The author Ernst Augustin is dead. He died on 3 November, a few days after his 92nd birthday, as the publisher CH Beck announced. He honored him as "one of the great writers of the German language". The novel he leaves behind is "of rare narrative virtuosity and originality". Augustine's literary work was inextricably linked to his work as a physician and psychiatrist, his work revolved around the question: What is the me?
Augustin was born in 1927 as the son of a teacher in Hirschberg in the Giant Mountains and grew up in Schwerin. He studied medicine in East Berlin and worked as an assistant physician in neurology and psychiatry before fled to the West. From 1958 to 1961 he headed a hospital in Afghanistan. In his adopted home of Munich, he then worked as a physician and later as a psychiatric expert.
Augustin's best-known works include his first novel "The Head" (1962) and "The School of the Naked" (2003). He has received numerous awards: for example, the Mörike Prize (2009), the Ernst-Hoferichter Prize (2008) and the Literature Prize of the City of Munich (1999). His novel "Robinson's Blue House" was shortlisted in 2012 for the German Book Prize. "I've been the eternal secret for half a century," Augustin commented on the nomination back then. "That's not without humor."
A "fist"
The book price finally went to "district court" of Ursula Krechel. But Augustin was still proud of his novel: "My 'blue house' feels like the roof over all my books, it's something like my 'fist' - or rather a 'fist'," he said.
"Seen as a whole," wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung in honor of Augustin's 90th birthday, "this author is an 'author's author', that is, one whose immense skill in producing ease, but never of light weight, of comic but never trivial, of genuine seriousness, but never false profundity of colleagues unreservedly admired. "
Asked whether he was afraid of death, Augustin had answered in the "SZ Magazine" in 2013: "No. One can not even say that I have curiosity, although it is probably an incredible experience, what you have As monstrous as entering this world, we just forgot that. "
