Arno Schmidt

Arno Schmidt (18 January 1914 - 3 June 1979) was a German author and translator. Born in Hamburg, son of a police constable, Schmidt moved with his widowed mother to Lauban (in Lusatia, then Lower Silesia, now Polish) and attended the secondary school in Görlitz. He then worked as a clerk in a textile company in Greiffenberg. At the outset of World War II in 1939, Schmidt was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He first served in Alsace and after 1941 in fairly quiet Norway. In 1945, Schmidt volunteered for active duty at the front in Northern Germany in order to be granted a brief home visit, as was the custom. He used that visit to organize a defection from Lusatia westwards for him and his wife, in order to evade capture by the Red Army,...