Wolfgang Hildesheimer has certainly been around a lot. Born in Hamburg in 1916, he belongs to that generation of Germans whom fortune first inexorably divided into victims and perpetrators and then united as bewildered survivors. In 1934 he emigrated with his parents to England and thence to Palestine, where he was apprenticed to a master carpenter. He spent a couple of years at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, taught English for the British Council in Tel Aviv, and ended the war as an officer of the British Information Service in Jerusalem. Between 1946 and 1949 he worked with the Allied War Crimes Commission at Nuremberg. He has lived in Southern Germany, Bavaria, Cornwall, and in Urbino (where presumably he first came upon traces of Andrew Marbot's life); now he seems to have settled in Poschiavo in the Swiss Grisons. Rumour has it that he is a generous host with a fair Knowledge of the local vineyards.

LRB 5 August 1982 | PDF Download