been 90 in November 2023. With his wonderful children’s and young adult books he enchanted entire generations onto reading. But he was so much more. The time is more than ripe for this first, comprehensive biography.
When he was 14, Peter Härtling wanted to become a freelance writer; at 40, after a career as a journalist and publisher at the helm of S. Fischer Verlag, his dream came true. Concentrating exclusively on his writing, he produced his great novels in rapid succession. As his fame grew, he finally succeeded in grappling with the central theme of his life: the experience of being a refugee. It colored every sentence he wrote, and yet he found it extremely difficult to speak of his traumatic experiences, which included his mother’s suicide. In his gripping biography, Klaus Siblewski, a proven authority on Peter Härtling’s work, sets out to trace the human being behind it.
