On accepting the Frankfurt Goethe Prize of 1973, Arno Schmidt lamented that German Fascism and the Second World War had encumbered an entire generation of German writers with the specter of “too late”. In particular, he saw himself as having been cheated out of many years of literary productivity. Indeed, Schmidt was already 35 years old before

[

], his first publication, a volume containing the stories

,

, and

, appeared in 1949. Written during October 1946, the title story

comprises a mere 21 pages in the

of the collected works of Arno Schmidt. Yet

in its brevity is nonetheless a fully weighted indictment of the destruction of German culture and civilisation through Hitler’s war,…

1426 words

Citation: Menke, Timm. "Leviathan". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 September 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28119, accessed 21 November 2024.]