Arno Schmidt

At the outset of World War II, in 1939, Schmidt was drafted into the Wehrmacht, where his mathematical skills led him to be assigned to the artillery corps.

In 1945, Schmidt volunteered for active front duty in Northern Germany, in order to be granted a brief home visit.

After an interlude as a British POW and later as an interpreter at a police school, Schmidt began his career as a freelance writer in 1946.

Temporary accommodations led the Schmidts to Cordingen (near Bomlitz), Gau-Bickelheim, and Kastel (the latter two in the newly formed state of Rhineland-Palatinate).

In Kastel, he was accused in court of blasphemy and moral subversion, then still considered a crime in some of the Catholic regions of West Germany.

Although he was not a deist in the conventional sense, he maintained that the world was created by a monster called Leviathan, whose predatory nature was passed on to humans.

His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus, Bottom's Dream (German: Zettels Traum), in which a middle-aged writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter.

But Schmidt's reputation as esoteric, and that of his work as non-art, has faded and he is now seen as an important, if highly eccentric, German writer of the 20th century.

Schmidt's final completed novel was Abend mit Goldrand (1975) which was praised by some critics for its verbal inventiveness, although many had a difficult time digesting the erotic themes of the book.

[5] Dalkey Archive Press has reissued five volumes of Schmidt's work translated by John E. Woods.