The writer Friedrich Christian Delius, who was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 2011, died in Berlin on Monday at the age of 79. This was announced by Rowohlt Verlag on Tuesday.
Works such as “The Sunday I became World Champion” or the volume of stories “The Seven Languages of Silence”, published in 2021, come from Delius. In 2020, Delius also commented on the pandemic and a text regarding his own experiences in an intensive care unitto which he had been admitted in 2008 because of another infection.
His always carefully researched titles include a trilogy on the German Autumn of 1977, in which Delius dealt with the armed struggle of the left-wing terrorist RAF and the assassination of employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer. Or the novel “My Year as a Murderer”, which deals with the suppression of Nazi crimes in post-war Germany.
Delius was active for more than six decades, his works have been translated into more than 20 languages. Its discoverer was the publisher Klaus Wagenbach. He brought the literary scholar to his legendary publishing house as an editor in 1970. Because of Delius’ attitude towards the RAF, Wagenbach broke up.
In 1973, Delius and friends founded the Rotbuch Verlag, which is also managed jointly. He became successful with his flair for then unknown authors such as Heiner Müller, Thomas Brasch, Thea Dorn and Herta Müller and helped to make authors from the GDR known in the West. The Rowohlt publishing house praised his own literary work as “a work of great consistency, great clarity and power”.
