photo © Mircea Struteanu

Ernest Wichner [Germany]

Ernest Wichner was born in 1952 in Zăbrani in the Banat region of Romania. He studied German and Romanian literature at the West University of Timișoara. In 1975 he emigrated to West Berlin, where he continued his studies of German literature and political science at the Freie Universität. After many years of working for the Literaturhaus Berlin, he served as its director from 2003 to 2017. Wichner’s literary works include poetry and essay collections as well as numerous adaptations and translations of Romanian authors whose (re)discovery he often personally encouraged, including M. Blecher, Daniel Bănulescu and Mircea Cărtărescu. Wichner’s debut Steinsuppe (1988; tr: Stone Soup) offers a wide range of poetic styles with occasionally surreal and Dadaist elements, while the intertextual embedding of fragments and anecdotes about, for instance Oskar Pastior, George Trakl, or Tristan Tzara, is always part of a more in-depth reflection on language and self. Alte Bilder (2001; tr: Old Pictures) is a collection of fragmented stories inspired by walks through rummage sales in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and uses artefacts found by chance to create a new imaginative and allegorical exploration of memory. The poems in bin ganz wie aufgesperrt (2010; tr: am just as if unlocked) are not just full of refined references that bring together all different kinds of literary trends; In Desparates Berlin der Zeit 1920 Wichner also creates a poetic treasure in which he converts a note, found in the Marbach literary archives, from Franz Hessel into a two-stanza verse. In 2022, Wichner’s last poetry collection Heute Mai und morgen Du was published.In 2005, Wichner was awarded the city of Münster’s International Poetry Prize. His translation of Cătălin Mihuleacs Oxenberg & Bernstein (2018) about the pogrom of June 29, 1941 in the eastern Romanian town of Iaşi was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In 2020, he was awarded the Johann Heinrich Voß Prize in Translation.

Wichner lives in Berlin.